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11.19.11

Patent Trolls Thrive in the United States, Europe Can Keep Them Away

Posted in Patents at 9:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Salamanca

Summary: Patent trolls in the news and some quick remarks about them

THE patent realists, those who actually produce something other than lawsuits, carry on talking about the issues.

Pieter Hintjens, the former president of the FFII, says that “[f]f you naively define “innovation” as “making better products, cheaper”, you’ve not grasped the first thing about patents.” Patents are about preventing features from being included and raising costs, too. He adds that “[t]o understand how patents “help innovation” it helps to redefine “innovation” as “making money from patent claims”.” Later he quotes himself as saying that “[p]atents [are] a legislative parasite that consumes the industrial base, and replaces it with cartels and trolls.” [original]

According to this new article, the trolls epidemic is very real in Texas. To quote the opening paragraph of the story: “The small town of Marshall (population: less than 25,000) in the east Texas part of the Piney Woods forest – famous for wild hog hunting – is the self-proclaimed “Pottery Capital of the World”. More recently, however, it has become best known for lawsuits brought by “patent trolls” – companies that apply for or buy up catch-all patents (often from companies forced to liquidate their assets), hunt down other companies with patents that may have a degree of crossover with theirs – and then sue.

“There are office blocks with hundreds of these firms registered in Marshall, home of the US district court for the eastern district of Texas, which has a particularly favourable regime for patent trolls.

“Previously, many personal injury litigation cases were brought in east Texas but a reform of Texas tort law in 2003 put an end to that, leading to the boom in intellectual property (IP) litigation – and the slogan bandied about by lawyers: “From PI to IP”.”

This has largely been facilitated by a broken system that permits racketeering from the likes of supertroll Intellectual Ventures and Interval (both with strong Microsoft connections), whose claims are routinely analysed here and elsewhere. Here is the latest about Interval:

The reexaminations of the four Interval Licensing patents continue to move forward with the USPTO examiner issuing a second Action Closing Prosecution, this one on the ’682 patent. In this instance the examiner has now confirmed the sole remaining challenged independent claim (two were confirmed at the time the Non-Final Action was issued) and all of the original 13 dependent claims that were challenged. In addition, the examiner has accepted 20 of the 24 dependent claims added by the patent holder during this reexamination. In other words, this reexamination looks like it will result in the complete affirmation of this patent.

According to the FFII’s president, things are not getting any better as “Ericsson to turn into a patent troll” as well.

“Any company or manufacturer will need an agreement with Ericsson,” to quote this new report which also says:

Ericsson AB, the world’s largest maker of mobile-phone networks, aims to increase revenue from its more than 27,000 patents as devices from toys to energy meters get wireless access, its chief executive officer said.

“By 2015 two thirds of all consumer electronics devices will have some sort of connectivity,” Hans Vestberg said in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Stockholm. “Any company or manufacturer that wants to get in there will need an agreement with Ericsson.”

Ericsson, which helped develop the global system for mobile communications that enables handsets to latch onto networks from London to Jakarta, holds the industry’s largest portfolio of wireless communication patents. Generating more revenue from rights would help smooth out fluctuations in network orders.

Here is another bit of news about patent trolls going after Yelp and Groupon:

On November 7, a little known company called Mobile Commerce Framework (MCF) sued both Groupon and Yelp for patent infringement. Groupon, of recent IPO fame, sells coupons for use at local shops, restaurants, even doctors’ offices. Yelp has become something of a democratized Zagat guide, providing information and reviews of local establishments across the U.S. MCF, a vague enterprise based in California, appears to be a patent troll, or in politically correct terms, a patent-holding entity that does not produce any products. MCF alleges in its respective Groupon and Yelp complaints that both of the young, internet-based companies infringed upon Patent Number 7,693,752, owned by MCF. While patent wars among technology developers is nothing new, what is of particular interest in these cases is the breadth of the patent itself and the mobile device industry at large.

This is of course happening in the US, where patent trolls are very commonplace. The FFII’s president warns that the same might happen in Europe if the multinationals and/or patent lawyers get their way. To quote:

EU patent is an example where adoption where EU shows it will do everything possible to boost growth of trolls

There is a formal document linked there. They usually prefer to say “boost the economy” or something along those lines. █

Big Figures for Big Impact: Academics Versus Lobbyists

Posted in Patents at 9:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Education

Patent lawyers’ propaganda does not stack up

Summary: New numbers from Bessen et al. and the latest propaganda from a UK-based front group for ‘IP’

FOLLOWING the newest study from Bessen and his co-workers, there is press coverage estimating the cost of patent trolls at about half a trillion dollars. The figure as it appears in headlines might not be accurate, but it does have an impact and it can help squash patent trolls. We are quite used to seeing the Business Software Alliance commissioning the likes of IDC (at the behest of Microsoft et al.) to put out there some bogus figures which have the very opposite effect, so maybe this is a case of using scholarly work to battle lobbying. “Federation Against Software Theft” is another new body we saw emerging in a press release a couple of days ago. It says: “The new small claims service being introduced at the Patents County Court (PCC) in 2012 will help small and medium sized software businesses protect their copyright, trademarks and designs, reports the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST).”

Sounds like lobbying for patents on someone else’s behalf. At the bottom it says that “The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) was formed in 1984. FAST is a not-for-profit organisation limited by guarantee and wholly owned by its members. It was the first organisation to protect software publishers’ rights and advances its mission through education, enforcement and policy initiatives, together with promoting standards and best practice in the professional management of software. FAST advocates IP for growth. www.fast.org.uk ”

IP growth, eh? It’s funny that they have a .org.uk domain while they probably just serve as a front group of multinationals like Warner or Microsoft. Historically, we are less used to seeing this body fronting for patents and more used to seeing it involved in copyrights maximalism.

In other news, there is this continued push to put patents on just about anything, which leads to a stunning debate that ought to have been trivial. Some companies wish to patent life itself. To quote: “Oral arguments begin today on two separate cases, which don’t involve biotech firms but will affect the industry.”

It also says: “Both Akamai and McKesson have found support from two biopharma groups and one company in amicus curiae filings. Myriad Genetics offered insight into industry thinking: Since the Human Genome Project, the company noted, companies cannot obtain patents for fundamental composition of matter, since almost all of the human genome, all its encoded proteins, and analyses of those molecular markers, are deemed prior art.”

They actually wanted a patent on life and the Genome Project famously stopped them (to a degree). How did things get so bad to begin with? Not every piece of knowledge should be treated as “property” that can be sold of leased. It’s an outrageous suggestion to do so. Here is some news about patents being sold. It says that “Cryptocard has acquired the patents and intellectual property of GrIDsure, a UK pattern-based authentication start-up that became insolvent earlier this month. Term of the deal, announced Friday, were undisclosed.”

So basically this company was just a bunch of patents and it failed. Who would have guessed? Based on this news, there are predators out there looking just for patent monopolies to pick from defunct (or up for sale) companies so that they can extract fees without really doing anything. And as noted before, Doom 3 too is now suffering from patents, so despite goodwill from Carmack, we have no source code yet. “Games programming icon John Carmack,” says one article, “has been advised to rewrite some of the Doom 3 code to pave the way for its open-source release.” There is more about it here. The patent system does not encourage innovation, it is just an expensive nuisance as it stands. Software developers do not want that. █

Even Some Microsoft Apologists Appalled by Microsoft’s Patent Attack on Android/Linux

Posted in Site News at 9:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“Positively evil.”

Prior art

Prior art for Microsoft’s shoddy patents is ancient

Summary: As moves are being made to invalidate Microsoft patents and to report Microsoft’s extortionate nature, even some of its supporters take a step back

MICROSOFT continues to threaten Linux/Android and Google increasingly provides assurance to partners (maybe even financial backing). B&N did the noble thing by refusing to pay “protection money”. Google is likely to become involved now. One of the latest examples says that “Schmidt, on his stopover in Taipei said, “We tell our partners, including the ones here in Taiwan, we will support them. For example we have been supporting HTC in its dispute with Apple because we think that the Apple thing is not correct,” reported Reuters.”

Slashdot has a discussion about prior art to eliminate Microsoft’s extortion of Android and over at IDG someone who is typically a Microsoft apologist (Shimel) writes:

Alan Shimel:

B&N claims that all of these are “trivial” and “insignificant” in terms of Android’s use. They claim Microsoft is using these patents for minor functionality to hold Android hostage. It is not just licensing fees either, though they claim is Microsoft is receiving anywhere from $5 dollars to $15 dollars or more per copy of Android sold (which is equal to or more than what they charge for Windows Mobile licenses). Barnes & Nobles claims that along with paying the blood money Microsoft demands, Microsoft also makes license holders sign an “oppressive” agreement which gives Microsoft say over future hardware and software configurations and innovations. This according to B&N is to ensure that they keep Android from advancing too far, too fast for Microsoft to keep up. That is in many ways worse than the licensing fees. Microsoft wants to control future Android development and innovation. Positively evil.

So even Microsoft apologists are not in favour of Microsoft on this one. █

11.18.11

Links 18/11/2011: Android/Google Support at Motorola

Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How misinformation can still hurt FLOSS

    There seems to be a bit of confusion out there about what open source means in terms of security: specifically, there’s a pervasive notion that because software is open source, it’s inherently insecure.

    Seriously?

    Apparently these folks have completely forgotten about software like sendmail, Apache, MySQL, SSH, and oh, what’s that platform called… the one with the penguin… oh yeah: Linux. The applications and platforms are regarded in the industry has highly secure and generally free of malware in the wild.

    And yet, when Google Open Source Programs Manager Chris DiBona recently quoted an article that said that “critics have been pounding the table for years about open source being inherently insecure,” I decided to locate that article… I found myself running smack into what I believe is a serious error.

  • Open source biometrics technology for mobile devices, PCs and servers

    DigitalPersona has open sourced its new MINEX-certified FingerJetFX fingerprint feature extraction technology.

    FingerJetFX, Open Source Edition (OSE), is free, portable software that device manufacturers and application developers can use to convert bulky fingerprint images into small, mathematical representations called fingerprint “templates” for efficient storage or comparison.

  • FOSS over Miami

    Here’s a little Larry-the-Free-Software-Guy history for those of you who don’t already know it: I grew up in Miami and didn’t move to San Francisco until I was 29 (and that was the summer of 1987, so you can do the math). More specifically, I grew up in a strip of unincorporated Dade County sandwiched between North Miami and North Miami Beach. So you’ll understand why I have a tendency to pull for the Dolphins and the U on occasion, and I don’t think twice about driving 30 or so miles down Highway 1 into Monterey County to visit The Whole Enchilada because it has the only Key Lime Pie in this region close enough to be considered Miami-class. Listening to Jimmy Buffett puts me back among the palm trees, retroactively sweating in the 80 degree/90 percent humidity coziness for which South Florida is known worldwide.

  • Web Browsers

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Nov. 21: Free Software’s Stallman

      Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, will present a visiting lecture from 7-9 p.m., Monday, Nov. 21, in Mitchell Hall at the University of Delaware.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Wintel is Fragmented

    UPDATE A part of the changes to make “8″ will be a consolidation of re-re-reboots into one reboot per month where possible. The trolls here who claim re-re-reboots are no problem for competent users are again proven wrong. Even M$ admits re-re-reboots are a problem that needs fixing. Of course re-re-reboots don’t bother those of us who use GNU/Linux because we get to choose when and if we reboot. I have enjoyed that capability for a decade and love it.

  • The OS Wars: We Have A Winner

    You would not have shown your face at, say, ApacheCon, with a MacBook.

  • Google’s Brin and wife plop half-million into Wikipedia’s hat

    The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit publisher of Wikipedia and its affiliate sites, has received a $500,000 grant from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, a philanthropic organization set up by Google cofounder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of “personal genetic information” website 23andMe.

  • Security/BIOS

    • Attacks on secure boot

      This is interesting. It’s obviously lacking in details yet, but it does highlight one weakness of secure boot. The security for secure boot is all rooted in the firmware – there’s no external measurement to validate that everything functioned as expected. That means that if you can cause any trusted component to execute arbitrary code then you’ve won. So, what reads arbitrary user data? The most obvious components are any driver that binds to user-controlled hardware, any filesystem driver that reads user-provided filesystems and any signed bootloader that reads user-configured data. A USB drive could potentially trigger a bug in the USB stack and run arbitrary code. A malformed FAT filesystem could potentially trigger a bug in the FAT driver and run arbitrary code. A malformed bootloader configuration file or kernel could potentially trigger a bug in the bootloader and run arbitrary code. It may even be possible to find bugs in the PE-COFF binary loader. And once you have the ability to run arbitrary code, you can replace all the EFI entry points and convince the OS that everything is fine anyway.

    • UEFI Debugging Tools

      One of the many things I work on is UEFI support. It’s an interesting thing to work on, in part because there’s a lot of new development and it’s at a fairly low level, which is just the sort of thing I like.

      Often during UEFI development, we’ll see a bug and need to diagnose whether it’s a problem with the hardware, the firmware, the bootloader, the OS kernel, or even a userland program. One case of this is when console graphics don’t work right.

    • GPT disks in a BIOS world

      Starting with Fedora 16 we’re installing using GPT disklabels by default, even on BIOS-based systems. This is worth noting because most BIOSes have absolutely no idea what GPT is, which you’d think would create some problems. And, unsurprisingly, it does. Shock. But let’s have an overview.

  • Finance

    • State orders Goldman Sachs to repay investors for misleading sales tactics

      Florida’s securities regulators announced a settlement agreement with Goldman, Sach & Co. that has required the investment firm to back back an estimate $20 million in so-called “auction rate securities” because the company claimed they were liquid and secure when they were not.

    • Middle-class areas shrink as America divides into ‘two-tiered society’ of rich and poor

      The portion of American families living in middle-income neighborhoods has declined significantly since 1970, according to a new study, as rising income inequality left a growing share of families in neighborhoods that are mostly low-income or mostly affluent.

    • Our friends from Goldman Sachs…

      Serious and competent, they weigh up the pros and cons and study all of the documents before giving an opinion. They have a fondness for economics, but these luminaries who enter into the temple only after a long and meticulous recruitment process prefer to remain discreet.

      Collectively they form an entity that is part pressure group, part fraternal association for the collection of information, and part mutual aid network. They are the craftsmen, masters and grandmasters whose mission is “to spread the truth acquired in the lodge to the rest of the world.”

      According to its detractors, the European network of influence woven by American bank Goldman Sachs (GS) functions like a freemasonry. To diverse degrees, the new European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi, the newly designated Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Monti, and the freshly appointed Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos are totemic figures in this carefully constructed web.

  • Privacy

    • Wintel is Fragmented

      When I wrote about Google making it possible to opt-out of their Wi-Fi access point mapping program, I made a mistake. I thought Google was still using its StreetView cars to pick up Wi-Fi locations. Nope, Eitan Bencuya, a Google spokesperson, tells me that Google no longer uses StreetView cars to collect location information. So, how does Google collect Wi-Fi location data? They use you.

  • Civil Rights

    • Going Incognito

      The Internet can be a dangerous place. Once it was the scam artists and the damage they wrought that users had to watch. These days it seems it’s more governments trying to oppress citizens and so-called respectable companies looking to track and sell your movements that strike fear in the hearts of Penguistas. Perhaps it’s time to go Incognito.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • EU Adopts Resolution Against US Domain Seizures

      The European Parliament has adopted a resolution which criticizes domain name seizures of “infringing” websites by US authorities. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.” With this stance the European Parliament joins an ever-growing list of opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act .

IRC Proceedings: November 18th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 7:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#boycottnovell-social log

#techbytes log

Enter the IRC channels now

IRC Proceedings: November 17th, 2011

Posted in News Roundup at 12:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#boycottnovell-social log

#techbytes log

Enter the IRC channels now

MOSAID, Microsoft, and Antitrust

Posted in Microsoft at 11:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Mosaid homepage
Screenshot of the homepage of the patent troll Microsoft is feeding

Summary: MOSAID, which we wrote about many times before, is now a subject of more calls for antitrust/regulatory action

FOR over a month or two Techrights has foreseen Microsoft using MOSAID as a patent troll and proxy against Linux not just because of anti-Red Hat lawsuits but also because of the Nokia (versus Android) plot. We have begun building a wiki page about MOSAID and we shall keep it updated as long as Microsoft and its mole at Nokia try using this troll as a proxy. According to this article, MOSAID is coming under fire for being part of anti-competitive abuses:

Quinn Emanuel, another fabulous law firm, has joined the team representing Barnes & Noble before the ITC. And Google is in the mix too, filing an objection to Microsoft’s request for a shortened time for Google to respond to its motion. This is getting good. Barnes & Noble has filed a truly hilarious compilation of prior art, in a supplemental notice of prior art, which shows me that it’s still not too late to keep finding more, if you happen to know of any. And it has asked for a letter rogatory to go after evidence regarding MOSAID, a Canadian firm, and its deal with Microsoft and Nokia via documents and a deposition of the CEO. MOSAID doesn’t wish to voluntarily turn over anything.

MOSAID is one heck of a rancid thing and so is Microsoft, which pulls MOSAID’s strings to distort competition. We are now seeing just how ridiculous the USPTO is and the extent to which Microsoft exploits this malfunction based on Microsoft boosters who write: [via]

It almost seems that way based on a newly surfaced patent application from the Redmond company. The filing describes a computer system that would monitor behavior in the workplace with the goal of getting workers to stop each other people off during meetings, and convincing bosses to stop bugging their direct reports on their lunch breaks, among many other bad workplace habits — but at no small cost to workplace privacy.

Microsoft: is it a patent troll or a company that produces things? The truth may be somewhere in between. █

5 Years After Microsoft Deal OpenSUSE Releases Hardly Celebrated

Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE at 11:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Christmas

Summary: Another quick look at coverage of OpenSUSE 12.1

OPENSUSE 12.1 has been out for a couple of days and it still does not receive coverage from the corporate press. There is review of the distribution by Swapnil Bhartiya at Muktware and few more reviews in Linux sites. There are benchmarks from Michael Larabel over at Phoronix (including boot performance) and some blog posts that qualify as news even though they are informal. A lot of the coverage comes from existing or former Novell staff (OpenSUSE community manager in this case) or Linux advocates such as Scott Merrill at TechCrunch, Sean at Server Watch, and staff at OS News.

SoftPedia just posts some screenshots and the OpenSUSE site moves on to other topics such as WebYaST. To quote:

So the benefit is to login on a target linux machine from a computer which

* has not to be a unix machine and
* is without any VPN configuration stuff.

In summary, OpenSUSE enjoys none of the mainstream coverage it used to get. The OpenSUSE Boosters may not like to hear it, but it’s true. █

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