digital music/video
08/17/2005, 8:20am, EDT
Wednesday, August 17th
Apple, Sony, others named in DRM patent lawsuit
Five of the top companies in the online music industry--including Apple and Sony--are being sued because their music stores and DRM technology violate a seven-year old music DRM technology patent, according to AppleInsider. Earlier this month Ho Keung Tse of Hong Kong filed a lawsuit in US Federal Court alleging that the DRM technology used by Apple, Sony, Real Networks, Napster and MusicMatch infringes on his U.S. Patent No. 6,665,797, which describes a method for "Protection of Software Against Unauthorized Use". Update: The lawsuit follows virtually identical allegations made earlier this year by Hong Kong Pat-rights, which claimed that Apple's iTunes/iPod system violates the same DRM patent. As a royalty, the company was seeking 12-percent of Apple's profits on the revenues generated from iTunes and iPod sales, and had given Apple until the end of March to respond.
The DRM technique relies heavily on a "psychological barrier" to discourage users from sharing music by embedding personal information into each music file the user purchases. Demanding a trial by jury, Tse is seeking both actual and statutory damages resulting from the infringement, following unsuccessful negotiations with each company--including Apple--for royalties payments.
Filed under: industry
Other story tags: digital music/video
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Z
He also has prior art issues. I had computer games 15 years ago that had a kind of DRM. You could only install them on a few computers without first removing them from another. This always caused problems when hard drives crashed. That was a system to protect software from unauthorized use. But is a music file a piece of software. Any computer science textbook would refer to it as a piece of data as it doesn't actually contain a program, an algorithm. The DRM doesn't stop iTunes (the software) from unauthorized use, it stop's the music (the data) from unauthorized use. How exactly does this guys patent apply to digital music again?
I think this guy would find it easier to push an elephant up Mt Everest. He has far too many holes in his arguments to be going up against the legal departments of Song, Apple, etc.
I need more sleep!
We're talking '80s, here, folks.
(lol...I'm Asian so I'm free to say this =P )