Seems like every day there is another IP case. Some patent holder is suing someone (anyone) over infringement. Some copyright holder is claiming ownership of something and suing someone for not paying royalties. Some Trade Mark holder is busting everyone's balls for some other infringement.
Why? In some cases its a genuine desire to protect some intellectual property. In some cases to protect against some crook stealing a phrase, process, or trade name.
However - more and more cases have nothing to do with going after crooks. The latest wave of litigation is all about going after honest people that have unknowingly infringed on something that as far as everyone knew was fair game.
While researching categorization schemes I ran across a story about the owners of the Dewey Decimal System trademark suing a new york Theme hotel for advertising that each floor had rooms with themes that coresponded to Dewey Decimal Category Numbers.
The record industry has also been busy suing 12 year old girls for downloading the theme songs to their favourite TV shows.
And, in the Linux community there is a stink over SCO's claim that several lines of its code had been released into the open source community - and that anyone that uses linux that includes that code should be paying SCO licensing fees.
Now there is a story that a patent holder is suing just about everyone on the planet for a patent infringement of image compression. Yup - anyone that has software that compresses an image (say in JPEG format) - is supposed to pay them for the right to do it. More on this story about scum sucking JPEG nazi's here
And a while back the folks behind GIF image compression also insisted that people pay to use their technology and name.
Well fuck me. Its not that the IP holders don't have a case - I'm sure as the law is read they do have a case. But I'm pretty sure this wasn't the spirit of the law.
Its gotten to the point that Venture Capitalists are seeking out patent holders and willing to put up the money to defend their patents. And why not - its a lucrative business . And with the number of IP laws being passed in the US its making it easier and easier to win these cases. The people in the JPEG case said they had $90Million dollars in revenue last year - mostly from a case settled with Sony.
Its virtually free money. Why wouldn't a VC put up a couple of million to file suit against everyone and their brother for a piece of the pie? All of a sudden companies that were virtually bankrupt now have hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues. Not because the company made anything - but because after everyone else did that hard work of expanding an idea (process) which was previously freely available, and established a standard based on the "FREENESS" of that idea (process) - the owner of the idea (process) came back and said "You know what - now that you've done the hard work of establishing a standard - we want to get paid for something we didn't value before it became a standard."
Follow me?
But at least in the SCO case against the Linux world - the VC that are behind them have told them to shape up - because they aren't too fond of the bad press the case has been getting. See this article .
But even if they were to pull their funding, I'm sure someone else would pony up the cash to try and make a buck off of a still unproven case.
We live in a distopic world. Sue we've got it better than most people on the planet - but at what cost? The things that make our part of the world great - (e.g. the rule of law, the freedom to prosper from hard work etc.) also make our part of the world miserable since these great things are so often abused.
Blah - I wish everyone could just play nice and be fair. I wish everone could get some perspective.
Dewey as a trademark is not hurt by a hotel saying that its rooms fit the dewey decimal categorization scheme.
The record industry won't be crippled by kids that like to play the theme to "happy days" on their computer.
JPEG became a standard because it was freely available to use - and data compression is not a unique process that should be owned by anyone.
If you snooze you lose - the Jeni is out of the bottle - if SCO had a problem with the source code they should have said something long before the world made uncountable number of dirivitive works based on it.
Okay - enough of the rant.
andre
p.s. the contents of this article "intellectual property abuse" is hereby released to the public domain. Feel free to distribute it - make derivitive works based on it - profit from it - print it on toilet paper and wipe your nose with it - whatever. If you want karmic brownie points give me some credit or send me a couple of bucks for my trouble - but you don't have to.