I am the Sean Owen in question. I will drop in for a limited time since I think it is important for anyone who spends this much time thinking about Neomedia to think clearly about the reality of the patent situation.
Whatever you think of the Neomedia patents, take them as granted for now. They do not cover everything in the world related to barcodes. In particular, my paraphrase of what the recently reviewed patent covers is something like this:
- you make up an opaque identifier and map it to a pointer like a URL
- you encode those IDs in barcodes
- later you read the ID, send it to a remote server, and get back a pointer / URL
That is, if anything, a broad reading of the patent.
This is, however, not what is happening in the vast majority of cases where a barcode is scanned. Let me explain at least in terms of the work I am intimately familiar with.
QR Codes and Data Matrix codes can, and do, encode data like a URL directly. When you decode one, there is no lookup at all.
Barcode Scanner, likewise, does no lookup of a URL. It forwards the user to a URL it constructs locally.
The recent Google Product Search integration is actually just a hyperlink to Barcode Scanner.
ShopSavvy - I don't see how there was a predetermined ID -> pointer map they are using. They are looking up data, not pointers, about a barcode.
This patent pretty narrowly covers a technique that I believe everyone calls 'indirect' encoding. While I personally find this obvious, and am sorry someone was granted a patent on it, it is a model that is simply out of date anyway. There is no longer good reason, with denser codes and better codes today, to not just encode your data payload directly in the barcode.
But guys, listen closely, here's the kicker -- Neomedia seems to agree with what I am saying. We have talked to them, ShopSavvy has talked to them, and nobody at Neomedia had anything but support. They are reasonable people and understand what they do and don't have.
So, I just ask you to think about this, clearly, when you decide where to invest your time and money.
(You do not need to decompile Barcode Scanner; it is open source, http://code.google.com/p/zxing.)