04.26.10
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 7:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More of the truth about MPEG-LA and how it really operates (through coercion); Apple is becoming more of a legal firm after attacking Linux/Android with a patent lawsuit
ABOUT a month ago, MPEG-LA tried to portray itself as some sort of a cuddly and reasonable entity which is willing to ‘give away’ some ‘rights’ to MPEG; but those who know Sisvel’s army (for example [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13]) would possibly associate MPEG-LA with the underworld, maybe with the mafia. ALDI is one of the latest victims despite the fact that it’s a European chain and software patents are invalid in Europe. We have already explained the role Microsoft plays in Europe’s patent law and also the promotion of MPEG-LA. Microsoft cannot simply be ignored.
The president of the FFII has brought to people’s attention this good report from The Prior Art blog, saying that “MPEG-LA’s CEO Larry Horn also heads MobileMedia, a patent troll holding no less than 122 patents bought to Nokia and Sony”; from the original:
This week: A closer at the holding company behind recent suits against smartphone makers Research in Motion, HTC, and, most interestingly, Apple.
[...]
What is unusual is who owns MobileMedia: MPEG-LA, the private company that oversees a total of eight patent pools covering important digital video standards—MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 being the most common—used in DVD players and pretty much every other device that supports digital video. Contributors to those pools, whose contents MPEG-LA has licensed to literally hundreds of companies, include Hewlett-Packard, Panasonic, Sony, and Cisco subsidiary Scientific Atlanta (see full list). MPEG-LA’s CEO Larry Horn also heads MobileMedia.
Even more unusual is that one of the companies targeted in MobileMedia’s initial batch of suits is Apple (the others were BlackBerry maker Research in Motion and HTC). Apple happens to be among the companies that has contributed patents to MPEG-LA patent pools, including those covering the MPEG-4 and the IEEE 1394 (Firewire) standards. That puts Horn in the position of collecting money for Apple on behalf of MPEG-LA while at the same time trying to wring money out of the company on behalf of MobileMedia. Considering the breadth of MobileMedia’s patent claims—the company claims to hold patents relating to all the central functions of “call handling, speed dial functions, database searches, audio download and playback, and still picture and video processing”—it’s easy to imagine that Apple won’t be the last company to wind up on both sides of Larry Horn.
In an interview, Horn told The Prior Art that said he doesn’t see a problem with his dual roles. “We’ve been threading that needle for 14 years,” he says. “[At MPEG-LA], we’ve run eight patent pools. Some companies are owners of patents in one pool and not in another. Some are users—licensees—in one pool, and not in another. Our mission in each pool is to proactively and vigorously license the patents to the market, on behalf of our licensors.”
[...]
In other words, MPEG-LA is already in a position in which it sees that some companies getting paid because of their patent rights while it “encouages” other companies to pay up in exchange for those rights. It’s always possible, Horn says, for some overlap to occur.
It is safe to say that Larry Horn is a patent troll because he confirmed this to the author, although he did not use the word “troll” (nobody perceives himself/herself that way). The roundup above also mentions Apple and HTC which are fighting over patents. Apple sued without provocation and it is now signing up more litigators rather than engineers.
Steve Jobs doesn’t skimp on lawyers.
Apple Inc. just added another big, expensive name to the growing list of lawyers engaged in the company’s latest round of patent wars.
Matthew Powers, head of litigation at Weil, Gotshal & Manges in Redwood City, Calif., filed a countersuit for Apple against Kodak last week. In its dispute with Nokia, Apple has already hired Boston’s William Lee, co-managing partner of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. And in its patent offensive against HTC Corp.’s Google phones, Apple is using Kirkland & Ellis top patent lawyer Robert Krupka, from Los Angeles.
Apple — like Microsoft — is increasingly focused on litigation and marketing. Neither company respects ethics in operation or truth in advertising.
The president of the FFII has found another new item “on the patent portfolio of Bellow Bellows, LLC,” which is “a patent troll,” according to him and according to the evidence presented.
M·CAM, Inc. released its Patently Obvious(TM) report today on the patent portfolio held by Bellow Bellows, LLC, a non-operating patent licensing entity. Focused on patents regarding multi-antenna Wireless LAN access point data processing technology, this report identifies potential public-domain alternatives that are available for incorporation into products and services without cost or licensing restriction.
The world’s biggest patent troll is still Nathan Myhrvold, who is funded by Microsoft, Bill Gates, and Apple. These people and companies are therefore proponents of patent trolling*, whether they publicly signal this or not. They just prefer the mega-patent trolls to be on their side and they invest billions of dollars in such trolls. █
“We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
–Steve Jobs
“Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?”
–Steve Jobs, a hypocrite
___
* Bill Gates created his own patents aggregator, which is like a dormant troll.
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Posted in Hardware, Microsoft at 6:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Why it is notable that Microsoft is not a (primarily) hardware company, given the poor performance of its hardware business
WE will soon post an analysis of Microsoft’s latest financial results, which we have already alluded to in [1, 2]. This post deals in isolation with the fact that Microsoft’s hardware products (notably phones running Microsoft software and the fiasco-rich Xbox) are not in good shape, even based on Microsoft’s results.
Kin
“Microsoft Posts Slumping WinMo Sales,” says this one report.
Microsoft said its non-gaming revenue fell $80 million in its third quarter on decreased sales of its Windows Mobile operating system and Zune devices.
Last week we wrote about Kin [1, 2], which seems like another step in the wrong direction. Reuters has this article from IDG which says: “Windows Phone? No App for That”
Looking for the niftiest new mobile app? You might find it on an iPhone or an Android device, but not on a Windows phone. Developers’ apathy and a fast-falling market share mean that Microsoft’s mobile phone business is in the doldrums. And that in turn may mean trouble for all of Microsoft several years from now.
It is amazing that Microsoft would flush compatibility down the toilet. This was probably one of the few selling points they had. There are other complaints and rants about Kin, many of which concentrate on Microsoft’s distasteful advertising rather than Microsoft’s distasteful product.
The Microsoft “sexting” story is still being brought up [1, 2, 3] and even Microsoft boosters like Alex Zaharov-Reutt are critical of such advertisements. These ads (one in particular) are apparently gone altogether [1, 2, 3], with many claims that Microsoft “pulled” the offending advert.
Microsoft has announced its decision to pull a controversial advert for its new Kin line of phones after complaints emerged that it promotes “sexting” among teens.
The advert shows a man in a club taking a photo under his T-shirt using a Kin phone and sharing it with his friends. Thereafter, a young woman is shown receiving the message with a smile on her face.
Did Microsoft pull the entire ad or was it just edited? There are somewhat contradictory reports. Either way, another point for which Kin is criticised has to do with the lack of "cut/copy and paste" functionality. Is this being done for the media industry (to please Murdoch et al [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13])? That’s just one theory, which Microsoft’s Web font DRM [1, 2] brings to mind. Here is another explanation which says that Microsoft intends to keep it that way.
Microsoft Apologetics On Why Copy/Paste Unnecessary
As anyone knows that has been following the impending release of Windows Phone 7 knows, the OS will not support copy and paste operations. Rather than just say that copy and paste is something Microsoft wants to do, they have begun a campaign to try and convince you that copy and paste is unnecessary.
We really need Free(dom) software to counter these rigid mobile platforms that do not allow “cut/copy and paste” (Apple too banned it before, at least when it was implemented by a developer other than Apple’s own iPhone programmers).
It is actually unfortunate that Linux phones too are made semi-proprietary these days. Examples include Android and WebOS, which has just shed off a former Microsoft general manager [1, 2].
Abbott, a former Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) general manager, joined Palm in 2008 to head development for webOS.
Why was he hired in the first place? Given how Microsoft ruined Danger, they ought to have known better.
One of Microsoft’s key mobile strategies is to fill the Web with Silver Lie content, which will in turn block access from many devices except Microsoft’s. Forrester, which lists Microsoft as a major client, plays along with this suppression of web standards.
[Forrester] Analyst: HTML5 far from killing off Web plug-ins
HTML5, the budding specification for multimedia in Web applications, will not displace proprietary rich Internet technologies, such as Adobe Flash/Flex or Microsoft Silverlight, anytime soon, an analyst report released this week said.
Given what Google does regarding codecs at the moment — not to mention Apple blocking Adobe and Microsoft/Novell [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] — this “analyst report” may soon be proven wrong. We shall see.
Xbox 360
Xbox reality is one of denial (Machinarium) and censorship. Microsoft wants to control the message and even fire employees who say the truth about error/defect rates that continue to be a major problem (and comically enough, Microsoft brags about “MCV Industry Excellence Award”). Servers of Xbox are slowing down after downtimes that we reported earlier this year and former Microsoft employees are part of the life blood that’s left for the product.
Xbox has already lost billions of dollars. This is not success.
Zune Hacked
There is almost not a word about Zune anymore. It sometimes seems like it’s in “clearance sale” status. Kin, which reuses some elements of Zune, is equally unappealing as it lags behind the competition (the Linux-based Android grows most impressively). Adding insult to injury, Zune HD as well as previous models of the Zune have just been hacked and instructions for hacking made available.
Neither the hack nor exploit was revealed by ZuneBoards Development Front, so let’s see how Microsoft patches the hole.
This is also covered in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
A new press release about faulty hardware recycling [1, 2] names two products that are prone to permanent failure.
More than 1,900 U.S. and Canadian Goodwill Locations to Collect Xbox, Zune and Accompanying Accessories for Free Recycling
Maybe these can be recycled into something that’s actually usable and respects the owners who bought (actually rented) them. █
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Posted in Asia, Courtroom, Microsoft, Vista, Windows at 5:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Young people in China are manufacturing
Microsoft hardware for as little as 52 cents per hour (learn more)
Summary: Microsoft is squeezing China not just for its youth but also for the little money they have left
THE US-BASED COMPANY which the US Senate accused of “enabling tyranny” [1, 2] is taking its chase for profit up a gear, even in places where people can hardly afford Windows and where Microsoft tolerated counterfeiting because it was beneficial to its business. As ECT once put it, “No less than Bill Gates himself said in a recent Fortune article that Microsoft competes better against Linux in China when there’s piracy than when there isn’t.
“So, Microsoft actively looks the other way as people pirate its software. It builds its market share that way, and lets people get used to the idea of having Windows at a certain price.”
Well, party time is over for China (or “no mister nice guy” anymore, as Microsoft might put it, even though there is nothing “nice” about predatory lock-in). First of all, we have just learned that Microsoft is cracking down on counterfeiting of Windows Vista, not just XP (probably for the same reasons as before, in order to pressure people to buy the newer version).
Microsoft hunts down pirated Vista!
Microsoft rolls out its strategy against pirated copies of its latest operating system Windows Vista. Since May 6, Microsoft offers Vista users to download an update under the name “KB940510″.
Notice what Microsoft is doing here. It is intruding people’s computers as its employees are allowed to remotely install anything they wish (it’s in the EULA). There have already been lawsuits against Microsoft in China over this practice (“Black Screens of Death”). Based on this new article, Microsoft is getting more remote controls for XP and Vista.
The main story from the news, however, is about Microsoft sending its partners/clients to court or to prison. Windows puts them in a vulnerable position and the same applies to proprietary software in general; it potentially criminalises, which affects power hierarchies (developer/s over the user/s). Here is the news from China. It was covered in very many publications, such as:
As Pogson puts it:
An insurance company in China was found to have 450 unlicenced copies of some of M$’s software. A court awarded $706 a copy, $318000. The insurance company had negotiated with M$ and rejected $30 a copy as “irrational”. I would bet Free Software is looking pretty good to those involved now.
[...]
The fact that the customer thought $30 a copy was too much should tell us something. GNU/Linux and home-grown apps is the way to go if they need special stuff. How many programmer-years (in China) for $318000? Do the maths.
This defendant will appeal the verdict [1, 2] — a verdict which does show that Microsoft is no longer accepting free-of-charge Windows in China.
In other news from China, Microsoft’s MSN Network will now be run with more influence from China (which probably means more censorship).
Netease is expected to take over a 50 percent stake of Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology Co., Ltd. (SMNCT) from Shanghai Alliance Investment Co., Ltd. (SAI) and jointly operate MSN China with Microsoft Corp., a source in the Investment industry revealed to Sohu.
China recently released a new version of its national GNU/Linux distribution. Given these recent moves from Microsoft, perhaps more Chinese people will use GNU/Linux. █
“It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not.”
–Bill Gates
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Servers, Windows at 4:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Forefront/Stirling is axed by Microsoft despite all the stupendous attempts to sell it
MICROSOFT’S long list of dead products from 2008-2010 has just grown longer. Several days ago Microsoft quietly announced that a product it had been hyping up, Forefront, is going into the bit bucket. Why did Microsoft speak about this so informally?
Microsoft won’t release its planned Forefront Protection Manager (FPM) security management product after all, the company blogged last night.
We have attempted to find more explanations, but there is no compelling one. Many products that go under the same banner are affected:
The development of Forefront Protection Manager, which was to offer centralized management of the range of Forefront-branded security products, has been cancelled. Codenamed “Stirling,” FPM was going to provide a single management console for Forefront Client Security, Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server (FPE), and Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint (FPSP), as well as integration with Forefront Threat Management Gateway.
This is also covered in:
This news puts the kibosh on promotional articles such as this new one which recommends Forefront (published just days ago, so imagine those who followed the advice). But Forefront is dead “and up til this month, they were telling people to buy it,” says our reader Ryan, “and that it was great.” █
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Posted in Site News at 10:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Decision regarding graphics to be made with readers’ consent, feedback
Eruaran continues to make a lot of new designs (over 20 so far) and we would like to add one of the following images to the front page. Help us decide which one.
Any other suggestions would be welcomed. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Intellectual Monopoly, Microsoft, Patents at 9:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Inaffectionate monopolies
Summary: The latest cases of patents intruding nations, interfering with economic sense, and turning Free/open source software into another monster
Today’s summary covers patents in general and software patents in particular. As predicted several years ago, software patents are pushing “open source” proponents to change themselves rather than fight back as they should.
The Economist Versus Patents
Patents make business sense to lawyers, but they rarely make business sense in general. Several famous economists, some of whom won the Nobel prize, are advocating the removal of patents (or at least some of them). The Economist has this new article which says that some patents do “more harm than good”. To quote just a part: [via]
George Church, a molecular geneticist at Harvard Medical School and a pioneer of whole-genome sequencing, is unpersuaded. Leaving aside the cystic fibrosis case, he says genetic testing benefits from incentives for innovation by luring in investors. He objects to the recommended reforms as “micro-manipulation of one small part of the patent system” that could have unintended consequences.
That’s the part about genome sequencing and as we found out earlier this month, gene patents are already dying [1, 2, 3].
The film “Patent Absurdity” (mentioned already in [1, 2 3, 4]) is focused specifically on software patents and it received a lot of press coverage (more recently from Heise and eWEEK Europe). But another big battle over the issue actually takes place in New Zealand right now.
New Zealand
Software patents are a hot topic in New Zealand because they might be formally removed (explicitly excluded by scope).
As we pointed out two days ago, the Labour party in New Zealand is opposing software patents and this is also covered here:
The exclusion of computer software from a Patents Bill before Parliament is a step towards helping New Zealand become more innovative Labour MPs Lianne Dalziel and Clare Curran said today.
Later on, the same publication talks for patent lawyers, who of course want more patents of any kind.
InternetNZ is against software patents because it represents technologists, not lawyers.
InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) agrees with the Commerce Select Committee and Minister Hon Simon Power that software should not be patentable. InternetNZ outlined its position in a submission to the Committee in July 2009.
More on the stance of InternetNZ can be found in TechDay, which also covers the views of The New Zealand Computer Society in this new post.
The New Zealand Computer Society polled its members and found that 81% supported the recommendation to remove Software from the Patents Act.
NZCS Chief Executive Paul Matthews said, “This is a big issue for the ICT sector. And whilst not scientific, this poll clearly backs up previous consultation showing widespread support from the ICT sector for the removal of software patents.”
We covered the views of NZCS in [1, 2, 3, 4]. It has been strongly against software patents all along. It’s usually a case of computer scientists versus lawyers who only pretend to serve them rather than tax them. Here in Europe we have this lawyers’ site promoting software patents a few days ago. They smell cash in more patent applications and lawsuits.
Although the UK and European patent offices have been granting patent claims that relate to computer programs for many years, a European Parliament rejected the proposed EC Directive on the Patentability of Computer Implemented Inventions (EC Software Patent Directive) in July 2006, which caused some controversy.
[...]
Corinne Day is a trainee solicitor who specialises in intellectual property law.
Well, Corinne Day should be focused on her field and not pursue what lawyers call “protection” with software patents. They pretend it’s a “protection” for software developers, but it’s really just protection of the lawyers’ way of life.
It is sad to find posts like this one from defeatists who are promoting “open core” and other such ideas (while occasionally denouncing the Free Software Foundation), listing Microsoft as part of “open source” and using this as reason to accept “intellectual property” like software patents (when it comes to “open source”, Microsoft is constantly changing what these terms mean using "promises" that it adds to software patents). To quote one portion of it:
In this future the notion of intellectual property will still exist, as will software patents (unfortunately). In this future, any software or services company, of any size, whether local or global has the opportunity to participate in the FOSS realm.
We must not accept software patents as they are incompatible with Free/open source software. The author is also using the term “intellectual property” rather than “copyright” and “patent”, which are separate and very different things. Free software relies heavily upon copyrights, but patents are antithetical to it. The use of the term “intellectual property” can also be found in this new post from OSS Watch. It’s part of the degradation we see among “open source” supporters, who turn it into another monster and encourage more of ZDNet’s typical FUD, which is debunked by The Source.
If anything, ”Open Source” is moving beyond “sexy” right into “required label”.
That label too is losing its uniqueness. The meaning changes and the OSI ought to fix this by intevening. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 8:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kin is the new Zin
Summary: How Microsoft failed — quite utterly in fact — to reignite interest in its mobile business; a leak of an Apple iPhone prototype leads to criminal investigation at the behest of Chairman Jobs and his morbidly-vain group
OUR previous two posts helped expose Microsoft's rather abysmal financial situation and systematic tax evasion (which it can pretend not to be an evasion because it controls the law through former employees and lobbyists). One area where Microsoft is/was losing billions of dollars would be the whole mobile business, whose losses Microsoft was trying to hide over the years using tricks that Microsoft Watch explained about 3 years ago (before it became a Microsoft PR outlet, post-morphing). More recently, the SEC started probing Microsoft about this allegedly inappropriate reporting of cash flow. People will hopefully be allowed to know what’s going on inside Microsoft (press releases are spin; they are rarely connected to reality, but reporters rely on them).
“More recently, the SEC started probing Microsoft about this allegedly inappropriate reporting of cash flow.”Pogson continues to write about the true impact of GNU/Linux on the price of Windows (and thus Microsoft’s financial performance). Sub-notebooks are an area where Microsoft’s competition is so great that Windows is given away almost for free and some sources say that Microsoft even pays OEMs to preinstall Windows (instead of charging for it).
Another area where Microsoft faces overwhelming competition is phones and as we showed last week, Microsoft stands not a chance with “Kin”. It’s just too far behind and the South African press seemingly agrees.
I just think that the company should be focusing its energies on getting Windows Mobile 7 out the door. The longer that OS is delayed the more customers Microsoft will lose and the more people will speculate that Microsoft doesn’t actually have a product to match the iPhone or Android.
More importantly, Microsoft can hardly charge for it, so what is its business model? Selling mobile phones as hardware? With designs like that (it seems like a Palm ripoff from ages ago), Microsoft’s mobile reality is a really gloomy one. Kin is nothing. It’s probably just another Zune (Microsoft can’t use this name for the phone because it’s tarnished just like “Vista” or “Live”), but this “Zune phone” enjoys far less hype than the Zune. A few days ago, Dvorak pointed out that:
We hear very little from [Microsoft's] outside agencies and almost nothing from the inside PR department.
Where are the exciting news stories about what the company is doing? This can’t be good for the company, it has always relied on a blanket of often obfuscating PR, especially when leading into the next generation cash cow.
Given Microsoft’s enormous debt, maybe it’s just not renewing contracts with PR agencies. The lack of buzz generated about Kin sure surprised us last week (we expected a massive blitz and journalists did too). Is this another sign of Microsoft’s demise?
Forbes has this new article which is titled “Microsoft’s Dismal Future” (it mostly speaks about phones, operating systems, and search).
Instead, since 2008 Microsoft has busied itself launching two very expensive operating system upgrades, Windows Vista and 7, in an effort to defend and protect its historical PC operating system business. They’ve been a huge investment, but both have won a less than enthusiastic response from the vast majority of users. Microsoft has turned to forcing new computer buyers to purchase them, since almost no one chooses to buy them. Additionally, it is in the midst of planning Office 2010, an enormously expensive upgrade of Office 2007, even though a huge number of customers still use Office 2003, completely ignoring or rejecting 2007 since it came available.
Instead of working hard to get into new growth markets, Microsoft, in the tradition of Xerox and Kodak, pours its talent, energy and money into trying to defend its PC operating system and office products markets, which have much slower growth and are under attack from new mobile devices.
[...]
Apple broke out of defending and extending the Macintosh platform, and Google avoided falling into merely defending the search business (unlike Alta Vista and AskJeeves). They did so by strategically using white space, meaning they’ve supported unfettered, unencumbered opportunities to pursue entirely fresh ideas and move them into solutions and then to the market quickly and effectively. Fundamentally, both companies are very different from Microsoft, because Microsoft hasn’t learned to use white space teams.
We are not proponents of Google or Apple. Both companies sell products and services that are proprietary (and sometimes painted as “open”). A few days ago Apple was sued yet again for its arrogant behaviour and shoddy products. This week we also learned that a police probe (no kidding!) was launched because secrecy was not honoured by Apple employees/partners.
Silicon Valley police are investigating what appears to be a lost Apple iPhone prototype purchased by a gadget blog, a transaction that may have violated criminal laws, a law enforcement official told CNET on Friday.
Apple is all about fake hype. It adds to the allure. It’s just hilarious when Apple has the police involved because its hype machine failed. If the “alien test” was applied (hypothetical extraterrestrials watching from above), Apple’s behaviour would make it akin to China’s [1, 2]. █
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