Not believing in software patents is unlikely to change a court's mind. Instead, support formats that are royalty free from the start - Vorbis, Opus, and Codec2, for example.
Since TPP is dead, the IP-dependent industries may start looking for a new venue, as they appear to have been putting a lot of eggs in that particular basket. But there may be a short-term reprieve for countries not currently toeing the US party line.
No, that is not the case.
http://www.ajpark.com/ip-central/news-articles/2016/05/new-z...
What the Zeds have done is really not so different from what the Supreme Court decided in Enfish:
claims purporting to improve the functioning of the
computer itself, or improving an existing technological
process might not succumb to the abstract idea exception
http://www.iam-media.com/blog/detail.aspx?g=96d4aeaf-dedf-4a...
"Effectively, if the invention lies purely in software, then it is considered unpatentable. However, as outlined in the explanatory note of the SOP, patents will still be able to be granted for inventions that
a) make use of computer programs where the contribution lies outside of the computer, or
b) affect the computer but is not dependent on the type of data being processed or the particular application being used.
Essentially embedded software is patentable where it improves the operation of hardware, along with software that improves the way a computer runs. Again, this is consistent with the UK."
Also Zeds is a really strange name for us. Correct term is Kiwis or Rugby Overlords :)
Note: as to whether any particular tactic like this stands up in court or not, you'll find out if you fight it in court. You and your huge heap of cash, that is. Don't have a huge heap of cash? Then the question is moot, isn't it, peasant?
One noteworthy exception, which plays a much bigger role in slower-moving industries, is that an exact copy of something sold over more time than the pendency of any patent in existence (mostly less than 23-24 years) is clear. But the larger point holds. Comparing patent claims to products and prior art is hard and expensive.
That applies to MP3 (and all of MPEG and other 'licensed' systems) as well. See for example Sisvel's MP3 related patents that led to raids on MP3 players at the Cebit fair.
Then you start by not giving them your money. It's a uphill battle, but someone has to fight the good fight instead of just throwing their hands-up.
That's a noble, if politically naïve, attitude. Societies, like Congress, have a limited bandwidth for problem solving. The way we prioritize what gets solved and what doesn't, as well as how to solve it, is "politics". (This is more a matter of definition than quibbling.)
There are various political institutions, and individuals have varying degrees of influence over them, depending on how one's society is structured. But unvaryingly, attracting people with political capital to your cause is paramount. This is often done by showing such people an agglomeration of individuals supporting your cause, individually with less political value than them but collectively something interesting.
Even the people at the bottom of the chain have limited bandwidth. This is why most systems default to delegation, particularly at scale. Single-handedly refusing to support something you think is important without patching that into a political system is fine from a personal or moral perspective, but it shouldn't be expected to actually do anything. As such, it's less a good fight than good fussing about.
My general thought is: you should, on a regular basis, feel at least a little bit of pain due to your opinions. If you don't then your opinion is probably worthless to society.
I've reread this sentence a few times... and it is actually quite deeper that it first seemed on a more superficial read. Thanks a lot for your comment.
That seems to get a lot of incentives right. Publishers have to pay artists decent royalties, and proprietary file formats can't be used to suppress competition. What would go wrong? Apart from the fact that this would have to be enacted over the cold, dead bodies of a lot of music company executives: that's a feature, not a bug.
MP3 is not an encrypted codec, the format itself is quite open and doesn't place any real restrictions on redistributing music -- in fact, most of the original music sharing sites like Napster traded exclusively in MP3. The use of MP3 has no bearing on copyright or music piracy.
The real issue is that software developers had to pay a royalty to Fraunhofer to distribute copies of MP3 players or encoders. That made it impossible to incorporate MP3 into a free (as in speech) OS like GNU/Linux.
There's real a higher-order issue, too. Why did anyone want GNU to incorporate an MP3 player in the first place? There is no law of physics that requires songs to be encoded as MP3.
Dude, in 2006 ALL MUSIC was mp3.
And as we know, due to Nyquist, N Congressmembers can at most be solving N/2 things at any given point in time.
There is radio (online and in the ether), there are alternative platforms (e.g., Bandcamp), concerts and other live venues, (second hand) physical media (e.g., CDs or vinyl), open access music, etcetera.
On top of all that there is the big middle finger of 'piracy' if you are so inclined. For many this is a morally acceptable alternative to a rotten system, for others it may remain an imponderable transgression of law and or ethics — either way, it is a viable alternative in addition to the above.
Support indie artists and buy music in MP3, FLAC, Apple Lossless, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WAV or AIFF.
I'd love to be able to buy DRM-free 24/96 lossless versions of all the music I actually want but buying used CDs for under $2 apiece seems like a reasonable compromise to me. For the moment if I can't find particular albums on CD in the used market I either buy them from eBay sellers or do without. The remaining chain retail vendors for CDs such as Best Buy have a pretty hopelessly bad selection these days.
Patent-encumbered audio codecs are popular at this point because of network effects, not technical superiority. There are many ways to reduce the network effect, even without changing music buying habits. For example If you're a website designer, include a royalty-free audio format as one of your <audio> srcs. As a bonus, you'll save some bandwidth.
It seems kind of odd to do this so late in the patents' life, though. I understand the general theory behind a last-minute cash grab, but you generally can't take "last-minute" quite this literally. Why wait so long?
If only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding has been patent-free in the US since 22 September 2015 [...] If the longest-running patent mentioned in the aforementioned references is taken as a measure, then the MP3 technology became patent-free in the United States on 16 April 2017 [...].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and...
Wikipedia also says (unless I'm missing something) that all the MP3 patents have already expired everywhere else too. If this is true, then Fraunhofer is ending their licensing program just because they don't want to bother getting people to pay for something they can now legally have for free.
Support Bandcamp. Support Databeats (storefront for many drum 'n' bass labels). Hell, support Beatport and Juno, even though they insist on huge markups for WAV/FLAC.
Somebody at apple decided AAC was better than MP3 because of it has better licensing for distributors, they could have gone further to consider codecs which had liberal licensing towards codec developers/manufacturers.
In fact the decision would have been made back in 2001 or earlier, given that the original iPod released in 2001 supported AAC decoding.
(The music labels also forced Apple to encrypt everything, therefore there was no incentive to use an open format. Had they used encrypted Vorbis, that would have been seen as a giant middle finger to open source.)
They have now switched to 256k, where all lossy codecs are largely equivalent.
Simple: don't give any money to Apple for music in patented or DRMed formats, or to anyone else who tries to sell music that way. If you really want, you can write them to tell them why you're not buying their crap.
Companies get away with this behavior because consumers let them, and reward them with their money. You can make the argument that consumers don't have enough power for necessities like internet service (because of local/regional monopolies or oligopolies), but this just isn't true for luxury goods and services, which is exactly what the Apple music store is. You don't need downloaded music, there are other providers out there, and you can always buy it on CD (frequently for less) and rip it yourself into whatever format you prefer, like Vorbis, Opus, or FLAC.
I don't seriously believe the corps would actually change their ways to benefit the customer -- but this is my rebellion against their business model and it's an exercise of the small power I have.
Plus I don't break the law. I simply actively don't feed them money in their scheme which I feel are very unethical and greedy.
When looking for a head unit in my car, I specifically made sure I had something that could play FLAC and oggs (and mp3s .. and aac .. my music collection is a mix of legacy formats).
Or make your patent-dependent development OSS.
now it is first to file. I can just patent all those formats and troll everyone until a court finally decides to consider prior art correctly when someone finally bites the bullet on a defense instead of deal.
Given that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has been giving software patents a good deal of thought (not to mention issuing software patents) [1], I'd say the situation is anything but "clear".
[1] https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/news-updates/examination-soft...
The general-purpose computer to single-purpose computer transformation cracks me up (and makes it obvious that the law doesn't necessarily have any relationship with reality): "by loading this program, a computer able to do many different things becomes a computer capable of doing a specific thing."
This isn't true in many cases after the Supreme Court decision Alice v. CLS Bank in 2014. Now we have a rule more like that in Europe, where some software is patent-eligible if it's sufficiently technical (e.g., something like RSA, or better cache management) and not patent eligible if it's not technical (e.g, CRUD apps, or new views on a database).
When I said "court approved" I meant Federal Circuit, as in Alappat ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Alappat#Majority_opinion ): "We have held that such programming creates a new machine, because a general purpose computer in effect becomes a special purpose computer once it is programmed to perform particular functions pursuant to instructions from program software."
On the one hand, several Supreme Court decisions appear to leave less room for software patents. On the other hand, I don't think the Supreme Court has an overall goal in mind. I believe the problem comes from the fact that the law prohibits patenting natural laws, but allows patenting the application of natural laws. It's hard to distinguish between those two ideas; and I believe impossible to distinguish between them when it comes to software.
This is the beauty of intellectual property experts: they can reverse a very root concept, by changing few commas, and over-interpreting.
TL;DR: Software patents are forbidden (especially in Europe) "as such". It means that if you attempt to patent the "linked list" in software programming, this will be refused. But you can patent a "method of linking a set of abstract data together, using a numerical identifier as gathering medium". This is not rephrasing: what you are attempting to patent is NOT software - you can have a set of paper sheets, with a number on top of them, and form a linked set of data (printer documents). You could ALSO have a linked list in a computer program. But what you are attempting to patent is a more general concept, that CAN be represented as a piece of software. Of course, what you REALLY want to patent is the later.
Yes, yes, this is fraud. Legal fraud. Move along, nothing to see.