This documents contains links to some older news items related to software patents. The oldest items mentioned here date back to March 1998.
Microsoft has applied for patents that could prevent competing applications from processing documents created with the latest version of the software giant's Office program.
IBM's latest round of patent applications includes one for Isolating Business Programming from Web User Interface Programming
The patent covers the method of assigning URLs and e-mail addresses of members of a group such that the "@" sign is the dot in the URL. For example, if a group used a so-called third-level URL, www.john.smith.com, the e-mail address would be john@smith.com.
[Optima Technology] filed a patent suit late Friday against software maker Roxio and said the dispute will likely expand to cover other hardware and software companies involved with CD-ROMs.
Having started out as a case about breach of contract, [the SCO v. IBM case] is now about all three key areas of intellectual property law: copyright law [...], patent law [...], and trademark law. [...] Making the choice whether software can be patented is a political decision, not a legal one. In Europe, a bad draft law was overturned by community action coordinated by Hartmut Pilch and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure.
The FTC has issued a report calling on the US Patent and Trademark Office to apply tougher standards in granting patents. Congress should also establish a mechanism to permit companies to challenge patents more easily, it advises.
See our GIF page for some history.
SCO Group, inheritor of the intellectual property for the Unix operating system, has sued IBM for more than $1 billion, alleging Big Blue misappropriated SCO's Unix technology and built it into Linux.
Google this week was granted its first patent by the USPTO for a method of determining the relevance of Web pages in relation to search queries. [...]The company now has three outstanding patent applications. Two concern [...] providing search results in response to an ambiguous search query. The third deals with [...] delivering search results that use analysis of Web page usage.
In addition, Google co-founder Larry Page invented a methodology called PageRank, which was patented to the board of trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University on September 2001.
CVS has been around for a long time, but now Interwoven has been awarded a new patent covering version control of web assets.
"Developing software is [now] like crossing a minefield," says Richard Stallman, the originator of the free software movement that has developed the GNU/Linux operating system. "With each design decision, you might step on a patent that will blow up your project."[...] Rather than copying a failed American policy, the Europeans could be exploring alternatives to patents that might provide protection without sinking the intended beneficiaries. No doctor would approve an untested drug for his or her patient. Nor should Europe inflict such a remedy on its already weakened software industry.
Microsoft is in the process of applying for a wide-ranging patent that covers a variety of functions related to its .Net initiative. [...] IBM is the most prolific patent generator, topping the list of corporate patent awards for the last 10 years. Big Blue landed 3,288 patents in 2002, bringing its total over the past 10 years to more than 22,000. [...] Bruce Perens worries that Microsoft's patents could shut out alternative software development.
This column is about U.S. patent 5,933,841, which [...] is now owned by [...] SBC Communications. [...] Called a "structured document browser," the patent [...] claims as Ameritech's original idea the concept of having elements on a web page that don't change, yet apply directly to other parts of the page that do change.
Hackers like Jeremy Allison would rather pore over source code than legal documents, but the recent Microsoft antitrust settlement decision has the Samba leader thinking about lawsuits. Patent lawsuits.
[...]
"The free software community would not attempt those activities were it not faced with a threat to its survival," Moglen said. "But faced with a threat to its survival, the community will raise the money and litigate the validity of those patents."
Forgent Networks claims to have a patent on the JPEG compression technology and they are apparently trying to use it against manufacturers of digital still cameras, printers, scanners, etc.
It seems like the story was broken by The Register in this article.
There is also a Wired article about this:
"It's sort of an ambushing kind of thing," said Michael Long, a computer consultant who calls digital photography a hobby. Long said he was perturbed by the fact that Forgent waited until JPEG became an industry standard before asserting its patent rights.
The Register also reports that the Joint Photographic Experts Group is launching a website which gathers examples of prior art
On July 23rd, 2002, The Register also reported that the ISO standards body will withdraw the JPEG image format as a standard if Forgent Networks continues to demand royalties on a seventeen-year old patent.
[Many standards bodies] often refer to such licenses by the term "RAND," which stands for "reasonable and non-discriminatory." That term whitewashes a class of patent licenses that are normally neither reasonable nor non-discriminatory. It is true that these licenses do not discriminate against any specific person, but they do discriminate against the free software community, and that makes them unreasonable.
The US Patent Office issued patent 6,368,227 on 9 April to Steven Olson of St Paul, Minnesota for a "method of swinging on a swing". The award has generated a mixture of chuckles and frustration at an overworked patent system unable to catch absurd applications.
In related matters, after being featured for two years on Amazon's web site, Jeff Bezos' "radical patent reform policy proposal" suddenly disappeared without a trace sometime over the past few weeks.
The "Amazon.com Patents" link has been removed from the "About Amazon.com" page and links to An Open Letter From Jeff Bezos on the Subject of Patents are now redirected to Amazon's home page.
With last week's secretive, sealed BN "1-Click" lawsuit settlement, it kind of looks like Amazon no longer has any use for Jeff Bezos' "call for radical patent form" that helped quell the Amazon boycott movement.
Noting that "The Web is fragile" and "Archive.Org is scotch tape that holds it together", Scripting News' Dave Winer runs an item that illustrates how all those folks who posted links to Jeff Bezos' original "call for radical patent reform" are now unwittingly hawking Amazon products thanks to a simple redirect.
Those people can change those links to the GNU Project's Boycott Amazon page.
BT owns what it calls the Hidden Page patent, which was filed in the U.S. in 1976, granted in 1989 and isn't due to expire until 2006, giving the company the intellectual property rights to hyperlink technology. [...] Berners-Lee's work was based on, among other things, earlier work carried out by Ted Nelson, who is generally acknowledged to have coined the term hypertext in his 1965 book, "Literary Machines."
This [SSSCA] law would effectively announce the end of innovation in digital technology: it would become illegal to create any hardware or software that failed to incorporate controls chosen by the content providers.
There is an on-line petition against the SSSCA ("government policeware on your PC") that American citizens can sign.
This latest ruling indicates that the courts consider the patent, filed by a company called E-Data in 1985, a valid patent. E-Data's plan is to charge a license fee for all data downloaded over the Internet.
Mr Keogh said he patented the wheel to prove the innovation patent system was flawed because it did not need to be examined by the patent office, IP Australia.
[...] Hence the message Dutch developer 8Hz Productions ("two students in Amsterdam programming for the sake of learning") recently received from Fraunhofer regarding its open source 8Hz-MP3 software. Says the organisation: "We have received an email from Fraunhofer (as have more developers) to negotiate the licensing for the MP3 encoder. As we are poor students, paying the license is not really a viable option."Fraunhofer wanted $25,000 a year from the two students
So what is viable? Well, nothing beyond charging for the software or scrapping the project. 8Hz has chosen the latter [...]
RMS has been pointing out that MP3 is hampered by patents for a long time now; the proof-bearing pudding is on the way.
[...] Commercial software raises the issue of computer security, since one does not know what is inside. This is why I am against software patenting in Europe. It would kill innovation and reinforce litigation terrorism
A federal appeals court on Wednesday overturned a preliminary injunction granted by a lower court judge in Seattle in December 1999 prohibiting Barnes & Noble.com from using one-click shopping technology that allegedly infringed on arch-rival Amazon.com's online shopping tool.[...] "We have said throughout this case that we do not intend to sit back and allow Amazon.com to stake a claim upon any technology that is widely used. Allowing them to do so abridges our rights as a leader in e-commerce, but more important limits the choices of customers," [Barnes & Noble] said.
The Temporary Restraining Order temporarily prevents Juno from displaying third party advertisements in the Juno ad banner window.The patent, which issued December 6, 2000, applies to a process that enables an Internet service provider (ISP) to display advertisements or messages through a window that is separate from the browser.
BT - which owns the patent to hypertext links - has begun its legal fight to claim back millions of dollars in licensing revenue from US ISPs. [...] Intellectual property attorneys, Kenyon & Kenyon yesterday filed a case on behalf of BT against Prodigy [...]The monster telco said a patent (# 4,873,662) filed in 1976 - and granted in 1989 - proves it owns the intellectual property rights to those natty little devices that link Web content together.
The owner of most of the intellectual property inside the MP3 format is Germany's Fraunhofer Institute [...]That company already charges MP3 download companies about 1 percent of royalties, while hardware companies must pay 50 cents per unit shipped. MP3 encoder companies, such as Musicmatch, pay Thomson about $5 per unit, contributing to the relative scarcity of free MP3 "rippers."
The tide was turned by a groundswell largely co-ordinated through EuroLinux, although it would be wrong to assume that the issue is just of concern to open source proponents, as there are major implications for the ethical part of the software industry. Oracle opposes the patentability of software and believes that existing copyright law and trade secret protection is adequate, while Adobe, Autodesk, Borland, Novell, Synopsis and Wind River Systems have also developed their businesses without resorting to building a portfolio of software patents. Content-king Bertelsmann regards them as "inhibiting innovation". [...]Yesterday's skirmish in Munich was a well-won battle, but much work remains to be done in convincing national governments and the EU that software patents are fundamentally wrong, anti-competitive, and only in the interest of those trying to establish toll roads along the previously-open highway.
(From Linux Weekly News:)
The U.K. Patent Office has put up a request for comments on how software (and business method) patents should be treated in the U.K. and Europe. There is also some interesting information to be found in there, including the fact that some 15% of all U.K. patents now are "software-based."They seem truly interested. "We want to know what you think about this so that Government policy is evidence-based and relevant to business, commerce, and consumers - in other words to you. So, whether you are in the software industry, financial services, are a software user, a consumer, or are otherwise interested, we want to hear from you." The deadline for responses is December 15. (Thanks to Alan Cox).
On Thursday 19th October 2000, the European Commission announced the opening of an official consultation on the economic and social impact of software patents in Europe. In order to help European Authorities to conduct an open consultation, the EuroLinux Alliance of software publishers and non profit organisations debuts a public forum and a rich knowledge base.
In late September OpenTV applied to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to broaden the scope of a patent originally awarded to the company in 1998 so it includes "one-click" shopping. [...] Should the Patent Office decide in OpenTV's favor, Amazon could be forced to either pay licensing fees for one-click shopping or abandon it altogether. Ironically, that's the same position Amazon has been trying to put Barnesandnoble.com into for the past year.
The way current regulations are written, you could probably get a patent for the practice of selling hair dryers over the Internet. If two congressional Democrats get their way, the days of "obvious" business practice patents are numbered.Congressmen Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) and Howard Berman (D-California) have introduced the Business Method Patent Improvement Act of 2000
Darren Reed, in a recent posting to the IP Filter mailing list, has asked for a legal opinion about patent 5793763. This patent may have far reaching effects for all NAT software.
NAT is crucial for firewalling, load balancing, and failover.
Apparently, on December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and 17 researchers at the Augmentation Research Center, Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park, California presented a 90-minute live public demo in which hypertext was wheeled out for all to see. The demo also included the first public appearance of the "mouse". Real Player footage of the demo can be seen here.
EuroLinux Alliance for a Free Information Infrastructure is reporting that its "Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe" was signed by over 20,000 people.
TeleDynamics, a small Florida company, said its newly awarded patent has major import for -- well, just about any automated service that gathers user information and passes it to someone else.
Warnock is quite right that our forefathers expressly recognized the legitimacy of government-granted monopolies to subsidize "authors" and "inventors" in their work to "promote the Progress of Science and useful arts." But this is not because the framers were especially fond of "intellectual property." (Jefferson, for example, hated it.) Their purpose instead was as much to limit that power as to grant it.
The monster telco believes a patent filed in 1976 - and granted in 1989 - proves it owns the intellectual property rights to those natty little devices that link Web content together.
Also, see this press release: EuroLinux Congratulates British Telecom for Demonstrating the Absurdity of Software Patents
Worried about steadily rising royalty fees for online MP3 music companies, a group of open-source developers has created a new music format they say will be free and will equal or better MP3's quality.[...] the German research institute that helped create the format is beginning to collect its dues, charging companies that create MP3 software and hardware or sell MP3 downloads. Next year it will begin charging Webcasters, it says.
This petition is directed to the European Parliament. Its goal is to warn European Authorities against the dangers of software patents. This petition is supported by the EuroLinux Alliance together with European companies and open source associations. Please make this petition well known to everybody concerned.
At issue is the use by DoubleClick, which is widely seen as the leader in the online advertising market, of an enabling technology for DoubleClick's DART ad serving system that enables it to target specific ads to certain users based on usage patterns.
This PTO press release is commented by Don Marti and Richard Stallman in this message. The PTO commissioners may be graded on the amount of time it takes to issue patents.
I [Don Marti] am nominating Richard for the Patent Public Advisory Committee, and I encourage everyone else to think of a person who can represent the interests of users and inventors harmed by software and business methods patents and nominate that person. More info at: http://zgp.org/~dmarti/uspto_committee
In his interview with J.S. Kelly, Richard M. Stallman, the father of the GNU project, talks about how software patents have been a problem for programmers for nearly 20 years and why he's leading the boycott against Amazon.com.
Making abstraction of the legalese, claim 7 says in short that you can compress an arbitrary sequence of two bits down to one bit.It took three years to the patent office to ascertain the validity of such a patent. A person with basic knowledge in mathematics and data compression can find the flaws immediately upon first reading.
We have an old system that was adapted to a new technology without being thought through, with unfortunate results. If it turns out that the software patent system is actually a hindrance to business - and not a boon, as the patent system was in mechanical engineering, back when steam engines were being invented - well, gee, maybe we should do away with software patents.
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 13:44:18 -0800 (PST)
From: Paul Rubin
Subject: more bogus patents (not software)
From AIP What's New (today's issue):
2. PATENT NONSENSE: INFINITE ENERGY MEETS INFINITE BANDWIDTH. On Tuesday, BlackLight Power was awarded a patent for a chemical means of shrinking hydrogen atoms into "a state below the ground state." The, uh, inventor, Randall Mills, calls his teeny little hydrogen atoms "hydrinos" (WN 22 Jan 99). Mills describes them as, "the most important discovery of all time...up there with fire." The second most important discovery, I suppose, would be to find the hydrino line in the spectrum. In November, a patent was awarded to Media Fusion for Advanced Sub-Carrier Modulation, a method of transmitting data over ordinary power lines with a 10 GHz bandwidth. The claim is that magnetic fields surrounding the conductor can act as a waveguide. In a classic understatement, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has issued a warning to members that Media Fusion's claims "lack scientific merit."
This patent illustrates the general incompetence of the U.S. Patent Office. See more details about this patent.
Infoworld has a column by Ephraim Schwartz on this story.
The problem is simple: The #%@$# Patent Office is handing out exclusive rights so broad and general they cover everything. And greedy attorneys are in a frenzy. If the trend continues, innovation will be halted.
Xerox Corp. has won a ruling that will allow the world's biggest copier company to pursue claims that 3Com Corp. infringed on a Xerox handwriting technology patent used in 3Com's top-selling Palm handheld computers.
Unlike other current generation search engines, which rely heavily on keywords or meta-search technology to find information, Google offers an advanced patent-pending technology called PageRank(TM) to deliver the most relevant results.
This page is an attempt to sum up various information which recently emerged on the FreeType mailing lists after the discovery that Apple owns several US patents on TrueType. Its purpose is to explain what the patents are, how they can affect us and what can be done.
The FreeType engine is a free and portable TrueType font rendering engine. It has been developed to provide TrueType support to a great variety of platforms and environments.
Lawsuits are threatening to dampen the dynamism of the internet because, even when they are obviously spurious, they add so much to the cost of doing business that soon amateurs and upstarts might not be able to afford to compete with anyone who can afford a lawyer.
How could sound legal reasoning lead to a patent policy that so obviously undermines competition, discourages innovation, and distorts market dynamics in an important, emerging industry? As you'll learn in this essay, you don't get the answer until you trace this reasoning back to the earliest decision that enabled patent seekers to win government-guaranteed monopolies for software algorithms [...]
Amazon is not alone at fault in what is happening. The US Patent Office is to blame for having very low standards, and US courts are to blame for endorsing them. And US patent law is to blame for authorizing patents on computational techniques and patterns of communication--a policy that is harmful in general.
libgd allows CGI scripts and other programs to create GIF images on the fly. With GD.pm, Perl scripts could do that, too. [...]According to the Unisys Corporation, I'm a fugitive from justice. A rogue Webmaster. A flaunter of national and international treaties. My Web site uses (gasp!) GIF images. Chances are that you're a fugitive, too.
Their specific invention is that they store the live data used to fill in their site's templates in shared memory that the sub-processes that actually generate the page have access to.
Filed in US District court in St. Louis on Tuesday, the lawsuit accuses Yahoo of illegally setting up a comparison shopping service that allows consumers to pile purchases from several merchants into a universal shopping cart.
The Washington Post published an article about the "inventor," Bruce Dickens, titled Y2K Patent Fortune Pending?
Steven Young writes "As an intellectual property attorney, and a regular Slashdot reader, I would like to share a few of my thoughts regarding patent issues, especially as they relate to programmers. Although patents (for better or worse) are playing an ever-expanding role in the software field, many programmers do not know much about them."
Bogus software patents pose a genuine threat to computer industry innovation. In this column, University of Virginia professor and author Bryan Pfaffenberger contemplates what's going to happen when open-source authors start getting hit with patent infringement lawsuits -- and the picture isn't pretty.
Welcome to the new era for patents, a field that has emerged as one of the fiercest and slipperiest battlegrounds between established companies and their online rivals. Once arcane devices primarily used to protect inventors, they are increasingly being wielded as weapons to boost cash flow, confuse investors, or intimidate a rival.
The article also mentions a case from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit between State Street Bank and Signature Financial:
Signature Financial was an East Coast investment company that obtained a patent in 1993 for what it called a ``hub and spoke'' investment structure that deployed software to link its central assets with a series of mutual funds. The Boston-based State Street Bank challenged the patents on the grounds that it was only a ``business method,'' not a patentable process.Although a lower court sided with the bank, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled last summer that Signature did have a right to a patent. And that ruling has had wide repercussions in Silicon Valley, prompting valley companies to defend even mundane Internet software.
The "invention" consists of a comparison of documents in original and modified versions in split-screen format...
Some dates: Public hearings will be held on Monday, June 28, and Wednesday, July 14. Those wishing to present oral testimony at any of the hearings must request an opportunity to do so no later than June 21 for the June 28 hearing, or July 7 for the July 14 hearing.
Biting the hand that on this occasion fed him, Stallman said that he used his acceptance speech to alert conference attendees to the impending introduction of software patents in Europe.
"Why not apply for a patent for the method of invalidating patents?" said Michael Barclay, attorney at Silicon Valley law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati. "You can patent anything now."
Apparently IPIX backed down from its threats when someone sent Dersch articles from 1960's computer graphics magazines that described doing the same thing, showing IPIX's patent to almost certainly be invalid.
The torrent of patents for e-commerce schemes raises new questions about an old-fashioned system. (From Salon Magazine.)
Microsoft Internet Explorer's use of plug-ins and applets to add functionality was recently alleged to have violated the patents of a small, privately owned software developer.
We, the undersigned, petition the U.S. Government to either 1) Address the questions of competence raised about the USPTO, or 2) Change Intellectual Property Law to disallow the sort of patents mentioned above.
French newspaper Libération published an article (in French) about patents by Bernard Lang and Jean-Paul Smets.
A short summary: A book titled Logiciels libres - la nouvelle économie (Free Softare - the New Economy) will soon be published by Smets. Europe is still protected against software patents by a 1991 directive which forbids them. The disparity between American and European protection systems is to the advantage of Europe. This is also the opinion of Oracle Corp., which opposes software patents. In 1998, the United States asked Europe to accept software patents. The article clearly describes the anti-competitive nature of software patents, and expresses the European point of view that many small businesses of that continent would be harmed by them.
Wired News reports:
Be Free Inc. will be granted a patent Tuesday that covers targeted online advertising, an award that could make the little-known company a toll taker in the booming online-ad business.
an article on the PBS Web site by Robert X. Cringely about a patent obtained by a small company that threatens Java and might allow Microsoft to control the new language by exclusively licensing the patent.
This is taken from the Friday, 20 November 1998 "What's New" newsletter of the American Physical Society.
Patents may be the ground on which the open source battle is won or lost. An article in LinuxWorld by Bruce Perens.
a ZDNet article about a new software patent related to electronic commerce.
a press release by the Thinking Media Corporation.
Back to LPF patents page.
Back to LPF home page.
