DRM Company: If You Think Patents Are Bad, You're Un-American

from the protect-protect-protect dept

In our recent discussion about another bad idea for a new type of DRM that will surely fail, Steve R. pointed us to an article in Forbes about Intertrust, the DRM company, who apparently is cooking up yet another DRM scheme. But, unlike the system we talked about in the original post -- where the guy noted that the concept had to be widely adopted as a standard, and not protected, Intertrust goes on and on and on about how it's got a ton of DRM patents to protect this new DRM scheme. This isn't a surprise. Intertrust's entire business model was based on suing Microsoft for patent infringement.

And, of course, it should be no surprise that a company that thinks DRM makes sense also believes in the patenting the crap out of everything. But it's quite telling that even the way Forbes describes the company, it's the patents that come first, ahead of the DRM:

Talal Shamoon, chief executive of Intertrust Technologies in Sunnyvale, Calif., believes he has an answer. Intertrust holds a treasure trove of patents that help content owners manage digital rights; it has spent five years and tens of millions of dollars developing a standard called Marlin, which aims to keep content secure in a way that legitimate consumers won't find offensive

If you're leading with your patents, you don't have a good product. It's that simple. Meanwhile, the article goes on and on about just how many patents Intertrust has, and doesn't actually get around to describing "Marlin" until many paragraphs later. It doesn't sound particularly unique or special. Basically, it's still DRM that allows you to make limited copies. Yippee.

But, really, the most stunning line in the whole article is this lovely gem:

"I think it's un-American to think that patents are bad."

That's from Intertrust's CEO. It's quite a statement given the tons of evidence that patents have been a net negative on innovation and a massive waste of resources for most tech companies. It's un-American to want innovation to move faster? It's un-American to think that companies shouldn't be throwing money away on protectionist schemes? I'd love to better understand how. The purpose of the patent system is not to create more patents, it's "to promote the progress." If evidence suggests patents are not doing that, how is it possibly "un-American" to complain about that and try to change things?

Filed Under: drm, patents, un-american
Companies: intertrust