[MPlayer-users] MPlayer patent issues NOVIRUS

[Attila Kinali]

On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 10:52:17 +0200
Reimar Döffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at stud.uni-karlsruhe.de> wrote:

> libdts is just one recent example of what can happen - it never gets to
> the stage where someone actually checks if the claims are valid.
> The current completely obfuscated proposal thus would provide zero
> protection to us, no matter what the proponents claim you can patent with
> it and what not, since the only place you can find that out is court.

It's not the only example, but the most prominent to us.

Actualy the situation is like this: Companies register
tons of patents. Most of these patents are accepted as they
are, although they do not contain anything technicaly new,
are not precise and no implementation is provided. Especialy
in the video coding filed a damn lot of patents are just rephrasings
of long time known mathematical formulas, methods or properties
of real signals. Thus a lot of the patents that are around these
days are invalid.

What makes this so difficult is, that it doesn't matter whether
the patent is valid or not, as no single person or hobbist group
(that's what OSS developers are) can defend himself against
patent claims, as these have to be sorted out in curt and this
costs a damn lot. Especialy as there are lots of tactics to
prolonge such a trial (just have a look at IBM vs SCO).
Even if someone got the money and won the first round, the
company is most likely to file an appeal and the whole
thing strats again, with even huger costs.

Over the past years, while watching all this software patent
nonsense, i realized that the problem does not lie within the
way what software is and how it is produced, nor how we develop
code, but within the patent system itself. Just have a look
outside, in every technical and non-technical field there are
tons of patents on trivial stuff, anything that a first grader
could tell you too. It's just written complicated enough to
pass a patent review. If anyone comes up with a new idea, ie
one that is really something new and not an application of already
known stuff to a new field, he'll face imediatly thousands of
patent claims, because he'll be using some general basics that
are coverd by those fake patents. Thus it becomes impossible to
even develop (not to talk about patenting) something new if
you do not have already a huge asset of patents yourself to
fend of any patent claim. 
On the other hand, if you patent something, the chances
are very low that you'll ever find out that someone uses
your invention w/o paying patent fees. Thus the patent
system doesn't really protect your invention.

And this is not only a problem in the field of software,
but a problem in all technical and scientific areas!

Thus i came to the conclusion, that the patent system as
we have now does more harm than good and should be replaced
by something better. But as IMHO there is no system that would
work out in most cases and couldn't be easily missused, i suggest
that the whole patent system should be dropped and instead
inventions should be either protected by trade secrets 
or freely shared among all. 

No more problems with a not working patent system. No
more problems with a not working patent protection.
And everyone can share a free exchange of information.


				Attila Kinali
-- 
郷に入れば郷に従え