Anti-Piracy Company Wants to Sell Patents to Protect P2P
Recently we reported that anti-piracy company Viralg is selling the patents to its technology on eBay for $1,000,000. Most people didn’t think it was value for money but Viralg have been in touch and they have a new idea – selling the patents to P2P’ers to help prevent some future anti-P2P technology.
When we reported on the sale of Viralg’s anti-p2p patents, not many people got excited by the offer.
However, after we published the article, Viralg responded to an email we sent earlier. It appears that they believe that the value of the sale doesn’t necessarily lie in the technology.
This section from the eBay auction gives a clue:
3. If your business is involved in developing and/or selling a P2P program, you can make it better and avoid any problems that this technology can give to your network.
A brief email from Viralg suggests that they feel that a ‘p2p related community’ might want to buy the patents – but why would p2p’ers want them?
Here are some details from the Canadian patent:
1. A method for limiting the use of unauthorized digital content in a content-sharing network in which digital content is distributed as files, wherein each file comprises content information and is associated with characteristic information and verification information, the method comprising:
(a) determining a first file whose content information is copyrighted;
(b) repeatedly distributing a second file in the content-sharing network, wherein the second file is associated with characteristic information and verification information that match the characteristic information and verification information, respectively, of said first file, and wherein the second file comprises content information that does not match the content information of the first file.
It seems that Viralg feel that their patent gives them the monopoly on a particular type of file corruption and that if these patents were bought by a pro-p2p outfit, they could get legal protection if anyone ever tried to use this technique against them.
Viralg told us: “Let say at some P2P related community buy those patent applications… after that no body can’t mess with hash codes…”
Maybe one million p2p’ers will put $1 each for these papers?
Ok, maybe not.
