Summary: Overview of news about software patents and slightly beyond that
THE ISSUE of software patents is having an impact on GNU/Linux more than ever before. Apple, Microsoft, and a few other companies use software patents against the freedom of software. This post is a collection of items that hopefully inform and explain where we stand.
Acacia
There is only one patent troll that directly challenged GNU/Linux by filing a lawsuit against a GNU/Linux vendor, based on a software patent claim. Acacia sued Red Hat and Novell shortly after it had hired from Microsoft and Law.com has an update on the case.
Already this month, Rader has dismissed one patent case against Google and Yahoo on summary judgment and trimmed back damages theories in a lawsuit against Red Hat and Novell. These are somewhat unusual rulings for the Eastern District of Texas, which historically has not killed as many patent cases on summary judgment as other venues.
[...]
• In IP Innovation v. Red Hat, another case also involving plaintiff IP Innovation, this time against Red Hat and Novell, Rader made a statement on the hot button issue of damages in patent cases. The judge questioned the plaintiff expert’s use of the “entire market value” rule, which calculates damages based on a percentage of total sales even if only a small feature of a product like a computer is infringing.
“Mr. Gemini’s current expert report improperly inflates both the royalty base and the royalty rate by relying on irrelevant or unreliable evidence and by failing to account for the economic realities of this claimed component as part of a larger system,” Rader wrote (.pdf).
Red Hat and Novell are being represented by Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher lawyers from San Francisco.
It is hard to tell if Microsoft was in touch with Acacia executives just before the lawsuit (there was a staff migration from Microsoft to Acacia), but as we showed many times before, the timing was interesting. The Acacia lawsuit was filed shortly after Ballmer had issued a patent threat to Red Hat.
For those who do not remember how Tuxera is connected to Microsoft, here is a Wiki page serving as reference. There is noteworthy news about Tuxera becoming an SD Association member. They hopefully won’t standardise only on Microsoft file systems that require money to be paid to Microsoft (for software patents).
Monsanto
One company that might be more malicious than Microsoft would have to be Monsanto. There are others too, but the nature of their malice is different (wars, poisoning, et cetera).
Monsanto officials are already inside the government (we have dozens of posts about Monsanto’s inter-personal relationships) and this new report from The New York Times indicates that the company’s patent franchise is still under scrutiny.
The price increases have not only irritated many farmers, they have caught the attention of the Obama administration. The Justice Department began an antitrust investigation of the seed industry last year, with an apparent focus on Monsanto, which controls much of the market for the expensive bioengineered traits that make crops resistant to insect pests and herbicides.
But the ones he chooses in contrast are pretty significant:
And the past:
Extractive. Over two decades, Microsoft has honed its extractive edge, coming up with cleverer and cleverer ways to extract profits from customers and suppliers. But Microsoft’s just a flea on Wall St’s elephant — who mastered extractive advantage by finding ways to, ultimately, extract trillions from you, me, and our grandkids. Extractive advantage asks: how can we transfer value from stakeholders to us, 10x or 100x better than our rivals?
Protective. Think Microsoft’s the master of 20th century advantage? Think again. Monsanto’s Round-up Ready strategy protects genetically modified crops with proprietary herbicide that crops need to flourish. The result? A protective advantage: Monsanto’s made sure that farmers are locked in to Monsanto as tightly as possible. Protective advantage asks: are buyers and suppliers locked in to dealing with us, 10x or 100x more tightly than to rivals?
Hmm, Microsoft and Monsanto, what a combination – and interestingly, it’s the latter that is singled out as clearly the worse of the two (which is why I am writing increasingly about the company and its activities.)
Monsanto is directly connected to Bill Gates [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].
Apple and Microsoft
Moody also writes about Apple and Microsoft; specifically, he is referring to the secrets Sun’s former CEO is telling about this pair (already covered in [1, 2, 3, 4]).
What Schwartz’s wonderful anecdotes remind us is that every piece of software borrows from its predecessors, just as every artist learns from the artists that created before him or her. And that’s to be expected, because software is a combination of art and science, and both gain much of their power by building on what went before, and then sharing that for others to build on in their turn, for the wider benefit of everyone.
The insane fad for trying to stop that sharing, and to turn those ideas into some mythical “intellectual property” is now reaching its inevitable conclusion, as patent thickets everywhere mean companies spend more and more time and money defending themselves against patent lawsuits, and less time getting on with their main business. There is only one solution: get rid of patents completely, and let the companies that innovate obtain their rewards from *using* that innovation to become leaders, not from trying to stop others from following belatedly in their footsteps.
In the context of free software patents are problematic. In the ideal world patents on software wouldn’t exist and there wouldn’t be a problem. However, they do exist. Moreover, part of the reason they exist is because of a variation of mutually assured destruction – many businesses believe they need to acquire patents in order to defend against other patents.* Jonathan Schwartz sets out some of the sad, tawdry circumstances in which this logic plays out here.
I think it is a non trivial problem to find wording which preserves just the defensive potential of patents (which, is actually their offensive potential limited to specific circumstances of exercise) while preserving freedom when licensing software. Some of the more detailed free software licences attempt this. It is, I think, a more difficult problem to craft such wording to apply to standards – because standards purport to be agreed by some collection of people, while freedom requires that everyone be permitted to pursue their own goals. Thus, any ‘promise’ or ‘covenant’** which is limited to an agreed specification must necessarily be inconsistent with freedom in a way qualitatively different to a patent clause in an open source licence. Moreover, any wording which applies to a particular version of a specification will be inconsistent with the evolution of that specification. In short, promises made in relation to specifications are likely to always be problematic (the best to hope for is a disclaimer – per W3C).
More information about Apple’s lawsuit (and some background) can be found in The Prior Art blog, which is a good resource.
So while its partner HTC may be the “perfect target” for a patent attack, this is clearly a proxy war with Google—a company that has made clear that it’s determined to push into the cell-phone market. That makes Apple’s gambit a truly risky one.
We recommend that our readers do not pay Apple any money from now on (and encourage others to do the same). There are alternatives to Apple in every area of computing and these alternatives are also much cheaper anyway. A former Novell/SUSE evangelist finds out where Macs just don’t work well (technically, as opposed to perception and visuals).
I have two MacBooks. One is from early 2007, the other from late 2009. Both have intermittent problems waking up from sleep often enough, and similarly enough, to indicate that the perfectionist culture rumored to drive Apple’s every move has its severe blind spots.
Vista 7 — like Vista where shots have just been fired — has its problems too. We wrote about this in the morning, quoting our reader Goblin who now adds: “Speak with a “average” user of Windows 7 after its been running for a few weeks. In my experience, there’s some unhappy people.” He also gives a couple of examples [1, 2] that say: “Since I upgraded my Acer Aspire 6930 from Vista to Windows 7 I have been having many issues…”
Another example says that “these are some of the problems faced by me on the operating system windows7″; is anybody surprised? We have warned about it since 2008 and large businesses refuse to consider this operating system, usually after extensive testing that they require and can afford to perform. █
Summary: Apple upsets some of the very same people who made the company what it is today, including some of the inspirers
Apple is likely to learn the hard way what Microsoft is still learning. Attacking developers is not a wise step to take. First of all, according to this bit of news from the EFF, “All Your Apps Belong to Apple” [if you develop for Apple platforms].
The entire family of devices built on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) have been designed to run only software that is approved by Apple—a major shift from the norms of the personal computer market. Software developers who want Apple’s approval must first agree to the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.
So today we’re posting the “iPhone Developer Program License Agreement”—the contract that every developer who writes software for the iTunes App Store must “sign.” Though more than 100,000 app developers have clicked “I agree,” public copies of the agreement are scarce, perhaps thanks to the prohibition on making any “public statements regarding this Agreement, its terms and conditions, or the relationship of the parties without Apple’s express prior written approval.” But when we saw the NASA App for iPhone, we used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to ask NASA for a copy, so that the general public could see what rules controlled the technology they could use with their phones. NASA responded with the Rev. 3-17-09 version of the agreement.
Here is another new post that’s titled “Why I don’t use Apple products”
1. Apple’s software is not open-source.
[...]
2. Apple is not open-anything.
[...]
3. They are even closed about other software you can install.
[...]
4. The final straw. Not only does Apple control exactly how you can use any Apple device, they now want to take away your choice to use any other device as well. This week they brought a lawsuit against HTC, the developer of the majority of Android phones, alleging 20 Apple patent violations. Many of these patents seem to be comprised of trivial ideas that should be non-patentable and/or ideas Apple itself stole from other companies. It is clear that Apple is scared of the consumer choice that competition brings and is scared of the innovation that is possible within the open Android framework. Patents were intended to promote independent innovation by protecting small inventors from being scooped by large established corporations. Apple is hijacking the patent system to protect the interests of their large corporation against any competition at all. This is an incredibly dangerous precedent to set that could stifle innovation for many years to come.
[...]
In the important realm of science, technology and ideas, I believe that the continual conversion of ideas and development effort into the private property of companies like Apple is a great threat to continued free innovation.
Apple is attacking Linux at this moment [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. It’s using software patents. Earlier today (or yesterday) it turned out that Apple was also bullying Sun (patent extortion) over innovative software that Sun was offering to GNU/Linux users, so this aggression is nothing new. Here is some more information about that:
Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz has a nice insider take on the latest patent craze including how he sent Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates packing when they came looking for a fight.
[...]
In the case of Bill Gates, Schwartz said Gates tried to extract a licensing royalty for OpenOffice, a free productivity suite developed by Sun, because Gates said it copied Microsoft Office.
Schwartz responded by drawing comparisons between Microsoft’s .NET platform and Sun’s Java technology, which he believed was some of the inspiration for .NET. “We’ve looked at .NET, and you’re trampling all over a huge number of Java patents. So what will you pay us for every copy of Windows?” Schwartz asked. That brought the meeting to a hasty close, he said.
“Starting in January, Apple launched a series of C-Level discussions with tier-1 handset makers to underscore its growing displeasure at seeing its iPhone-related IP [intellectual property] infringed. The lawsuit filed against HTC thus appears to be Apple’s way of putting a public, lawyered-up exclamation point on a series of blunt conversations that have been occurring behind closed doors.
“Our checks also suggest that these warning shots are meaningfully disrupting the development roadmaps for would-be iPhone killers. Rival software and hardware teams are going back to the drawing board to look for work-arounds. Lawyers are redoubling efforts to gauge potential defensive and offensive responses. And strategy teams are working to chart OS strategies that are better hedged.”
[...]
Why pick on HTC? Reiner speculates that as the earliest and most aggressive user of Android, HTC was the perfect proxy for Apple’s real target: Google (GOOG). It helped that Apple and HTC didn’t have any supplier relationships that could be disrupted by a protracted legal battle.
Apple continues to show that it’s not cool and gentle. Au contraire — Apple is becoming quite a bully, maybe because of arrogance. It is indicated above that Apple’s behaviour has begun turning developers and potential customers away. █
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D.”
As in life, bluster and threat are commonplace in business – especially the technology business. So that interaction was good preparation for a later meeting with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. They’d flown in over a weekend to meet with Scott McNealy, Sun’s then CEO – who asked me and Greg Papadopoulos (Sun’s CTO) to accompany him. As we sat down in our Menlo Park conference room, Bill skipped the small talk, and went straight to the point, “Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.” OpenOffice is a free office productivity suite found on tens of millions of desktops worldwide. It’s a tremendous brand ambassador for its owner – it also limits the appeal of Microsoft Office to businesses and those forced to pirate it. Bill was delivering a slightly more sophisticated variant of the threat Steve had made, but he had a different solution in mind. “We’re happy to get you under license.” That was code for “We’ll go away if you pay us a royalty for every download” – the digital version of a protection racket.
But wait. Steve Jobs, the patent bully who is attacking Linux at this moment [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], is no better. From the same post as above:
I feel for Google – Steve Jobs threatened to sue me, too.
In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.”
People should understand that when they buy something from Microsoft or from Apple they are paying money to racketeers. █
Update: There is more coverage of this in Groklaw and BTL.
Summary: Microsoft has issues evolving, its brand is falling down the ranks, its attempts to mimic open source mostly fail (despite media blitz), and Red Hat copes with Microsoft’s attempt to swallow virtualisation
MICROSOFT’S exacerbating financial performance (see analysis of the latest results in [1, 2, 3, 4]) may explain its increased racketeering (last example from yesterday). With ever-decreasing margins, Microsoft must find an alternative business model. So far, Microsoft has failed to mimic Google’s model (Microsoft loses over $2,000,000,000 per year in this area), so it decided to use regulators and lawsuits by proxy to hurt Google. Microsoft did the same thing to GNU/Linux by funding SCO, for example.
Microsoft’s control of the mainstream media usually prevents access to simple facts that are not hard to show and to defend. When some single firm from the UK hailed the Microsoft brand last month, nobody dares to question the data, the methods, and the population questioned. In fact, that single source was quoted extensively outside the UK in order to sell the impression that the Microsoft brand has power.
“When some single firm from the UK hailed the Microsoft brand last month, nobody dares to question the data, the methods, and the population questioned.”CNN/Fortune has just released a list of “The Most Admired Companies in the World”. Apple and Google top the list and Microsoft is not even in it (it is not among the worst brands, either). In any case, it is clear that Microsoft dropped sharply and this agrees with 3-4 similar surveys from 2008. They have all shown that Microsoft’s reputation was declining rapidly.
“Windows breeds fear and ignorance,” said this one blogger a couple of days ago. “And I put the blame squarely on Windows,” he added after explaining an experience with an indoctrinated individual. A few days ago we also cited a post from Jeremy Allison — one where he speaks about his days in Sun Microsystems. Here is an example of a company that was once so gigantic and formidable. Where is it today? It is in Oracle, which some notable people whom we cannot name just yet are about to leave (we received private communication about it).
“Sun Fell Prey to Open-Washing,” says BNET in the headline that continues: “Who’s Next? Microsoft?”
Here is a key part of the argument:
Openwashing is similar to greenwashing, in which a company markets itself as environmentally friendly but is actually faking it. A high tech firm openwashes itself when it makes noises about open software but is really interested in preserving its proprietary offerings and hampering free open systems practices.
So basically, BNET explains that excessive desire for control over developers cost Sun its existence. This agrees with what Jeremy Allison wrote and Bradley Kuhn wrote about that too.
Meanwhile, I’m less optimistic than Jeremy on the future of Oracle. I have paid attention to Oracle’s contributions to btrfs in light of recent events. Amusingly, btfs exists in no small part because ZFS was never licensed correctly and never turned into a truly community-oriented project. While the two projects don’t have identical goals, they are similar enough that it seems unlikely btrfs would exist if Sun had endeavored to become a real FLOSS contributor and shepherd ZFS into Linux upstream using normal Linux community processes. It’s thus strange to think that Oracle controls ZFS, even while it continues to contribute to btrfs, in a normal, upstream way (i.e., collaborating under the terms of GPLv2 with community developers and employees of other companies such as Red Hat, HP, Intel, Novell, and Fujitsu).
The moral of this story is that control over what developers could and could not do is what drove many people away and made Sun history. Microsoft is facing similar problems right now and it tries to ‘embrace’ (in “EEE” sense) the Free/open source arena in order to recapture developers. It’s not quite working.
A reader sent us this pointer to a Microsoft project yesterday. “Pay Microsoft more money to secure insecure Microsoft software” is how our reader described it. He said that “it’s released under an ‘open-source license’, except it only runs on Windows, the monoculture.” To quote from the project’s page: “U-Prove is an innovative cryptographic technology that enables the issuance and presentation of cryptographically protected claims in a manner that provides multi-party security: issuing organizations, users, and relying parties can protect themselves not just against outsider attacks but also against attacks originating from each other…”
A Microsoft-seeded, open-source organizer picked a Headspring Systems project for its first non-Microsoft sponsored effort.
Yes, Microsoft is organising a bit of a press tour [1, 2] to promote the CodePlex Foundation [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], where Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza is on the board. Here is the ‘Microsoft press’ promoting a .NET obfuscator. That’s the type of stuff Microsoft calls “open source”. It’s all about Windows, .NET, Silver Lie, etc. And how typical it is for CIOL to be pimping (with links) Microsoft’s smears of Free software, under the confusing headline “Open source slowly gaining momentum in India”. Are they trying to pretend that Silver Lie is “open source” or just lump Microsoft in? Here is part of it:
Developers in India are not much aware about open source technologies and there aren’t much good development tools and support for them, says Joydip Kanjilal, ASP.NET professional at Microsoft, in conversation with CIOL.
In another new article, CIOL promotes a form of EDGI that goes under the *Spark banner [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. CIOL is rewriting many press releases, as we pointed out before, but its shallow promotion of Microsoft requires some criticism too.
Another branch of the ‘Microsoft press’, namely the Microsoft Subnet at IDG, is doing some PR for Microsoft by saying that there is “much fanfare” over Red Hat support in Hyper-V (whose fanfare? Microsoft’s?).
With much fanfare, Microsoft first submitted said drivers to the Linux kernel way back in July (its first, and so far only, contribution to Linux, for obvious reason). Those drivers were already tested to work with Red Hat and, of course, SUSE. And in October, Red Hat and Microsoft announced that they were joining each other’s virtualization partnership programs, and validated that their products worked on each other’s virtual machines. So what took Microsoft so long to release these Red Hat drivers to the public?
People have other virtualisation options, they don’t need Microsoft’s proprietary one. Let’s not forget the GPL violation that’s associated with Microsoft’s offering [1, 2, 3].
Regarding the virtualisation arrangement Microsoft has with Red Hat, it is a subject that we summarised a year ago. Red Hat is now backing virtualisation research (yes, Free software conducts research too, contrary to myths).
Red Hat is funding a new research centre at Newcastle University that is looking into areas such as grid and cloud computing, virtualisation and middleware.
Among Red Hat’s competitors in this area there’s Microsoft, its ally Novell, and VMware, which is run by former Microsoft executives [1, 2, 3, 4]. Here is a new article on the subject:
Red Hat sees the virtualisation market developing into a three-way fight between itself, Microsoft and VMWare as the technology is increasingly taken up in the business space, Red Hat’s senior director of virtualisation, Navin Thadani, said today.
However, he said, the advantage would lie with the two operating system companies, adding that although Novell and Citrix had teamed up to contest the same space, they stood more of a chance in the desktop virtualisation arena.
“Microsoft is unique among proprietary software companies: they are the only ones who have actively tried to kill Open Source and Free Software. It’s not often someone wants to be your friend after trying to kill you for ten years, but such change is cause for suspicion.”
HE season of change is clearly upon us,” saysSimon Phipps, whose employer has been acquired by Oracle. “Seems even with Microsoft’s support Novell couldn’t cut it,” he asserts. Phipps is of course referring to what seems like the imminent sale of Novell (not necessarily to a hedge fund). We have covered the subject in:
There is an interesting new article in The Guardian, which speaks about proposed banning of “vulture funds”, such as the hedge fund which made an unsolicited bid to take over Novell (and also bought debt in developing countries in order to enslave and profit from them).
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, is urging MPs to back a bill banning vulture funds from using British courts to prey on poor countries when it comes to a vote on Friday .
Liberia lost a $20m (£13m) case in London last year against two so-called vultures. Such funds buy up the loans of poor governments, wait for them to win debt relief from the international community, and then use courts to pursue the countries for assets.
Sirleaf said: “We’ve been waiting for a parliament or an assembly to take this kind of hard decision. I hope the US Congress and maybe some others in Europe will pick up this gauntlet and will follow the example of Britain.”
An investigation for BBC’s Newsnight, to be broadcast tonight, has uncovered allegations that speculators subverted the international debt relief process for Liberia, in an attempt to gain more money from its government and international donors than 97% of its other creditors accepted.
Liberia received debt relief worth $4bn from the international community in 2007 under the heavily indebted poor countries initiative, including $2bn from private-sector bondholders. Insiders to negotiations allege that two US financiers, Eric Hermann and Michael Straus, allowed other creditors to accept a low payout from Liberia, then quietly transferred their holdings to two other firms, which then sued in Britain for the debt in full.
Here is a good video that explains how it works (previously included here). █
Summary: This post presents a roundup of patent news (mostly software); it is intended to show the lesser-known truths about patents — the ones which lawyers do not want people to know
Ghabuntu has just done some exploration around Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America.
It turns out that, just like Thomas Jefferson, Franklin would have rejected patents and advocated Free software. It is often being argued that software patents are unconstitutional, but that’s another matter that won’t be discussed today.
This pamphlet had a good effect. Gov’r. Thomas was so pleas’d with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin’d it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.
An ironmonger in London however, assuming a good deal of my pamphlet, and working it up into his own, and making some small changes in the machine, which rather hurt its operation, got a patent for it there, and made, as I was told, a little fortune by it.
Here is an older link on the subject (from one year ago). It’s titled “Ben Franklin, the first Open Source advocate” and it says:
Benjamin Franklin is known in American history as a founding father and a inventor. One interesting fact is that he did not approve of patents. Martin Streicher of IBM points out in his article of 10 tips for sensible systems administration that Benjamin Franklin would more than likely approve of Open Source software.
“Just resigned from Sun/Oracle,” he wrote a few days ago. “Not currently looking for another job.”
Patents are not only harming software by the way. Glyn Moody, who wrote a book about the dangers of genome patents, shows this new report about removal of generics using patent provisions.
Aside from pharmaceutical patents, the other key IP provision in the free trade agreement relates to geographical indications (GIs). These allow certain regions to claim an effective monopoly right on delicacies such as Champagne or Parma ham that are synonymous with them. According to Brussels sources, over 200 GIs will be covered by the agreement with Peru and Colombia.
In previous posts we explained why this is the death knell to a lot of people [1, 2]. This is genocide by patents. Speaking of which, the effect of the Gates-funded Monsanto is similar. It causes deaths rather than save lives and we wrote about the subject in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Monsanto is a company whose business model depends on patents relating to life (biology as a private property of a person). GM Watch asks, “Have we seen Peak Monsanto?”
Is it possible that we’ve reached Peak Monsanto?:
Low commodity soybean prices, attractive premiums, and rising prices for genetically modified soybean seed are leading American farmers to plant more acres of non-GMO soybeans this year.
Representatives with soybean associations, universities, and grain buyers all say that demand for non-GMO soybeans is growing, leading to more non-GMO acres.
Genetically modified Roundup Ready soybeans have taken an increasingly larger percentage of U.S. soybean acreage each year since their introduction in 1996, reaching 92 percent in 2008.
Bill Gates supports this colonisation of land and food. It’s about creating a crops monopoly, using intellectual monopolies (patents).
TechDirt has this new item which says that “It’s The Execution That Matters, Not The Idea” and the item happens to cite a former (but famous) Microsoft employee who seemingly argues against patents.
There have been lots of players who have come and gone, and there are at least a dozen players in the space today. And it’s not because they all “took” the idea from this guy, but because lots of people recognized that it’s an idea that makes sense. Kickstarter is certainly getting a ton of press these days, but that’s mostly because of some top notch execution on its part.
This leads us to the next area, which is software patents. No less than twice in recent days we wrote about Facebook’s controversial software patent [1, 2], as well as the company’s relationship with Microsoft and apparently the company’s patent troll too (Nathan Myhrvold). Here is another good analysis of why Facebook’s behaviour should be seen as hostile.
I wonder what is Facebook’s strategy here. They could simply be looking to stifle competitors. The obvious result of this is that they will probably attempt to get licences from some prominent social networks and the aforementioned open source projects. In the longer run, this could be used to become the only name in social networking. Not good news at all.
That patent itself focuses on making sure businesses can better target their ads based on location information so that they can do things such as price arbitration (e.g. figuring out prices for items near you and getting the best deal). It also deals with the user interface and defining geographic areas.
Will Google obey or least consider the suggestions from many people who want Google to set its new codec free? Or use Ogg Theora in YouTube? As this new post emphasises, this is a top issue when it comes to Free software and patents. GNU/Linux depends on it.
Patented multimedia codecs, however, are a little different from proprietary drivers and firmware, for reasons discussed in my first post on the topic. There are people–for example, a commenter on a previous post named markit–who remain passionately opposed to the use of restrictively licensed codecs and can make well reasoned arguments to support their stance, particularly since fully functional GPL-friendly equivalents are available for multimedia codecs.
The arguments against the use of patented codecs are not without merit. By using formats like MP3 and MPEG-2 rather than GPL’d alternatives, users perpetuate dependence on proprietary software, which is antithetical to the Ubuntu philosophy.
The obvious response to such arguments, of course, is that while it would be nice to use only patent-free codecs, that’s not a realistic goal for most people. You can’t send .ogg files to Windows users and expect them to know how to open them, and you won’t have many friends if you refuse to accept data in non-free formats.
Google’s harmful policy on patents withstanding, can the company prove to be helpful to Free software by weakening or gradually eliminating H.264? Let’s hope so. █
Summary: Criticism of the patent system is increasing and abolishment too is being considered for what became a hindrance — not a facilitator — to science
Filed under post slug “Patent Fail”, the following new post from Tim Bray is an expression of hatred of patents (Bray works for Oracle, but opinions in his blog are personal). He titled it “Giving Up On Patents”:
Not so many years ago, even as I was filled with fear and loathing of the hideous misconduct of the US Patent & Trademark Office, I retained some respect for the notion of patents. I even wrote what I think is an unusually easy-to-read introduction to Patent Theory. But no more. The whole thing is too broken to be fixed. Maybe it worked once, but it doesn’t any more. The patent system needs to be torn down and thrown out.
[...]
And here are a few words for the huge community of legal professionals who make their living pursuing patent law: You’re actively damaging society. Look in the mirror and find something better to do.
Maybe Bray can confront his employer over this*. Among those new articles that he cites is this excellent Mises analysis which uses the confusing term “IP”:
How should the IP system be reformed? For those with a principled, libertarian view of property rights, it is obvious that patent and copyright laws are unjust and should be completely abolished.[2] Total abolition is, however, exceedingly unlikely at present. Further, most people favor IP for less principled, utilitarian reasons. They take a wealth-maximization approach to policy making. They favor patent and copyright law because they believe that it generates net wealth — that the value of the innovation stimulated by IP law is significantly greater than the costs of these laws.[3]
What is striking is that this myth is widely believed even though the IP proponents can adduce no evidence in favor of this hypothesis. There are literally no studies clearly showing any net gains from IP.[4] If anything, it appears that the patent system, for example, imposes a gigantic net cost on the economy (approximately $31 billion a year, in my estimate).[5] In any case, even those who support IP on cost-benefit grounds have to acknowledge the costs of the system, and they should not oppose changes to IP law that significantly reduce these costs, so long as the change does not drastically reduce the innovation gains that IP purportedly stimulates. In other words, according to the reasoning of IP advocates, if weakening patent strength reduces costs more than it reduces gains, this results in a net gain.
Economists recognise the fact that patents are harmful and so do engineers. But as long as lawyers run our governments and collude with other lawyers [1, 2], rules will be established by the wrong people. It’s a battle between creators and leeches of these creators. A lot of people may not remember this, but Bill Gates was bound to be a lawyer, raised by a prominent (and apparently corrupt) lawyer, so he is not an engineer. Tim Berners-Lee, a true innovator, says that “software patents are a terrible thing”, but Microsoft still uses these for racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], even this week. █
_____ * I had arguments with Sun about the subject (but a lot of employees suppress their own opinion because of a paycheck).
Summary: A defender of (sometimes lobbyist for) software patents gets itself in trouble after Microsoft settles; company that sues Microsoft for software patent violations sidles with LiMo
GUESS WHICH company helps harm the software industry in India using software patents? It is the same company which is doing it in the United States and in Europe. “Indian Patent Office granted on “System for Creating an Application Program Package’” to IBM,” says the president of the FFII (in reference to patent number 176178). Here is the source of the claim, a post titled “Leveraging Through Software Patents” (an ignorant piece that wrongly attributes growth of patents to developments, without evidence).
India is emerging as a world leader in the field of software technology. The IT software and services industry in India grossed an annual revenue of Rs. 37,760 crore (US$ 8.26 billion) during 2000-01, according to the annual industry survey released by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), the apex body of software, e-commerce and IT services industry in India.
[...]
Contrary to popularly held belief that software related patents are not permitted by Indian Patent Office; there are several instances where software related patents have been granted by the Indian Patent Office. One example is the Software related patent no 176178 granted to IBM, USA for “System for Creating an Application Program Package’” by the Indian Patent Office.
Well, thank you, IBM. Thanks for nothing. The system which IBM helped create and sustain is now accommodating patent trolls too. Their impact is definitely subversive:
“Patent trolling” has its rewards.
Tech-sector executives and lawyers say privately—and an informed review of court dockets confirms—that so-called trolls aren’t just surviving, they’re thriving. The essential NPE tactic—suing a broad swath of companies for patent infringement, then settling with each defendant for less than the cost of fighting such a suit—is now an established business model. It’s so solid, in fact, that patent-holders are starting to delve into previously untouched economic sectors, suing small retailers and even photographers.
Deservedly perhaps, IBM has just been hit by a lawsuit from the same company that Microsoft had paid to settle (shades of Eolas [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]). Oracle is sued too and it’s a software patent.
IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Oracle Corp. are among a slew of major technology companies that have been hit with a patent infringement suit by encryption technology company TecSec Inc.
In a suit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, TecSec claims that nearly a dozen companies have infringed 11 of its patents for technology used to encrypt commercial data, including credit card and health care information.
[...]
In April, TecSec filed suit against Microsoft Corp. in the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging that components of Windows Vista and other Microsoft products infringed five of the same patents. The suit was dismissed in July after Microsoft agreed to an undisclosed settlement.
ELSE – a design house for state-of-the-art mobile technologies and a member of the Emblaze Group – has joined the LiMo Foundation, a global consortium of mobile industry leaders.
Reuters has a series of articles about the mobile software market. One part speaks about LIMO:
LIMO
Linux consortium LiMo hopes to benefit from its focus on giving greater say over software development to telecoms operators.
LiMo Foundation was set up in 2007 by Samsung, NTT DoCoMo (9437.T), France Telecom’s Orange (FTE.PA), and NEC Corp (6701.T), Panasonic Corp (6752.T), Vodafone (VOD.L).
These are some large companies and it’s a shame that they associate themselves with morally corrupt individuals who work for ACCESS, including pornographers. LiMo would be better off without them. █
