Spritz forces takedown of Spree bookmarklet citing patents
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Spritz forces takedown of Spree bookmarklet citing patents
#2I don't think anybody familiar with the two services had any doubt that this would happen, eventually.
Squirt.io is another service that does the same thing as Spree, and I can't imagine that it won't soon be in Spritz's crosshairs as well -- especially since in its Acknowledgements section, the first to be credited is "Spritz Inc, the company whose patents are pending."
One thing I'm curious about is whether leaving the code publicly accessible, but in a "commented out" state, ostensibly rendering the program non-functional, is sufficient.
Like, suppose I wrote a small open-source text editor whose default text upon startup is the entirety of "Fifty Shades of Grey." And E.L. James' people contact me and say, "Hey, you can't do that. E.L. James holds the copyright to that text." If I merely comment out the text, rather than wipe it from the source code, have I really fulfilled my responsibility to not infringe on James' copyright?
Re: Spritz forces takedown of Spree bookmarklet citing patents
#3I really like the Spritz-style technology, which allows me to read with high retention at 750+ WPM and skim casually at 900+ WPM, up from around 575 WPM and 700 WPM respectively, with other technologies.
I don't like to see them stopping open source versions, but at the same time they have little else to protect their algorithm, which brought some significant advances in the speed reading (RSVP) space that hadn't changed for years.
As screens get smaller with devices like smartwatches, this type of technology becomes even more important and may even be a requirement for reading text longer than a few sentences on such a small screen.
Re: Spritz forces takedown of Spree bookmarklet citing patents
#4Here's the patent: https://www.google.com/patents/WO2014011884A1?cl=en&dq=WO+20...
It's pretty ridiculous. It's very obtusely written and clearly cites work from others as the basis for their technique (primarily in description paragraphs 1-6). Then in paragraph 7 they claim "None of the previous research on word recognition has been applied to RSVP."
Re: Spritz forces takedown of Spree bookmarklet citing patents
#5I don't think anybody familiar with the two services had any doubt that this would happen, eventually. Squirt.io is another service that does the same thing as Spree, and I can't imagine that it won't soon be in Spritz's crosshairs as well -- especially since in its Acknowledgements section, the first to be credited is "Spritz Inc, the company whose patents are pending." One thing I'm curious about is whether leaving…
No. Because every time you send people a copy of your code, you are distributing a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. And making a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey without permission is precisely what copyright law prevents.
Re: Spritz forces takedown of Spree bookmarklet citing patents
#6I don't think anybody familiar with the two services had any doubt that this would happen, eventually. Squirt.io is another service that does the same thing as Spree, and I can't imagine that it won't soon be in Spritz's crosshairs as well -- especially since in its Acknowledgements section, the first to be credited is "Spritz Inc, the company whose patents are pending." One thing I'm curious about is whether leaving…
> If I merely comment out the text, rather than wipe it from the source code, have I really fulfilled my responsibility to not infringe on James' copyright?
The difference is copyright versus patents. For copyright, you definitely need to remove it. For patents, I think it was openssh that used to have patented algorithms in the source that you could compile into your binary if you had a license.
Re: Spritz forces takedown of Spree bookmarklet citing patents
#7Anyone know of an alternative to github that is hosted somewhere that doesn't recognise software patents?
Re: Spritz forces takedown of Spree bookmarklet citing patents
#8I'm building a Spritz-like application but I don't live in the US so the patent doesn't apply. Is there anything else I should be worried about?
Re: Spritz forces takedown of Spree bookmarklet citing patents
#9I'm building a Spritz-like application but I don't live in the US so the patent doesn't apply. Is there anything else I should be worried about?
They also have a WIPO patent[0], which may or may not affect you, depending on where you are.
Also, since Github is based in US you might want to look elsewhere for project hosting (assuming that it's an open source project).
Re: Spritz forces takedown of Spree bookmarklet citing patents
#10Sorry but what is it about for people who know neither Spree or Spritz, what patent did Spree violate( ELI5,tried to read the paper but did understand nothing).