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September 4th, 2004 by Franki

There is nothing particularly new about this issue, but I’ve collected enough stories on the subject to warrant another attack against software patents. The more people that know just how dangerous they are, the more likely that someone in power will notice and do something about it. (or at the very least, stop some even worse law from being added by inept un-knowledgeable politicians trying to get votes, and listening to paid industry lobbyists.)

Big companies like IBM and Microsoft love software patents, they can use them for two primary reasons, one is as a defence; If someone litigates against you, they should make sure that they are not infringing any of your patents or they will face a counter suit. And as an attack; If a competitor is taking market share from you, and you want to turn the tables, finding a patent infringement and litigating for damages is often a useful way to get started. IBM has one of the biggest patent portfolios, but to the best of my knowledge they only use it for litigation defence and licensing. Microsoft has a huge and growing patent portfolio, and thus far have really only used it for defence and licensing as well. Although there is much speculation that they will be using it to attack Open Source software like Linux, Samba, Apache, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org. In some ways they are already using it to fight open source as can be seen in the recent SenderID anti-spam issue covered here.

The question people should be asking, is: Should patents be granted for things like “Double clicking your mouse button” or the local collection of registration information which is later uploaded to a remote server, or a Window containing a “to-do” list. and online voting systems?

Read the rest of this entry »

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July 23rd, 2013 by Franki

Software patents are hurting the software industry by allowing big incumbents and patent trolls or NPE’s (non practising entities) to place a huge tax on newcomers. (or in Microsoft’s case, make Android as expensive as possible to manufacturers in the hope of making their windows mobile OS more appealing)

Anyway, not many people would argue that it’s a bad situation, even President Obama said as much recently when trying to rein in the patent problem.

So what to do? Why get silly patent applications that should never be granted dismissed by the PTO that’s what!

reading this article shows that it isn’t as hard as it seems and doesn’t take much time. If every coder got one application blown away a month it would go a long way to making sure that once the current batch of rubbish patents have expired or been ruled invalid there were not a new batch waiting in the wings to take their place.

348 Comments »

June 24th, 2005 by Franki

The BSA (Business Software Alliance), which counts companies like Microsoft, Dell, Apple and HP as members, has been claiming that 33 billion dollars in revenue was lost due to software piracy ni 2004.

That some revenue is lost to piracy is without a doubt true, but many are somewhat doubtful about method by which the BSA reached this figure. In short, according to the Economist (subscription required) the BSA worked out it’s piracy figure by using surveys to determine how many programs the average user has in each area, they then compared that total to the amount of software actually sold in that area and used the difference to reach the $33 billion figure. There are so many problems with that reasoning, that you start to wonder if perhaps the BSA is just a collection of marketers, lobbyists and lawyers working furiously together to further the goals of their member companies. For starters, take me for example, I have OpenOffice.org, Firefox, NVU and Thunderbird on all of my machines. All of those are free Open Source programs, and yet they would count as “piracy” using the above calculation. When you consider that over 65 million people have downloaded Firefox alone, that, it makes you wonder how the BSA could tout such a figure and do so with a serious face. They also apparently jump to the conclusion that the people really guilty of pirating software would rush out and buy it were they unable to use their illegally gotten software. I find that assumption dubious to say the least. So I guess the moral of this is that we can all help the BSA tout bigger software losses if we all adopt and encourage Open Source software.

The second chapter in this woeful story relates to the current software patent issue dividing the EU. The BSA released figures that once again have been twisted to serve the interests of it’s members, nearly all of whom are huge companies. Their claim was that software patents benefit small and medium sized companies (SMEs) as much as large enterprise. Rather then go into all of the detail here, I will instead direct you to Ingrid Marson’s article at ZDnet where the saga has been explained more clearly and in more detail then I could hope to achieve myself. One comment I would make is that the BSA is behind much of the current lobbying in the EU in favour of software patents and their figures have been quoted by at least one MEP over there as reasons why software patents should be legally approved. That the figures are hopelessly inflated in the BSA’s favour is apparently not worth considering.

Comments Off on BSA, proof that even software companies can fail maths.

April 22nd, 2005 by Franki

Forgent is one company that makes me wonder if my dislike of Microsoft’s business tactics could have been better directed at them. Forgent has been handed around 100 million dollars for the compression patent that they claim is used in the Jpeg image compression standard. Apparently that is not enough as they’ve just added Microsoft to their list of targets. This comes in the same month that they have started targeting DVR companies, no doubt expecting the same hand outs they’ve been getting from the likes of Sony and Adobe. Microsoft has asked that the court declare them non infringing and invalidate the patent in question.

If we needed another reason to swap from JPG format to the open and free PNG format, we now have it. The only upside in this sorry saga is that Forgent went after Microsoft, a company that owns a huge pile of software patents and who has enthusiastically encouraged the official adoption of software patents in the EU. Perhaps this will make them wonder if opening themselves to a whole new era of software patent lawsuits is such a good idea. They are after all, one of the biggest targets with the deepest pockets. They have paid out huge sums of money to settle many such claims in the past couple of years, but if they keep coming at this rate, it will eventually significantly hit Microsoft’s bottom line and that is something that their shareholders won’t be very happy about. Microsoft is still working hard to extract itself from the Eolas browser plug in patent lawsuit. How many more does it need to become embroiled in before it sees how software patents are doing more harm then good?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If the giants upon who’s shoulders the current Internet stands had been as patent hungry as the current proprietary software developers are now, we would not have the (mostly) standards compliant cross platform Internet we have now. (for example, consider one Internet for Macintosh users, one Internet for Windows users and one Internet for Unix/Linux/BSD users all incompatible with each other. Much like the Instant Messaging mess we have now.)

1 Comment »

April 18th, 2005 by Franki

Trading Technologies, a company based in Chicago has a few software based patents for their trading system and have just filed suit against a UK firm by the name of Man group (a hedge fund company) in the hopes of getting a 2.5 cent contribution per trade on the Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Eurex US and Euronext.liffe exchanges. Trading Technologies have stated that their software saves much more then would be provided by the 2.5 cent per trade tax would return.

This quote from Josh Poulson describes three of the software patents.

One of the patents appears to describe any trading order entry system that displays market depth (essentially the difference between highest bid and lowest ask prices) and allows a trader to select (with one click) a region of prices in which to place an order it could affect a large number of home-grown or commercial trading software. The next patent describes the fancy table that is used to describe the market. The third appears to patent the idea of using multiple colors to make a more readable chart, although the added value comes from specifying additional colors to parameters of the table on the fly.

For more detail on the patents and lawsuits see Groklaw. This should start people thinking about the real consequences of Software patents if they can use patent litigation to get a tax on trading transactions. The odd thing about the three patents listed above is that two of them are similiar to what has been used by pricing comparison software and websites for years. Just taking an existing concept and applying it to an alternative subject does not constitute “state of the art” and “non obvious” so at least a couple of the patents should not have been issued in the first place. (Although I am of the opinion that patents that describe software methods shouldn’t be valid at all as they generally help one and hurt many.)

Comments Off on Software patent: 2.5 cent trade tax to Chicago software firm.

February 28th, 2005 by Franki

In what appears to be an amazingly anti-democratic sign of the problems faced by the EU, the European Commission has declined the European Parliament’s request to restart the legislative process on the “Software patent directive”. The directive no longer has a majority backing in the EU, but it has been said that other forces have been pushing to get the patent directive into place. Twice now certain parties tried to slip the approval process into EU Fisheries meetings, and twice Poland stopped them. It seems that the powers that be are not going to allow democracy to get in the way of big business. Read this rather more descriptive breakdown of the situation.

1 Comment »

February 21st, 2005 by Franki

Last November a Microsoft employee issued a patent application on a function called “IsNot” the purpose of which is to check if two variables point to the same memory location. (In other words, they test if the two variables are in fact different names for the same variable). Every programming language has used such checks in the past and it is an extremely obvious function and should not therefore be granted as a “unique” innovation. However they are going to try anyway apparently.

Real Software have a product they call RealBasic that allows programmers to easily create programs that will work on Windows, Mac and Linux from the same code base, and Real are said to be worried that Microsoft is going to use it’s IsNot patent (assuming it is granted) to try and litigate RealBasic out of existence. As Richard Tallent, a software developer and project scientist at ERM Group Inc said:

The only reason a company would want to lay claim to such a patent would be to sue anybody who tries to implement that idea.

Patents are supposed to allow true innovators the opportunity to take advantage of their invention, not as a tool to allow big companies to block competitors from following obvious trends. This is why it is so important that the EU not fall into the software patent trap that the US is currently buried in. Microsoft has revealed no intention of having their Visual Studio tools updated to create Linux programs, and RealBasic already does this. You can see why Microsoft might be worried that programmers might like the idea of write once for all platforms rather then Microsoft’s apparent “Write once just for Windows and forget any other operating systems” ideology.
Read more at Eweek.

Comments Off on Real objects to MS software patent “IsNot”.







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