12.23.11
Posted in Microsoft, Patents at 3:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A roundup of Microsoft patent lobbying and aggression that go on mostly unnoticed
A stacked panel was described by Microsoft as “a stacked deck: it is packed with people who, on the face of things, should be neutral, but who are in fact strong supporters of our technology. The key to stacking a panel is being able to choose the moderator. Most conference organizers allow the moderator to select die panel, so if you can pick the moderator, you win. Since you can’t expect representatives of our competitors to speak on your behalf, you have to get the moderator to agree to having only “independent ISVs” on the panel. No one from Microsoft or any other formal backer of the competing technologies would be allowed -just ISVs who have to use this stuff in the “real world.” Sounds marvellously independent doesn’t it? In feet, it allows us to stack the panel with ISVs that back our cause. Thus, the “independent” panel ends up telling the audience that our technology beats the others hands down. Get the press to cover this panel, and you’ve got a major win on your hands.” See the full Microsoft document [PDF] for more details.
We already know, based on prior incidents, that Microsoft loves to stack panels, e.g. for OOXML. Microsoft and its front groups are entering another forum, where just like the Gates Foundation agents they spread the pro-patents talking points. Gates has more political power outside of Microsoft and we previously showed what he and his new minions/’foundamentalists’ do on the subject of patents. As one good journalist points out:
In short, Gates is a spent force. He says he will not lead Microsoft again as rumoured in some media outlets recently – but then it wouldn’t matter even if he did.
Microsoft’s MSN says that a “[s]oftware group spends $190k on lobbying in 3Q,” but this number from a third-party source is far lower than the real amount and patent policy is part of the lobbying, with focus on the USPTO:
The Software and Information Industry Association spent $190,000 on lobbying on such issues as intellectual property in the third quarter, according to federal disclosure reports.
[...]
The group lobbied Congress, the Education Department, the Commerce Department, the State Department, the U.S. Copyright Office, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
As we showed before, Bill Gates and his good friend who is the world’s biggest patent troll have also spent money lobbying for worse patent laws. Microsoft lobbies on the subject from many different directions, usually using proxies that it sponsors. Contrary to propaganda about “protection”, this is against the interest of citizens, but they just never get access to the ears of politicians, unlike for instance Microsoft’s Mundie [1, 2, 3].
Craig Mundie Is lobbying for Microsoft again, based on Microsoft’s own site. He lobbies on the subject of patents in Europe and the FFII’s president claims that “Microsoft is using Barroso, the President of the European Commission, to push for more patents and “innovation” salad”. In relation to the stack panel we wrote about earlier, he notes that:
IPweek: ACT, Microsoft and BSA discussing on the same panel, sounds like a Microsoft panel on its own
Mike Sax [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] is part of ACT (Microsoft front group) and Ronald Zink is from Microsoft. Here is another new example of:
Microsof’s association of SMEs ACT calls for software patents via a central EU patent court
Microsoft’s patent troll, Intellectual Ventures, is also busy doing its nasty things and “[t]heir pattern of behavior indicates they are acting as a proxy for Microsoft,” notes this one poster. Quoting in context:
It should also be pointed out that Intellectual Ventures targets companies that are major competitors to Microsoft such as makers of Android phones. IV has over 35,000 patents and there is virtual certainty that every company that writes software is infringing on at least one of their patents but they are highly selective about who they extort money from. Their pattern of behavior indicates they are acting as a proxy for Microsoft. If Microsoft were to file suits they would be subject to counter claims but since IV produces nothing they are immune from counter claims of patent infringement.
Lodsys and its connection to Intellectual Ventures has just been mentioned by Timothy B. Lee, who spots a common misconception and rebuts it:
Software Patents and Barriers to Entry
On one level this just begs the question. Obviously, if software patents promote innovation, that’s a strong argument for allowing them. But if software patents actually discorage innovation, as I and people who’ve crunched the numbers have argued they do, then people who care about entrepreneurial innovation should be equally anxious to get rid of them. Rosen doesn’t really engage in the arguments that I and others have offered that software patents are bad for innovation. He seems to just take it as a given that patents promote innovation.
But since Rosen brought up Angry Birds, I’d like to zoom in on the specific case of mobile apps. Too often, the patent debate occurs in broad abstractions, so it’s important to pay attention to the actual innovators being harmed by software patents.
So let’s talk about Lodsys, a patent troll (with alleged ties to uber-troll Intellectual Ventures) that began suing independent mobile app developers for patent infringement earlier this year. Lodsys’s holds broad patents related to the purchase of digital content over a network, and claims dozens of firms have infringed its patents. Few if any of the defendants in these cases copied from the Lodsys patents, but they (allegedly) stumbled across the broad concepts in the patents and are now facing the threat of a lawsuit.
“Shuffling patents around among shell companies and suing the same company twice with the same patent” is another thing we are seeing covered as follows:
We’ve written about famed patent troll Erich Spangenberg and the variety of shell companies under his control a few times in the past. He’s the guy who a court told to pay $4 million for shuffling patents around among shell companies and suing the same company twice with the same patent, despite a settlement the first time that precluded future suits. Spangenberg is also famous for his motto, “sue first, ask questions later,” in part because he wants his lawsuits to take place in Eastern Texas.
A company that is headed by a lot of former Microsoft executives has just gone hostile with patents as well:
A lawsuit has been filed by Juniper Networks, which has accused Palo Alto Networks of allegedly infringing six of its patents relating to firewall technology.
In the lawsuit, filed 19 December in a federal court in Wilmington, Delaware, Juniper said that while the technology used in its next-generation firewalls were invented by the founders of Palo Alto Networks, the patents actually belonged to Juniper Networks.
To be fair, others do similar things by choosing aggression, but just because others are doing this does not make it acceptable. Microsoft is generally very unique in 1) its attacks on Linux and 2) its operation via proxies. Nasty yet evasive. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents at 3:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Image from Wikimedia
Summary: A quick overview encompassing Microsoft’s latest actions against Linux, using software patents and Linux-taxing minions like Tuxera
MICROSOFT is attacking Linux/Android with lawsuits as well as extortion that goes on behind the scenes, away from the sight of regulators. The Microsoft booster covers this along with others who neglect to denounce Microsoft. The anti-Linux lawsuits all started nearly 3 years ago when Microsoft sued TomTom over FAT and Tuxera now helps Microsoft spread this kind of Linux tax on file systems, using new products which nobody really needs. As Zonker put it some days ago:
Patent Nastiness
One of the biggest disappointments for me in the 12-plus years that I’ve been writing about technology is the increasing amount of time and attention that one has to devote to patent lawsuits. Unfortunately, that trend doesn’t seem to be reversing itself.
A quick, cursory search for “cloud” in just the title of patent claims shows more than 181 hits. (Though, to be fair, some of them are unrelated to cloud services – like this one.)
The “good” news is that the major players may have little to gain from suing each other, since they all have major patent portfolios. The bad news is that patent trolls have nothing to lose from suing Amazon, Microsoft, VMware, Rackspace or any of the other companies doing business in the cloud. I expect to start seeing some shakedowns around cloud-related patents in 2012.
Ironically, Zonker, the author, chose to work with the company that had sidled with Microsoft on patents.
Microsoft is attacking Linux very hard because it is Linux that dominates in devices, whereas Microsoft has no such products left and thus no appearance in CES, either (we won’t go into that bit of Microsoft bashing today, but Microsoft has become pathetic in this area). The only thing Microsoft can hope to win now is frivolous lawsuits with trivial patents. To quote:
Motorola Mobility’s Android devices infringe on aspects of one Microsoft patent, according to a preliminary ruling by the International Trade Commission (ITC). But in a move that has left both sides claiming victory, the judge declined to find Motorola Mobility in violation of six other Microsoft patents.
Groklaw has this update about Oracle’s case against Android, which now sees 700,000 devices activated per day (rendering Linux victorious in another area). “On December 6,” writes Prof. Webbink, “Judge Alsup issued a tentative order with respect to Google’s third motion in limine seeking to exclude portions of Dr. Cockburn’s (Oracle expert) damages report. (642 [PDF; Text]) In that tentative report Judge Alsup had largely sided with Google. However, Judge Alsup gave each party the opportunity to weigh in on the tentative order, and they have now done so.”
In this broken patent system even the use of a programming language can be viewed as a patent violation. Oracle’s case is blurring gaps between copyrights and patents and the former president of the FFII writes:
Ah, effin Ch4 is done. Last line: “Burn the patent system to the ground. There can be no compromise with a fatal disease.”
It also spreads like a disease, currently to China. Some think that reform is the solution, but reform can come in all sorts of forms and even more things worse. To quote:
As we seek to further calibrate the delicate balance so critical to our regime of incentivizing innovation, we should reform software patents, not repeal them.
It is not about incentive to innovate but about monopoly privileges. Microsoft is a great example of it and it is not alone among those examples. We will write about what Microsoft does behind the scenes also in the next post. █
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Posted in Australia, Law, Patents at 3:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Bits of important news from Australia and New Zealand, less so from Europe
IN THIS status quo of “patents as products” we keep hearing about patent-pending hype/bragging rights from incognito companies. They do not always have products, but they sure have pieces of papers with an idea on them. The situation is worse in the States than in most other countries and Australia, for example, still has activism fighting the issue:
When it comes to software patents, Melbourne developer Ben Sturmfels is sure of one thing: his campaign to end them in their entirety will succeed in the long run.
[...]
Though he is a free software advocate, Sturmfels campaign against software patents extends to all genres of software. Patents can affect proprietary software as much as they do free and open source software, he pointed out when I met him recently.
In February, Sturmfels’ petition was accepted by the government’s Petitions Committee, in three batches. “Collecting 1000 signatures on paper is a hard task and a huge one in terms of the amount of paper needed,” he said with a grin.
More recently we saw some similar activism in New Zealand, where there is a danger that the “Software patent law in New Zealand [might] be overhidden by the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA).” Here is another article about it which says: “A pending international trade treaty could override a recent New Zealand law change that excluded software from patent protection.
“All the political parties supported the controversial change. But the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) could see the US pro-patent view override our local law makers.
“Last month, I met Trade Minister Hon Tim Groser and the government’s chief trade negotiator to get the inside word on what was happening with the TPPA, particularly in relation to technology and intellectual property (IP).
“Mr Groser’s openness and candour was excellent and I can’t speak highly enough about the minister’s willingness to engage and discuss these issues.”
The situation in New Zealand has been eerily similar at times to the situation in Europe — a situation so depressing that we prefer not to write about until after Christmas.
Watch how some people are treating patents like property. To quote a new example:
The Government has published draft legislation for its Finance Bill 2012, which includes draft measures aimed at creating improved conditions for business investment and growth in the UK. The proposals include a new tax scheme intended to reduce corporation tax for profits arising from patents, dubbed the “Patent Box”.
“Law” sites keep promoting software patents in the UK, under seemingly innocent titles. We are going to address software patents in Europe in a later series of posts later in the month. We need to do some activism to defend European software developers from the bureaucrats, paper-pushers, and multinational monopolists. █
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Posted in Novell, OpenSUSE at 2:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Systemic error
Summary: An article of interest from Phoronix
THE roundup of December’s Novell news is about to come, but among OpenSUSE posts of all sorts we found this article from Phoronix — an article that got its author berated in the forums (typical Novell bullies). To quote:
OpenSUSE 12.1 introduced support for systemd but it didn’t defenestrate SysVinit as there are still some dependencies on this older init system. However, there’s a proposal now to completely phase out SysVinit within openSUSE and it’s been met by some mixed views.
We wrote about systemd in OpenSUSE a few weeks/months ago. █
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Posted in Antitrust, Courtroom, Microsoft, Novell at 2:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The WordPerfect case with its imminent future is reported to have approached settlement, but experts beg to differ
THE Novell of Mr. Noorda is said to have entered settlement talks with Microsoft and according to Groklaw Microsoft made a motion to dismiss. Based on the filings that Pamela Jones shows:
Microsoft intends to renew its motion to dismiss as a matter of law Novell’s antitrust case in Novell v. Microsoft. It sent a letter [PDF] to Judge Frederick Motz informing him of its intention, saying it will file by January 13th. I gather it would prefer to avoid a second jury trial. TechFlash reports Microsoft lawyers will claim that Novell lacks sufficient evidence to support its claims. And IDG’s John Ribeiro provides more details on Network World. So, no settlement, as Law.com reports: “Despite the close call, Microsoft’s lawyers say they won’t pay to make the case go away. ‘There are no settlement discussions,’ Sullivan & Cromwell partner David Tulchin told us. ‘Microsoft believes firmly that Novell’s claims have no merit,’ he added.”
Microsoft typically pays its victims to just disappear, but perhaps not this time. █
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