Alan Cox Files Patent For DRM

booooh writes "Alan Cox has filed a patent for DRM (Digital Rights Management). From the filing: 'A rights management system monitors and controls use of a computer program to prevent use that is not in compliance with acceptable terms.' According to the patent pledge of Cox's employer Red Hat, they will not license this technology if the patent is granted. And it can probably be applied to the DRM that is in Vista. This forum has a few more details.

Illegal iTunes?

[tedgyz (515156)]

I KNEW I should have kept using LimeWire instead of paying for songs on iTunes!

FrostWire

[SpooForBrains (771537)]

FrostWire [frostwire.com] - all the *ahem* benefits of using Limewire, but without the annoying "Upgrade to Limewire Pro" popups.

Re:FrostWire

[Schemat1c (464768)]

When itunes came out, I started paying for my music and uninstalled all P2P clients.

How obedient of you, you deserve a treat.

*pats domesticated ape on the head*

Aww, isn't he cute?

Wow!

[noamsml (868075)]

Either the patent system will be proven rotten, or DRM will be halted! It's a win-win!

Re:Wow!

[Andy Dodd (701)]

"Either the patent system will be proven rotten, or DRM will be halted! It's a win-win!"

Or the patent system will work and the patent won't be granted (prior art).
Or the patent system will work and the patent will be granted because it is narrow in scope (only covers a specific type of DRM) which won't hurt DRM in general because no one implements it in the patented way. (If they do, prior art kills the patent)

Re:*All* claims must be meet for patent violation

[XLawyer (68496)]

This may be true somewhere, but not in the United States. In the U.S., you infringe a patent if any claim of the patent describes what you are doing.

Re:*All* claims must be meet for patent violation

[FallLine (12211)]

No, actually, your product or process does have to show all the elements listed in the patent.

No, it does not. The product/process must contain all the elements of just one claim: not all the elements of all the claims. There is a huge difference between the two. If this were really the case, it would be impossible to violate the majority of patents as they contain dependent claims that are mutually exclusive (often the dependent claims describe various implementations of the same idea).

You don't have to take my word for it. Read this: [iusmentis.com]

Something infringes a patent if it has all the elements of a claim in the patent, or performs all the steps of a claim. It does not have to match all the claims, a single one will do. However, it is important that it matches all elements in that single claim. Most patent courts take this requirement quite strictly and will not easily ignore an element in a claim unless it is clearly irrelevant. One often-heard argument against ignoring an element is that patent writers are aware of the strict interpretation and so would not put in an element unless necessary. Therefore, an element that is present in the claim must have been deemed necessary and so may not be ignored.

One great example is that lawsuit against Nintendo http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/08/ [slashdot.org] 2138250 over the Wiimote, because it has a "trigger" button underneath. And coincidently, the Wiimote also has buttons on top just like the item that Nintendo is supposedly infringing on.

I didn't read this case, but citing slashdot on patent issues is like citing Soviet propaganda to find out about the US Constitution. It is just about the worst place to find reliable information on patents.

Re:*All* claims must be meet for patent violation

[jc42 (318812)]

2) a lot of people have been working on DRM for a long time.

Yeah, but have any of them actually produced valid, workable DRM software? I get the impression that most of them are invalidated (i.e., "cracked") within days of release. Either that, or like the Sony "rootkit DRM", the DRM was a fiasco that was quickly withdrawn due to its side-effects on customers' equipment.

Cox and RedHat can be making the claim that all previous DRM has been poorly-functioning and/or vaporware, and they're the first ones to have actually implemented it. If so, those who support DRM should support their patent. (Whether software should actually be patentable is an independent issue.)

There's a lot of precedent for patents for inventions that others have attempted. I recently read an interesting history of the invention of the zipper. Many people tried to invent such a mechanism in the 1800s. Their attempts generally worked for a while, but were fragile and required frequent replacement. Finally, someone came up with the zipper that we all know, which both worked and was sturdy enough to last for years in normal clothing. They got a patent on it, despite the fact that many other (poor) zipper mechanisms had already been invented. Theirs was slightly different from all the others, and it actually worked well.

There are many stories like this in the history of technology, with many false starts before someone comes up with a good solution to a problem.

There is another potential problem with this patent, however. It's the way that the US Patent Office now accepts patents without a working model. So it's entirely possible that Cox and RedHat are also patenting vaporware that they can't build. Do we know much about this question?

Microsoft?

[Amazing Quantum Man (458715)]

Microsoft? They're not huge DRM supporters by nature

Say what? I have just three words for you.

Windows Genuine Advantage.

Re:Wow!

[arivanov (12034)]

Neither.

Read the patent application.

It is actually an interesting take on the licensing paradigm. Most licensing programs either start denying you access which leads to loss of data if this happens in the middle of an operation. Alternatively, they kill your program altogether which is again loss of data. Alternatively they check for licensing only when the program starts. In the days of software suspend and 200+ days of uptimes neither one of these is a good idea.

What redhat is patenting is a three pronged approach - OS suspend, component suspend or application suspend when a license violation is encountered. The first one is obvious, the second one and third one are non-obvious until one consideres RedHat aquisition of Jboss. These actually make a lot of sense in a Jboss application.

Overall, I am not surprised that RedHat has no intention of licensing this commercially. If they provide the relevant support, this will give a Jboss based commercial application considerable advantage over BEA and Websphere.

Re:Wow!

[bwt (68845)]

I believe that the patent will be granted. The PTO doesn't see this patent as any different than the myriads of other stupid patents they routinely grant. But the only way it might not be granted is if the publicity alerts the bad guys (MS, RIAA, MPAA, etc...) that they need to spin up their lobbiests to affect the PTO. I wish this story had not been run.

Assuming the PTO behaves as it has in the past, this patent will be granted and it will be up to litigation to sort out prior art. It will be up to Alan and Red Hat to pick who they want to attack first. If they pick somebody big, there is a serious danger that they will retaliate against Red Hat. Think about what IBM did to SCO. Every single SCO product has a patent claim infringement case against it.

If Red Hat is smart, they'd work out a deal with a friendly party who is willing to spend the money and litigate against them first. IBM or Novell might be candidates. The idea here would be that the "defendent" would want the courts to reach a common outcome with the plaintiffs and both sides would cooperate insofar as they would force the court to pick between precedents that are favorable to both sides.

Hope this works

[AlanS2002 (580378)]

It might be something that reduces the threat of DRM completely making our computers useless.

Flamebait??

[Cheesey (70139)]

Flamebait? "The threat of DRM completely making our computers useless" is not a contraversial statement. Even if you really like DRM, you can probably think of some examples where it has been taken too far: think Sony rootkits, Starforce CDROM damage, and Jon Johansen and Dimitri Skylarov being arrested for hacking their own computers.

Read up on TCPA immediately. Consider how much of the design of Vista has been aimed at preventing access to high-quality copies of information protected by DRM. Should the film industry really have been allowed to design an operating system?

It's not likely to affect Vista

[rumith (983060)]

Microsoft has got its back protected: http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6330670&id= tNcIAAAAEBAJ&dq=digital+rights+management [google.com]

Re:It's not likely to affect Vista

[Halo1 (136547)]

The fact that Microsoft also has patents on DRM does not "protect" it in any way from this particular patent owned by Red Hat. A "defensive patent" only works to the extent that you can assert it to someone who is threatening you. So unless Red Hat starts incorporating DRM stuff in its products which infringes on Microsoft's patent, it has zero defensive value against Red Hat's patent.

That said, Microsoft has a whole lot of other patents as well, and some of those are bound to cover code distributed by Red Hat. I just wanted to correct the misconception that holding a patent on something automatically protects your use of that stuff: it doesn't in any way, all it does is give you the right to prevent others from doing that. But it's quite possible you need umpteen other patent licenses yourself to be able to actually do what you describe in your patent application.

This is good, but with caution

[jimicus (737525)]

Had it been any other sort of technology, filing a patent for it and then refusing to license it, thus crippling adoption of that technology, would be considered a terrible thing on /. But in the case of DRM and RedHat, I think most would make an exception.

But I'm still not that excited. Most on /. thought Novell was a fine upstanding company until recently.

Pointless waste of money and time

[Breakfast Pants (323698)]

He might as well try and patent the airplane. If he really wants to prevent further spread of DRM, he should use his energy educating people about it's true costs. The only people who are going to read about this already know about DRM.

Not really

[rumith (983060)]

You see, he's not trying to patent DRM as a concept, he's trying to patent the technology of DRM system state saving. While this patent may have little value itself, it might be a show-stopper for Apple, Microsoft and the like. IANAL, but I suppose that Red Hat lawyers have studied the piles of MS et al DRM patents and Vista license agreement, and have found a hole in it [i.e. something that they use in the license or in their technology but haven't patented]. And now that Vista is getting ready for launch, Microsoft gets this blow. Let's keep our fingers crossed and see what follows.

Making DRM-aware applications even more annoying?

[tfbastard (782237)]

From this patent application [freshpatents.com]

The present invention provides a technique for preventing the unauthorized use of a computer application, operating system, or other program without causing the loss of any information or data.

And a bit further down:

When unauthorized use of the computer program is detected, any information and data is saved and the computer program and/or a portion of the computer system is disabled.

As patent law, legalese and such is not my area of expertise, I'm out on a limb here, but doesn't this sound like a patent for saving the state of an DRM-aware application before exiting if a DRM-breaking state occurs, thus making legal DRM-aware applications even more annoying to use?

Re:Making DRM-aware applications even more annoyin

[RegularFry (137639)]

It's quite clever, actually. Any DRM-aware application that doesn't save state before shutting down will be vilified as being broken the first time anyone loses important data because of a false positive, and any DRM-aware application that does is in violation of this patent. This makes any DRM-aware application either a) broken, or b) illegal. Very neat. Simple, but neat.

The Irony

[by Anonymous Coward]

Its like the one ring being destroyed in Mt. Doom

Mr. Cox, you are brilliant

[ratboy666 (104074)]

The current attack vectors on cryptographic based "DRM" schemes are (1) accidental key leakage, (2) the key exchange system or (3) the fact that the data must be eventually decoded.

Note that (3) is what makes DRM systems very dumb. It also follows that the Operating System must get involved in order to so hide the data.

If the Operating System allows a debugger to run AT THE SAME TIME as the "DRM", its attackable. If the OS allows "unsigned" drivers to run, its attackable.

The OS (for example, Vista) will (eventually) not allow unsigned drivers. It must also "kick out" or "suspend" all non-DRM (unsigned) software when DRM content is played.

This behaviour falls into Mr. Coxs patent.

Now, if (Vista) doesn't implement the scheme, it remains vulnerable. So, the problem must be solved another way.

My suggestion then is to ALSO patent (or disallow) by widely publishing the idea that a hypervisor (VM supervisor) can be used for DRM control as well, and can also be used to suspend, terminate or otherwise control applications that could be used to attack DRM software.

Got that? It's now published.

Re:How is this supposed to work?

[cgenman (325138)]

How, exactly, has prior art been stopping patents from being granted?

Re:How is this supposed to work?

[gnasher719 (869701)]

'' It hasn't. However, the moment he tries to use it on one of the large companies, they'll haul the matter in to court, most likely bankrupting Mr. Cox in the process. ''

There are two possibilities how this could go to court:

1. Mr. Cox finds out that for example Microsoft does actually infringe on his patent, and he tries to do an Eolas on them. You can be sure that he would find lawyers who will happily support him for 60 percent of the proceeds on a no win, no fee basis. Mr. Cox would go down in public opinion quite a lot, but he might not care with $100mil in his pocket.

2. Microsoft starts attacking Linux with patent claims, and Mr. Cox's patent is used as part of the "assured mutual destruction" policy that patents are used for. It won't be Mr. Cox paying for the court case.

Re:That's stupid (in the sense of *really stupid*)

[init100 (915886)]

If the patent is not granted, which is very likely because there is a ton of prior art,

Are you sure? This does not seem to be a patent for all DRM, but for a system that saves the state of the application when detecting a condition that violates the rules.

It's not like many people don't think that anyway.

What do you mean?

Either way it will be proven that the patent system actually works, because a patent troll has been defeated,

Red Hat is no patent troll. A patent troll is a company whose only business is patenting and suing for infringement. And that isn't a description of Red Hat by a long stretch.

on top of that it will be shown that the people who most adamantly argue against patents a) don't refrain from trying to use the system to their advantage (double standard)

So everyone that don't like the current implementation of the patent system should refrain from patenting things at all? Let's face it, patents exist and don't seem to be going away. As a corporation, refraining from patenting anything would be an invitation to competitors to sue, as you would have almost no defensive capability. Avoiding infringement altogether is about as easy as walking through a minefield, so in case you are sued, you need some defensive measures to fight off the attacker.

file patents for other people's inventions, which we all know is STEALING (or intellectual theft or somesuch).

A lot of patents cover the same or almost the same thing. It's a feature of the current implementation of patents, and whose patent is valid is left for the courts to decide.

One could suspect that the system is set up only to enrich lawyers, as lawyers in the patent office earn money proportional to the number of granted patent applications. Then their patent lawyer friends earn money when corporations battle it out in court. A different implementation might require the patent office to not issue patents that cover each other, but then the lawyers would not be able to enrich themselves as much.