Media moguls

PATENTS HAVE BEEN in the news a lot lately. I suggest you stifle the impulse to brush off the issue as something only the long-haired lefties care about.

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With a patent, a vendor can retroactively transform thousands or millions of strangers into instant customers, all bound by law to cough up whatever license fee the vendor deems appropriate. British Telecom's laughable attempt to enforce a hyperlink patent looks tame compared to another company's (as Paul Harvey says, the company would like me to mention its name ...) move to enforce a patent claim on JPEG images. When the ISO threatens to abandon a ubiquitous graphics standard over a lawsuit from some tiny company, the potential impact becomes evident.

The IT planning implications of patents are almost impossible to predict, yet you have to factor them in somehow. Squint at any software or technology that a vendor is apparently giving away and ask yourself where the revenue will come from. No business stays in business giving its goods away. "Free" can't mean "free forever."

I'll use digital media as an example. Microsoft, Apple, and RealNetworks -- the who's who of digital media -- will all have new software out by fall of 2002. Apple has already shipped the new QuickTime. RealNetworks announced its Helix software in late July. And Microsoft is planning to unveil Corona, the next generation of the Windows Media architecture, this September.

All three vendors are retooling to accomplish the same thing: end-to-end control of digital media content and delivery. Microsoft and Apple want a piece of the subscription model that's worked so surprisingly well for RealNetworks. The media player, encoder, and server must work together to make sure for-pay content isn't transcoded, that is, converted from a secure format (such as RealVideo) to an open one (such as MPEG-1). Content owners -- the studios that own movies, and the record companies that own music -- are waiting for an impenetrably secure delivery scheme before they jump into broadband content distribution. There are billions at stake for the vendor that locks in the most cable boxes, desktops, hip-side players, game consoles, and corporate streaming servers.

Giving technology away, even permitting competing implementations of it, doesn't negate a patent. So RealNetworks can publish source code, Microsoft can give Corona Player away, and Apple can hand out nagware copies of QuickTime like candy. Any of them can come back later and demand fees for content and technology that people are already using. They can use patents to thin the ranks of their competition and to turn freeware alternatives into contraband.

Microsoft's encouragement of open-source .Net and IBM's patented contributions to the Web Services Interoperability Organization make me as wary as the free media players do. The best way to keep your company from getting burned by patents is to stop expecting something for nothing. Unless a patent holder signs its invention over to the public, don't expect that technology to remain free.