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posted by janrinok on Tuesday May 15 2018, @08:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the stand-by-for-podcast dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow0245

Back in 2015, Personal Audio's claimed patent was invalidated by a federal court.

Podcasters, you can now engage in your lengthy Maron opens without the feeling of being legally targeted by a Texas company that many would consider to be a patent troll.

On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case of Personal Audio v. Electronic Frontier Foundation. In short, the case is all said and done.

As Ars reported in August 2017, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the April 2015 inter partes review (IPR) ruling—a process that allows anyone to challenge a patent's validity at the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/podcasting-patent-case-is-finally-totally-and-completely-dead-now/


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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @04:38AM (7 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 16 2018, @04:38AM (#680286) Homepage Journal

    and what's your take on it now being in the public domain?

    Rivest, Shamir and Adelson IIRC could have sold it to a company that would have kept it as a trade secret, perhaps implemented only in obfuscated hardware so as to make "discovering the source code" quite difficult.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @07:41AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @07:41AM (#680313)

    In which case it wouldn't be reviewed and thus not considered secure.

    At least until someone else came up with the idea of multiplying large prime numbers.

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:10AM

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 16 2018, @08:10AM (#680317) Homepage Journal

      The NSA never discloses crypto secrets even to the diplomats and military personnel who use them in their work.

      The best anyone ever knows is that the "NSA approved it".

      From time to time the NSA withdraws its approval. This because there is a separate department in the NSA who cryptanalyzes every proposed algorithm. That department never "approves" anything, they only tell the department that creates proposed algorithms that "we cracked it".

      Were the Soviets ever to have cracked one of our algoriths quite likely the way These United States would have found out about it was when a couple sub-launched missiles vaporized DC as well as New York City.

      That "disapproval department" NEVER gets the source code, they only have a black box which, if they're really lucky, from time to time they can feed it some chosen plaintext.

      Source: James Bamford, "The Puzzle Palace", Ninth Edition.

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  • (Score: 2) by stormreaver on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:06PM (3 children)

    by stormreaver (5101) on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:06PM (#680375)

    It it hadn't been patentable, it would have eventually made it into the public consciousness. At that point, some interested parties would have created something very similar. It always happens.

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:39PM (2 children)

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:39PM (#680392) Homepage Journal

      Extensive googling has yet to turn up any ideas similar to those of my lossless bitmap compressor, nor to its file format.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @05:30PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @05:30PM (#680458)

        Does it perform significantly better than 7zip?

        I could be mistaken, but my understanding was that lossless compression was a dead field as it has basically reached it's theoretical maximum.

        The emphasis now is on lossy compression as the art of learning where you can lose data and not have people notice it is still vibrant.

        • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 17 2018, @12:09AM

          by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday May 17 2018, @12:09AM (#680564) Homepage Journal

          ... to decompress. It's also dead-simple to implement decompression in C. That suggests it might be straightforward to implement in in an FPGA, with possible lucrative applications for ASIC such as spy satellites.

          It's dog-slow to compress, however: it only is useful if you compress just once then decompress a whole bunch of times.

          It's intended application was to replace GIF's LZW dog-slow LZW decompression on 20 MHz Windows 3.1 boxen. Our first use of it was for Medior's 2Market Home Shopping multimedia CD-ROM - that shipped _just_ in time for black friday!

          With four GIFs on each page of 2Market's catalogs, the Win GIF decompression was distressingly lagging when one browsed from page to page.

          We didn't use it on Mac OS because Apple's PICT bitmap compression was implemented in hand-optimized assembly by The Devil Incarnate.

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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday May 17 2018, @12:17AM

    by sjames (2882) on Thursday May 17 2018, @12:17AM (#680568) Journal

    If not RSA, we'd be using a variation on Diffie-Hellman which is backed by similar mathematics. In fact, a minor variation on the D-H exchange that can be used as a public key system was known at the same time as RSA's work. Meanwhile, D-H was a re-discovery of something British Sigint worked out 7 years earlier. Look past the 50,000 foot overview of any invention and you'll most likely find others who would have invented the thing (or actually DID) but stopped once the patent office picked a winner.

    The actual bolt from the blue invention is exceedingly rare