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The patent on SIFT expired yesterday

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Re: The patent on SIFT expired yesterday

#21

Post by Reelin »

peter_retief wrote: post #14
Reelin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open publication (at least in western jurisdictions) serves as prior art. If you don't intend to patent, just write about what you're doing openly and often!

Can any publication serve as prior art? Can I use a personal blog or do I need a certain type of publication? I know of people who have sent copies of their work in the mail to themselves to prove prior art.

Not a lawyer, but as I understand it any publicly accessible publication would suffice. Actually I think any sort of open demonstration of the idea that others can learn from is good enough, but I have no idea how edge cases are handled or precisely how open it has to be.

The sibling comment mentions a good point about the falsifiability of time stamps. If you're particularly worried about being challenged, you might point the Internet Archive at your blog or keep your blog content in a repo that you push to GitHub. For the truly paranoid, consult an attorney.

Re: The patent on SIFT expired yesterday

#22

Post by lifthrasiir »

exikyut wrote: post #10

More info about what this actually is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transf... --- Also, reading the listing, I see 2020-03-06 - Anticipated expiration 2020-03-08 - Application status is Active Is "active" some kind of obscure reference with a nonintuitive meaning, or did the patent owner reapply for the patent?

I was also a bit confused, but it turns out that the last line is always dated today (in the local time zone ;-) and displays the last known status, which may be, and in this case definitely is, outdated.

Re: The patent on SIFT expired yesterday

#23

Post by eitland »

simonh wrote: post #16
peter_retief wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can any publication serve as prior art? Can I use a personal blog or do I need a certain type of publication? I know of people who have sent copies of their work in the mail to themselves to prove prior art.

Any publication is fine as long as you can provide evidence. In fact the only thing special about publication is that it is a convenient way to demonstrate evidence of the prior art. What could be tricky about e.g. a personal blog post is proving that it was published when you say it was and that time stamps are genuine.

For those who are interested and doesn't know already[0] this is one of the places where blockchains and similar, older technoologies are actually useful: to provide irrefutable proof of knowledge at a given time.

Note however that similar services has been done for years[1] before Bitcoins and blockchains became a thing but since they neither need multi-Gigawatt-Proof-of-Work [2] nor any kind of "Coin" that can be pumped (and dumped) it wasn't cool.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/ (and hi to todays lucky 1/10000! : )

[1]: See here for an article that describes it: https://www.vice.com/en_nz/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first...

[2]: but, it kind of works anyway since it would take quite some work to find the majority + the archived ones of a certain days New York Times papers and change the classifieds section.

Re: The patent on SIFT expired yesterday

#24

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

To what extent were the SIFT patents enforced?

As an undergraduate I worked as an RA for some (IEEE published) research at my uni for some robotics work and I gather that violating the SIFT patent was somewhat common when it wasn't obvious SIFT was being used, e.g. when SIFT was being used as a fungible solution:

Self-driving car demo that recognizes road-signs? No, that's too obvious.

Object recognition primarily using HOG or other approaches but using SIFT as a fallback or for determining a confidence value? Go ahead.

And SIFT was used in a lot of private projects (proof-of-concepts, etc) or lab workers' weekend personal projects. This was in academia, but I'm curious if this attitude extends to industry anywhere.

Re: The patent on SIFT expired yesterday

#25

Post by mpweiher »

Reelin wrote: post #12
peter_retief wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that many patents are to stop others from patenting your work. It is a worry.

Open publication (at least in western jurisdictions) serves as prior art. If you don't intend to patent, just write about what you're doing openly and often!

I remember reading articles in "disclosure journals" published by different companies. My guess is that it was stuff that they didn't really think was worth patenting, but wanted to be safe from others patenting.

Haven't seen one of those in a while, and duck-go-go-ing didn't show anything either. I guess nowadays they just patent everything.

Re: The patent on SIFT expired yesterday

#26

Post by peter_retief »

mpweiher wrote: post #25
Reelin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open publication (at least in western jurisdictions) serves as prior art. If you don't intend to patent, just write about what you're doing openly and often!

I remember reading articles in "disclosure journals" published by different companies. My guess is that it was stuff that they didn't really think was worth patenting, but wanted to be safe from others patenting. Haven't seen one of those in a while, and duck-go-go-ing didn't show anything either. I guess nowadays they just patent everything.

You could be right about just patenting everything. There have been suspiciously similar Chinese patents from an open source biometric projects that I was following. Who is going to check prior art in this avalanche of patents?

Re: The patent on SIFT expired yesterday

#27

Post by johntiger1 »

Rochetshipz wrote: post #17
aerodog wrote: post #15

There have been many better feature detectors introduced in the mix over the past fifteen years. This change won't make too big a difference for people in the CV community.

Mhhhhh, I'm a researcher in the field and I'd say it's a mostly inaccurate statement. The root-SIFT detectors and descriptors are still really good. If you try to match images in different conditions (day/night), then CNN based approaches are OK. Which one were you thinking about?

I would argue more that SIFT was valuable in introducing a new paradigm of feature extraction/matching. It is a staple of many computer vision courses. But yes the main algorithm I'm sure is quite (practically) performant as well

Re: The patent on SIFT expired yesterday

#28

Post by littlestymaar »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #24

To what extent were the SIFT patents enforced? As an undergraduate I worked as an RA for some (IEEE published) research at my uni for some robotics work and I gather that violating the SIFT patent was somewhat common when it wasn't obvious SIFT was being used, e.g. when SIFT was being used as a fungible solution: Self-driving car demo that recognizes road-signs? No, that's too obvious. Object recognition primarily us…

Keep in mind that software patents are only enforceable in the US and Japan. Everywhere else in the world, you can do whatever you want (only copyright applies).

For businesses, it's still a big deal most of the time because you usually can't really neglect the US market, but for academia, there is no such issues.

Re: The patent on SIFT expired yesterday

#29

Post by laumars »

Reelin wrote: post #12
peter_retief wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that many patents are to stop others from patenting your work. It is a worry.

Open publication (at least in western jurisdictions) serves as prior art. If you don't intend to patent, just write about what you're doing openly and often!

Unfortunately prior art doesn't stop someone else from patenting your work. It just offers an avenue for someone to invalidate that patent. Worse still, the process of doing so is often riskier for small businesses than if they just agree to pay a licence fee.
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