Re: [Fsfe-uk] Open Standards-based DVD Authoring

[Alex Hudson]

On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 12:04 +0000, Dave Crossland wrote:
> On 01/03/07, Alex Hudson <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Even if you didn't care about places outside the UK/EU, MPEG is covered
> > by a number of European patents. So, it does affect us, I'm afraid.
> 
> Sorry, I thought there were no software patents in all of Europe?

There are several I can point at that were issued in the UK, let alone
Europe.

That's not to say that you can patent any software idea: in general,
that has been tough to do in Europe, has got marginally tougher there
and clearly tougher in the UK. But the fact that an idea can be
implemented in software does not immediately bar it from being
patentable, not does implementation in software preclude infringement. 

The case of MPEG audio is actually a good one: one of the things that
was patented was the method of quantizing (losing information from) the
audio stream in the frequency domain.

In plain English, someone realised that the human ear hears certain
frequencies "better" than others (a lot like how the eye is great at
seeing shades of yellow, but a bit useless seeing shades of blue), and
that capturing less information in the frequencies we don't hear so well
would reduce the audio data size at minimal cost to the quality of the
output (to a human).

It's really a physical idea - that you can alter sounds waves such that
humans hear basically the same thing, but there is less information in
the wave - but it's also information processing and/or software. It's
very hard to have a logically consistent position in such areas.

The extent to which a physical result can make something patentable
varies according to the patent draftsman really, but "it's software" in
general isn't a get out of jail free card.

There are also other ways that patents can cover software
implementations (or, reasons for being able to patent an idea which
provides such cover).

Cheers,

Alex.