File Formats Blog

I don't usually rant in this blog, but this time I have to.

A court has ruled that Microsoft must pay $1.52 billion to Alcatel-Lucent for violating software compression patents, originally developed by Bell Labs and now owned by Alcatel-Lucent, which describe file compression methods used in the MP3 audio format. All other companies that create MP3 files and don't already have licensing agreements with Alcatel-Lucent are probably affected by this ruling. Microsoft will be appealing the jury verdict.

Microsoft had already licensed MP3 technology from Fraunhofer Institute, as have many other companies.

This case is the latest of many illustrations of the minefield which software development has become as the result of software patents. Just about anything that someone might develop might turn out to be covered by a patent held by some obscure company. The typical language of software patents makes it agonizingly difficult to figure out just what is covered, and the Patent Office routinely grants patents on simple actions that underlie vast amounts of code. I once got a consulting fee for helping to show that I/O buffering was not a new, innovative invention; to counter the claim, I simply copied a page out of an old, well-known textbook.

However suitable patents may be in some areas, they aren't an appropriate way of dealing with software ownership, where creation is a continuous process. I hope this case will finally create enough outrage to trigger a reform in the patent system.

There's an interesting article on this case at Technology Liberation Front. As the article notes, algorithms are not patentable under law, yet computational "processes" are patentable, even though there is no difference. The entire field of patent software law, as far as I can tell, rests on meaningless analogies between data transformations physical processes. For instance, otherwise non-patentable code, we're told by one of the attorneys, becomes patentable when it's written to a read-only medium.

The bottom line for us as developers is that if we write software to generate output in any format that isn't so old that all patents on it must have expired, we can't tell whether we're breaking the law or not.

Labels: MP3

# posted by Gary McGath @ 5:50 AM 1 comments

The Digital Library Federation's Spring Forum will be in Pasadena on April 23-25, 2007, and registration is now open. The schedule is already on line.

# posted by Gary McGath @ 12:57 PM 0 comments