The Musings of Chris Samuel

For those who’ve heard about the crazy news about the patent trolls that are invoicing people based on their claims to have invented image linking in 2000 (and patented it in 2002) there is a site that is gathering information about the patent itself (Republic of Singapore Patent No. 95940) and the Australian company behind it.

The site is at http://suevuestar.biz/ and includes the handy information that the Australian patent actually lapsed because they failed to pay the renewal fees!

As part of Adobe’s OpenScreen project to get Flash onto more devices they have just openly published the Flash 9 specification, with what appear to be no restrictions on their part (that I can see). The OpenScreen site seems to confirm it, listing their moves as:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

This is great news, suddenly Flash becomes an open standard and the projects to create open source viewers for it suddenly should have a lot of the information that they need. It doesn’t remove all the issues though, some of the codecs that can be employed are patented and can themselves attract licensing fees, but it does appear that they are not required (unlike OOXML, which requires MP3 for audio content for example). It also means that people wanting to implement open tools to create Flash content, or export to Flash, will have their job made a lot easier too.

Hats off to Adobe - better late than never!

Update: This also includes the FLV/F4V specification too!

Found via the ever excellent LWN..

Erm, I don’t know quite what got into this person!

The purpose of this invention is to provide an improved method of proposing marriage to an individual. The method of proposing to an individual generally comprising the steps of meeting the individual; exchanging names with the individual; dating the individual (not necessary); drafting a government document having a proposal to marry the individual incorporated therein; and showing the government document to the individual. The government document may be a patent application. The patent application may claim the method by which the proposor will make a marriage proposal to the individual. The proposor could then use the method claimed in the patent application to propose to the individual. The patent application could be the actual marriage proposal.

Thankfully it’s rather restrictive on whom it applies to..

[0022] In the drawings, the method for a proposor to propose to an individual is generally referred to by the reference numeral 10. Method 10 generally comprises the steps of meeting an individual; exchanging names with the individual; drafting a government document having a proposal to marry the individual incorporated therein; and showing the government document to the individual. Preferably, the government document is a patent application. The patent application may claim the method by which the proposor will make a marriage proposal to the individual. The proposor could then use the method claimed in the patent application to propose to the individual. Furthermore, the individual is preferably named Ellen Renee Colyer (hereinafter “Ellie”) and the proposor is preferably named Ryan Thomas Grace (hereinafter “Ryan”). Ryan is more fully described as set forth hereinbelow. Ellie generally comprises a kind, loving individual who has not only been a large support for Ryan during many pressing times, but has also been a large influence on how Ryan approaches life (more so than Ellie will ever let herself realize).

…and the exact method is something that few people will (hopefully) try…

[0014] After drafting the government document, the government document is shown to the individual as generally defined by the showing step. The showing step may comprise placing the government document in a limousine where the individual can find the government document. The proposor could then arrange to have the limousine meet the proposor at a predetermined location where the proposor presents a diamond ring to the individual.

As geeky as the proposal may seem it appears to have worked!

[0045] In the ideal situation where Ellie accepts the diamond ring, Ryan should sign the patent application and deposit the patent application with the United States Postal Service. Preferably, the United States Patent and Trademark Office receives the patent application and, upon examination, issues a patent on the same.

The wedding reception will be a scream..

Dear Microsoft,

RE: OOXML

Due to massive irregularities in the voting process in ISO, the requirement to use patented media formats such as MP3 and the sheer inappropriateness of using the fast-track process for your massive XML document format OOXML I will not accept it as an agreed ISO standard, even though you managed to con enough people into voting for it.

Chris

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry over this one..

A company sues Cisco for infringing a patent. Just one problem, they filed the suit the day before the patent was granted!

It then appears they realise their faux pas and so persuade someone at the court to alter the docket to the day after, so it will match the patent issuance date!

With much thanks to the excellent Patent Troll Tracker blog for the news and to Dennis Crouch’s Patently-O blog for the complaint.

So Steve Balmer said:

for the appropriate fee Novell customers also get essentially the right to use our patented intellectual property. And I think it’s great the way Novell stepped up to kind of say intellectual property matters. People use Red hat, at least with respect to *our* intellectual property in a sense have an obligation to eventually compensate us.

Now, Mr Balmer, precisely what “patented intellectual property” are you talking about here ? Please be specific, patent numbers would be very handy..

Or are you just trying on a shakedown with vague threats to see what easy protection money may come your way now that Vista and Office 2007 aren’t selling so well ?

Thanks Novell, for nothing..

LWN has this to say:

The terms of the Microsoft/Novell deal have been posted at last. There are three parts: the patent cooperation agreement granting the patent non-licenses, the technical collaboration agreement describing the technical work each company will do, and the business collaboration agreement on the business arrangements.

Groklaw also has an initial post about the SEC filing which details the agreement and quotes Novell on how GPLv3 may affect it.

Microsoft still don’t get open standards - their new OpenXML office file format is patent encumbered, but not in a way that is obvious. Sam Hiser has an interesting evaluation of the license for OpenXML and it appears that whilst MS do promise not to sue you for any patents that cover anything that is explicitly in the specification they do not do so for anything that you need to implement that specification.

We know of a great deal of Microsoft technology which does in fact contain patents and which lies outside the specification which would need to be implemented by such a 3rd-party for the formats to work. The Microsoft Office Open XML formats are therefore dependent upon a host of patented Microsoft technology.

In effect, this license means that if you are making a well-functioning, complete implementation of the Microsoft Office Open XML specification, then you are not covered by the “promise” in the License. In other words, Microsoft effectively prohibits you legally from making a complete and working implementation of its new formats in your software. If you do, you run the risk of being sued.

In other words, here is an open specification that you can only implement if you either (a) are willing to get sued, or (b) lucky enough not to live in a country that has stupid software patent laws..

Peter Gutmann, crypto geek and author of “Everything you never wanted to know about PKI but have been forced to find out“, has written an analysis of the long-delayed Microsoft’s “Vista Content Protection” specification¹.

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

Peter has drawn on a heap of sources (both public and private) to work out the implications of Microsoft wanting to make the content providers dreams come true and going to extreme lengths to try and stop a few people tampering with “premium content”. The results are going to be more unreliable systems with large processing overheads and less functionality.

Since S/PDIF doesn’t provide any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing protected content. In other words if you’ve invested a pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from a digital output, you won’t be able to use it with protected content. Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by Vista’s content protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed from component video.

Echo cancellation will be another victim of Vista as the required feedback system will not be permitted, instead it’ll degrade the quality to stop the potential for capturing “premium content” and the legitimate users will just have to cope. This sort of audio and video degradation will occur whenever the system believes it is playing “premium content”, even if you’re doing something else important:

What makes this particularly entertaining is the fact that the downgrading/disabling is dynamic, so if the premium-content signal is intermittent or varies (for example music that fades out), various outputs and output quality will fade in and out, or turn on and off, in sync. Normally this behaviour would be a trigger for reinstalling device drivers or even a warranty return of the affected hardware, but in this case it’s just a signal that everything is functioning as intended.

It appears the user will have no control over this, if someone manages to introduce something that Vista believes is “premium content” (and we all know how bad Microsoft are at getting things right) then the constrictors will kick in, downgrading the signal and then upgrading it to the required spec but with loss in quality. This pretty much rules Vista out for use in hospital imaging systems, astronomy or anywhere else where lossy compression is verboten. This is going to be a nightmare for the hardware vendors:

Amusingly, the Vista content protection docs say that it’ll be left to graphics chip manufacturers to differentiate their product based on (deliberately degraded) video quality. This seems a bit like breaking the legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can hobble on crutches.

This is also going to have serious ramifications for developers of drivers for open source operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD, etc as Vista will introduce a requirement called Hardware Functionality Scan (HFS for short) where the driver interrogates a device and gets it to attest it is legitimate (and not a software phantom). This, of course, is being done through security through obscurity and, as Peter says:

In order for this to work, the spec requires that the operational details of the device be kept confidential. Obviously anyone who knows enough about the workings of a device to operate it and to write a third-party driver for it (for example one for an open-source OS, or in general just any non-Windows OS) will also know enough to fake the HFS process. The only way to protect the HFS process therefore is to not release any technical details on the device beyond a minimum required for web site reviews and comparison with other products.

In return the hardware will be monitored for odd things happening (unexpected voltage changes, etc) and the drive can set so called “tilt switches” to let the O/S know that something bad might be happening, which will be real fun for Vista users when the virus writers figure out how to trip these from software. The hardware is also going to have to support video decompression as the CPU won’t be allowed to do that due to its vulnerable nature, which is going to constrain the codecs that “premium content” will use. This is already an issue:

This is particularly troubling for the high-quality digital cinema (D-Cinema) specification, which uses Motion JPEG2000 (MJ2K) because standard MPEG and equivalents don’t provide sufficient image quality. Since JPEG2000 uses wavelet-based compression rather than MPEG’s DCT-based compression, and wavelet-based compression isn’t on the hardware codec list, it’s not possible to play back D-Cinema premium content (the moribund Ogg Tarkin codec also used wavelet-based compression). Because *all* D-Cinema content will (presumably) be premium content, the result is no playback at all until the hardware support appears in PCs at some indeterminate point in the future.

So this will stifle the innovation in video codecs, no hardware support then no undegraded playback. This will probably rule out the use of Vista for high-def Access Grid videoconferencing. Add in on top of all this the requirements to support hardware encryption between components and all the patent licenses that are needed for this and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

For those of us lucky enough to not be under the thumb of the Redmond monopoly this will either mean a ramp up in hardware costs across the board, or (less likely) the hardware vendors will start to sell two streams of hardware, one “Vista Certified” and costing more and another which isn’t and costs less (possibly being older hardware predating these crazy requirements).

(Via)

1. Warning, plain text document, may cause culture shock to the Flash Generation due to high signal to noise ratio and lack of pretty pictures [back]

Time to be grateful I only stomach watching the ABC (no ads) or SBS (only adverts between programs, not during)..

New Scientist announce something that really should have been an April Fool - Philips have a patent on a TV advert enforcer to prevent you changing channels during an advert break on TV.

Philips suggests adding flags to commercial breaks to stop a viewer from changing channels until the adverts are over. The flags could also be recognised by digital video recorders, which would then disable the fast forward control while the ads are playing.

The full patent for an “Apparatus and method for preventing switching from a channel during an advertisement display” is online - via Groklaw.