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| Subject: | RE: GISList: Working with large rasters ~100Gb and GIS |
| Date: |
03/17/2003 10:17:20 AM |
| From: |
Dimitri Rotow |
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> While I cannot discuss specifics of the case, defending patented
> intellectual property is the right and responsibility of any company that
> has invested as much as Lizardtech has into their underlying
> technology and
I take it that your answer is that LizardTech is still persisting in the
litigation it initated against ERMapper. I understand the excuse used for
litigation is defending a patent, but the case seems to me to be more about
trying to defeat a more nimble and technologically elegant competitor, Earth
Resource Mapping, by a court action when LizardTech's technology was not
enough to defeat them in the market.
> products. As a software developer, I find it surprising that protecting
> your own IP that is integral to your products would be
> distasteful. This is
If it's really your intellectual property (IP), sure, but that does not
appear to be the case here given what I hear from technically knowledgeable
people.
Legal pushing and shoving to try to use a twisted legal system to tie up a
more successful or more elegant competitor in lieu of competing with them in
the marketplace I don't think is either ethical or appropriate. From my
personal knowledge of the techology at hand, my opinion is that any claim
that the ECW technology used in ERMapper somehow infringes upon the
techology in MrSID is utterly false. Of course, you might find a court that
disagrees with that opinion, but (correct me if I'm wrong) didn't a court
rule rather decisively against LizardTech on the merits?
> not like Amazon, claiming patents to every business process,
> these are real
> mathematical algorithyms and methods that Lizardtech paid to license from
> LANL.
>
> Additionally, we have continued to move the technology forward in
> ways that
> no competitors have yet done and intend to continue to do so.
>
I think the jury's out on that. I'm not surprised that a company which did
not develop the core technology in the first place has so little faith in
its own development capabilities that it would try to outflank a competitor
in court instead of investing the same effort into development. Anyone for
whom development is a competitive advantage would put the time, money and
effort into their own development processes to crush the competitor. But, I
suppose if you are not the inventor of your core technology in the first
place that's not really an option for you.
It's not your fault, of course, but I think this whole thing shows just one
more negative aspect of what I regard as the fundamental conceptual
corruption of a political process that allows the privatization of public
technology into a private monopoly that has an economic incentive to prevent
its widespread use by more agile, more efficient or simply smarter players.
IMHO, once you lock up a process like this with a single monopolist you get
the same poor results as happens when governments choose sole-source
concessionaires to operate food service on turnpikes and in airports: lousy
food, lousy service and lousy prices.
But then, no one in recent years has accussed the administration at Los
Alamos of having an iota of manegerial talent, so I suppose we should not be
surprised that they cut deals with such negative public impact.
Whatever the case may be, it's a really squalid spectacle to have some
private opportunist take over (formerly) public technology and then set out
through legal means to prevent anyone else from doing a better job in the
market. I realize that's mostly likely not your view of the case but it is
the conclusion that many observers have reached. I think LizardTech would
do much better to be done from the distractions of such litigation and the
poisonous impact it has on your relationship with real software developers
(as opposed to licensees and remarketers).
No doubt it has had some direct business impact as well. Experienced
businesspeople have to ask themselves twice if they really want to sign a
contract with a party that has a known streak of litigiousness. Plus, your
assault on ERMapper and ECW gives your opponents an opening to go to each
state agency that is using MrSid and ask them why they are denying public
access to public data by bottling it up within a proprietary format that
requires agreement to anticompetitive provisions (which I believe are
illegal in some states) to read.
> I really don't know what you mean by eggregious and perhaps we
I meant the license provisions that state that if a company uses the SDK it
agrees to thereafter compete with LizardTech in the image compression
market. That's a paraphrase from memory, not a quotation, but as I recall
it was something like that. Has that been removed?
As I recall, the provision was not merely to refrain from using the SDK to
compete with LizardTech using LizardTech's own SDK, it was a requirement
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