waider

This is funny. Engadget has a brief summary of the Apple iPod patent ruckus, the short, short version of which is that Apple's patent was refused because a Microsoft employee had previousy filed for a too-similar patent, but now it turns out that iPods were shipping before the Microsoft patent was filed. What I'm wondering is does this knot (which smacks of one of Milo's Catch-22 setups) mean that the iPod interface can't now be patented, because it has been cited as its own prior art? Or can the Patent Office dereference sufficiently to grant the patent to Apple on the grounds of them owning said prior art prior to the Microsoft application?

One of my readers (hi mopti!) will be delighted to know I’m currently poring over documents relating to software patents and related issues in the EU. Said reader has been providing huge assistance to my attempts to put together a coherent letter to the undecided MEPs in my area in order to persuade them not to legislate me out of a job, and probably is a little peeved that I’m taking so long between drafts. In my defence I’ll point out that the guinness in my local is very tasty, and sometimes I get distracted by bright shiny objects. Plus, mopti‘s got MAD WRITING SKILLZ and I keep writing chunks of text and then deleting them in the realisation that he’s going to tell me I’ve lost the plot AGAIN. Anyway. I just stumbled across something that I will have to dig further at, but which relates to my recent reverse-engineering efforts; it is something of which I was aware, almost talisman-like, but which I had never bothered looking up. But here it is: Directive 91/250/EEC Articles 5 and 6 specifically authorise me to reverse-engineer software for interoperability. Now, I’m going to have to go read some more to find out what exactly is meant by interoperability, but right now my eyes are starting to glaze with all this bloody legalese. Oh, one other note: the justification for one of EP’s proposed amendments to the CIID is, "It is bad draftsmanship to couch recitals as normative provisions." Take that, Directive Drafters!

I've just written an honest-to-goodness letter about the software patents directive to my European Parliament representatives. I could email them, but I'm still inclined to believe that a letter's a far more weighty thing. I did email the two guys who have stated definitively that they're against software patents to say thanks.

What I find interesting about the fan-wing plane story is that the guy paid £20,000 to file the first patents. I find it hard to reconcile that level of cost with the notion that the job of the patent office is to protect the inventor, never mind the usual patent office abuse that goes on with submarine patents and what not.

This seems to have gotten remarkably little coverage: Eolas Patent Dumped By USPTO.

Charles Arthur suggests that the spread of the web was caused by the fact that it wasn't patented. Well, if that's so, then how come the existing protocols:

"[it] wasn't just that it let you click about from place to place; that had always been possible using protocols such as "gopher" and plain old file transfer ("ftp")."

didn't spawn such a spread? Perhaps because what launched the web, really and truly threw it in your face like nothing before, was the client? Specifically, Mosaic, which was under such legal wraps that Netscape Communications Corporation changed their name from Mosaic Communications Corporation when UIUC "expressed concern" about the choice of name? The same Mosaic which was subsequently licensed to the likes of Quarterdeck, Spry, and Microsoft?

On top of that, as soon as Netscape had a lead in the market, they made huge efforts to retain that leadership through driving HTML - perhaps the unfettered part of the web that Arthur is really referring to, although he's not exactly clear about that - in directions that suited them. <BLINK>, anyone? Microsoft did likewise, and continue to do so, using non-standard tags and the like in an attempt to provide a suitably tempting piece of added value that will persuade customers to give up on the competition. And yet through that driving towards some semblance of proprietary code - which the W3C implicitly endorsed several times by updating the official standards to match the de facto ones - we got Java, Flash, plugins in general (admittedly now under threat from the Eolas lawsuit) and, by and large, more powerful HTML features.

That aside, the quote above is itself largely incorrect in that gopher and ftp were, at the time, more manual affairs without the clicky goodness of HTML; the first browser (available for public use by telnetting to a CERN machine) used a page trailer list of footnotes to link other documents (no clicking here, m'lud); and the whole argument about which platform your software patent is based on is a complete straw man which has no useful relevance to the argument. Even the bit about basing your work on the work of others, well, jeez. Every second patent does that; even the much-vaunted Segway required someone to invent - and patent - gyroscopes, stepper motors, low-density high-power batteries, and so on. Few if any patents stand on their own

Software Patents are indeed bad, but it doesn't help to pick examples that don't properly support your hypothesis.

PS this is largely a top-of-head rant. feel free to criticise and nitpick, since that's exactly what I'm doing myself.

USPTO to re-examine Eolas patent

Predictionish thing:
if ( patent is overturned ) {

Eolas sue USPTO
Case drags on for several years
Outcome irrelevant since things have moved on

} else {

Things continue as they were,
which is to say the outcome will be irrelevant in some other way since things will have moved on

}

These greedy money-grubbing assholes really spoiled my morning.