A company by the name of “DE Technologies” is in the middle of suing Dell because they offer an international e-commerce platform by which they offer their products, and that international shopping cart system adds up all the various changes, taxes and shipping, and tells the shopper in their own currency, what they will owe should they choose to purchase the product in question. Apparently the idea of telling people what they will have to pay for something in total before purchase is some secret technology that required a patent.

Apparently, only DE Technologies are smart enough to work out that a person would want to know the total price before committing to a purchase if it’s international, and because it incorporates currency conversion and stuff. (another “gee, how did they think of that?” aspect.) DE are alleging that Dell is in violation of their patent and owes them lots of cash. This is what happens when you have patent officers that have no idea about the technology they are in charge of, making the decisions. They think nearly everything is “revolutionary” and worthy of a patent, when to someone in the business, it’s a totally obvious process. I wrote a shopping cart years ago for a client, and it was an Australian shopping cart designed to take our new (back then) GST into account, the last thing it did before sending people off to pay, was display and email a pre payment tax invoice to Australian customers. Apparently the process wasn’t that “special” if someone like me could infringe on it just by doing what was obvious.

If you live in Europe, you are running out of time to tell your local representative that you are terrified that the same patent rubbish going on in the US is about to be imported into the EU. Check out http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ if you want to help make a stand against this madness. For more on the DE/Dell story, see here.

IBM just announced [PDF] that they will allow free use of 500 of their patents in Open Source programming with no strings attached.

This is fantastic news, patents were set to be the next battleground that MS and co may drag Linux and OSS (Open Source Software) into, in order to potentially create more uncertainty about OSS . This move of donating free patent usage for OSS is likely to spread to other companies as they will not wish to be overshadowed by IBM’s support of Linux and OSS in general. IBM is actually in support of the EU software patent initiative, which makes sense because they have more IT patents then pretty much anybody. We can only hope that once they are making most of their money from OSS support contracts, they will see the light and join the fight to stop the big boys using patents to fight off the little boys. In the mean time, their large investment in OSS, and their massive patent portfolio might make people looking for a quick bit of cash think twice about picking OSS as a target. (SCO appears to be learning this lesson the hard way.)

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Two things happened this week, neither are certain wins, but both inspire the hope that somehow the good guys will eventually win the day.
The first one is that the EU has upheld the sanctions imposed upon Microsoft in it’s most recent anti-competitive litigation. Basically Microsoft were hoping to get a stay on the sanctions until they had completed their appeal. By the time they had dragged the appeal out to 5 years or so, the sanctions would be dust in the wind and not relevant at all. This we know because that is basically what happened when Microsoft was found guilty of anti-competitive behaviour by the US DOJ. Part of that case was about Microsoft putting Netscape out of business by including IE in Windows, but by the time it had its day in court, Netscape was already gone and the damage was done and Microsoft had already won.

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In what tentatively appears to be a win for the good guys, the European Union has delayed voting on software patents until sometime in 2005. The reasons for the delay are many and varied, but the most significant reason is that they no longer have the majority, and a vote could well kill off the proposal. So they probably put it off until such time as they can work out a way to push it though without opposition. My guess is that there is a good many dollars behind this proposal, big software companies desperately want software patents in place as it’s a very effective weapon to use against your competition. (Look at the situation in the US if you don’t believe me.)

With many European countries eager to distance themselves from reliance on US big business, they are not too keen to vote in laws that are likely to cement their reliance on Microsoft for desktop and server software. Countries in which OSS (Open Source Software) is growing in popularity are showing a growing desire to remove software patents from the table, and rightly so because software patents are just an excuse for frivolous litigation used by big guys to kill off little guys. Software is copyright, you don’t patent a book, you copyright it, software is exactly the same. We don’t need to hand big monopolies any more tools with which they can oppress the competition.

Franki

The battle has started between those interested in software innovation and those interested in lining their pockets to the detriment of everything else. The battlefield is the patenting of non specific ideas.

To give you an idea of the problem, say for example I had patented the idea of burning a flammable substance and using the resultant released energy to “do stuff”. Do you have any idea how many people would have to pay me money? Even if I had never actually researched the process, or created a product, anyone using energy derived from fire for heat, cooking, power generation or to power a car would owe me cash.

That is what’s happening today in the software industry. Big companies are patenting the building blocks of applications and using them to build or ensure market share dominance. It needs to stop.

To that end, the guys at the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) have filed a brief to the US court of appeals to have ambiguous patents declared invalid. If a patent isn’t totally explicit about an “idea” then it should not be valid.

The other question is the validity of software patents at all. Is it acceptable to allow someone to patent double clicking a mouse button? or an online to-do list? Well guess what? Microsoft already have both of those “ideas” wrapped up. Here is another way of looking at it, nobody in their right mind would try to patent selling stuff, but if you do it online, there is a risk you will be sued for patent infringement because online shopping has been the target of a patent or two as well.

Read about the first salvo in this war at TheRegister.

This first tip comes courtesy of TheInquirer and is about a new scam involving Google’s new Gmail service. Basically you get an e-mail from someone purporting to be a Gmail admin asking you to log into your account, and providing a link. The link is not Gmail and if you follow the prompt, you end up giving them your user details.

Next, also from TheInquirer is the news that Sun and Microsoft have a deal going whereby Sun has agreed to help Microsoft start legal action over the Open Source OpenOffice.org office application suite in exchange for some cash and a promise from Microsoft that Sun is exempt from legal action themselves. Goes to show, you can’t believe anything Sun says about supporting Open Source software. Microsoft-watch have also covered this, and you can find their take here.

Yet again from TheInquirer, in short 90 percent of Chinese computers are infected by worms/trojans/virus’s. Perhaps the government should spend more time fixing that instead of finding new and inventive ways to block their people from seeing anything useful on the net.

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It’s been said before, and it’ll be said again. The patent system is hopelessly broken and desperately needs fixing.

Apple has just had to pay off a company called E-Date Corp for their iTunes music service because E-Date Corp registered a patent about downloading commercial digital content over wired or wireless networks. How dumb or un-knowledgeable must the patent administrators have been to allow that patent to stand? Did anybody at the patent office that was versed in such things even look at this? Or was it rubber stamped by some computer illiterate lackey who just wanted to go to lunch?

What this patent means is that any mobile phone, PC, PDA, Laptop, MP3 player or other such devices that can be used for downloading of authorised, commercial content, is a potential target of this patent. There is no technology behind this patent that I can see, it seems they simply came up with the idea that people might one day want to download authorised content off the net and decided to patent it. And the authorities just let them.

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