02.06.12
Posted in Patents at 8:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Challenging the old misconception that patents are beneficial to anything but few multinationals and their patent lawyers
PATENT monopolies form the basis of business of some ruthless multinationals — companies with so many patents that nobody is able to enter their field without fear of litigation. Patents are a form of territory-marking and they are an obstacle or a barrier to the number of people working in a particular field. Surely this cannot result in more innovation. I understand this as a researcher and programmer in the field of computer vision, where people habitually get US patents on matrix operations. That’s mathematics.
According to this news article, an award goes to a company that helps groom the portfolio of patent monopolisers:
On Friday afternoon, Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard announced the winner of a Super Bowl XLVI contest for Indianapolis-area startups presented jointly by Develop Indy and Startup America Partnership. The competition sought to recognize a high-potential startup in the Indianapolis area while raising awareness of Indianapolis as a great place to launch a business.
The winner was Indianapolis-based legal technology startup PatentStatus, a cloud-based software-as-a-service that enables organizations with large patent portfolios to implement a virtual patent marking strategy on their corporate web sites.
Now, let’s think about it for a second. Here we have proprietary and remote software which targets what is essentially a company with many monopolies. By helping such entities mark their territory, so to speak, this Indianapolis-based company essentially does more to scare potential competition. In essence, this depresses innovation and provides yet more examples of how patents stifle progress. In some places, in order to stride forward, employees are actively encouraged not to look at patents — as means of avoiding wilful infringement.
According to a reader of ours, there is the White House response which says “overly broad patents on software-based inventions may stifle the very innovative and creative open source software development community..”
“Like so many others,” notes the reader, “it intentionally or accidentally mistakes the problem as being one for developers, when the issue of patents is really about users. It’s 2012 and it’s tiring to see that canard still being used.”
Here is the Glyn Moody piece that he cites. Moody concludes with the following words:
What’s interesting here is that open source was nowhere mentioned in the original petition. So it shows a commendable savviness on the part of the person who actually wrote the reply – Quentin Palfrey, Senior Advisor to CTO for Jobs and Competitiveness at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy – that much of the concern about software patents is the deletorious effect they have on free software.
So even if the e-petition failed to get President Obama to agree to abolish software patents (admittedly a bit of a long shot), it did have the beneficial effect of eliciting this strong vote in favour of open source from a very high-profile site.
When will US policy-makers realise that patents — and software patents in particular — are a sham that benefit nobody but a tiny proportion (maybe under 0.001%) of the population? There are high costs associated with externalities. █
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02.05.12
Posted in GNU/Linux, GPL, Microsoft, Mono, Oracle, Patents at 10:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Building an “open” stack with proprietary Microsoft?
Summary: Another look at the OpenStack situation, why Microsoft should not be allowed to enter, and more about patent and copyright complications
SOME days ago we wrote about OpenStack's situation when it comes to Microsoft. Later we showed what Microsoft boosters were doing to spin it as good news. Well, according to this new article:
OpenStack is supposed to be a vendor agnostic open community for building an open source cloud stack. And it is, unless you don’t pull your own weight- or if you’re Microsoft.
I know there is plenty of vitriol in the open source world towards Microsoft and certainly some of that has now surfaced in the OpenStack community.
OpenStack is now removing the Hyper-V capabilities from its stack, after Microsoft didn’t maintain the code. That happens in projects all the time, just think about the Linux kernel where Microsoft has had similar challenges and hey for that matter so has Google.
The hostility towards Microsoft has a lot to do with this monopolist’s continued attacks on Open Source projects. We need not whitewash Microsoft here or claim the above to be an irrational move of irrational hatred. Never mind the fact that Hyper-V is proprietary and not open. Microsoft continues to attack Linux with all sorts of proxies like SCO as well as patent trolls. There are those who wish to just abolish it all, especially patents. Realising the idiocy of many patents, there are some who speak about the harms of patents as a whole, not just software patents. To quote:
“Is this Patent full of crap?”
[...]
The ideas are those of patent lawyer Andrew Schulman, but the story is full of insight on a patent lawyer’s thinking and offers real clues into why the patent system is such a mess–complexity compounded, full of precedents that ordinary humans will find puzzling at best.
Earlier we wrote about many patents becoming just junk. Even Oracle seems to be moving further away from patents and is now trying to use copyrights against Android. Quoting Groklaw:
Today is the due date for Dr. Cockburn’s third attempt at a damages report on behalf of Oracle, and just to make sure Oracle knows what needs to be submitted, Judge Alsup has issue a reminder order. (709 [PDF; Text]) The judge wants to see not only the report but also all of the related reports and studies that support it.
Let’s remember that Microsoft has put code with its copyrights inside Linux and the same goes for Mono. They try to make those things more adaptable to Microsoft’s proprietary software. In the case of Mono, there is lawsuit risk too. Anything with Microsoft in it tends to be tainted. Just see what happened with FAT. █
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Posted in Apple, Patents at 10:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The Apple assault doesn’t blend
Summary: Apple products get banned (for the time being) after Apple decided to attack Linux-supporting competitors and then received some blowback
APPLE’S opening of a jar of worms has led to reactionary lawsuits that sometimes trouble Apple and discourage the original strategists (those in favour of suing Android). Some of Apple’s legal leadership has already left or was fired. We covered this at one time.
According to the corporate press and the Irish Times, Apple has its day in court and the outcome is not as Apple originally planned:
Motorola Mobility has won a second German patent ruling against Apple over its iCloud service allowing the company to block sales of devices including iPhone and iPad if they use the software that accesses it.
Apple started this whole war and there is an attempt at deterrence from the defendants. Citing a Microsoft lobbyist, ZDNet tells the distorted version of the story, where Google and Motorola are somehow the “aggressors”. To quote:
Apple was forced to remove several iOS devices from sale on its German online store on Thursday as a result of its patent battles with Motorola.
The iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and 3G iPads are currently not available from the company’s web store in Germany following a ruling in favour of Motorola relating to FRAND-pledged patents declared essential to 3G standards.
With more rumours based on Apple patents (like this one) we expect Apple to carry on with its patent strategy, living and dying by the sword (the man behind this strategy is already dead). Apple does not even get sympathy from people who claim to like Apple products:
I like Apple products. God knows I own and use enough of them. But, I hate their out-sourcing business practices and their world-wide anti-Android lawsuits. So, when I learned this morning that Motorola Mobility had won a permanent injunction against Apple’s iCloud service in Germany because of a patent violation and Motorola had followed that up with another patent victory, which has forced Apple to take all its older phones, 3G and 4 and all iPads off its German online store (German language link), I was pleased.
Apple has made enemies it did not need to make. █
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Patents at 10:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The rise of the junk patents and what we are taught about them by the news, including some news about the unitary patent in Europe
THE UNITARY patent [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] drew opposition in several countries and also among some British MPs. Despite all that we know about the harms of patent maximalism, patent lawyers in Europe keep promoting it and argue for the inevitability of this looting of public knowledge:
It certainly is a sign of progress (although some would say in the wrong direction) that the Secretariat of the EU Council is about to finalise the Regulation for implementing the Unitary Patent (see Document CM 1068/12). Apparently, the dice is cast with respect to the Unitary Patent and, thus, with respect to the highly controversial question as to whether or not Articles 6 to 8 (effects of patents) should remain in the proposed Regulation so that substantive patent law will be subject to review by the Court of Justice of the European Union in future.
We have not heard about the unitary patent in a while, which either means that the public is left out or that no significant progress is being made. Lawyers have their own interests here and therefore a bias too. Over in Australia we see a similar type of crowd doing something similar. Patent boosters in Australia argue in favour of software patenting. It’s from a pro-patents blog that says:
The US Supreme Court has established three exceptions to the broad principle that all machines, processes, manufactures and compositions of matter are patentable under 35 USC §101 – laws of nature, physical phenomena and abstract ideas.
In Australia, it is settled law that the ‘manner of manufacture’ test for patent-eligibility excludes laws of nature, mere discoveries, ideas, scientific theories, schemes and plans. Mathematical formulae and algorithms are also excluded, to the extent that claims are not meaningfully limited to their use as part of a patentable practical application.
It can therefore be seen that, while the precise terms used differ in the two countries, there is a broad similarity between the fields of excluded subject matter in Australia and the US.
As we showed last year, there was some lobbying in Australia and a perpetual attempt to spread the venom of the US patent system to another continent (just like in Europe). It’s not about innovation, it is about greed. When multinationals are calling out the alligators with some more litigators (new hirings) they do nothing to promote innovation. Usually they merely impede it. Here is an example of another software patent being granted. Some of them are so embarrassingly trivial and CNET catches up with old news about Microsoft withdrawing one such embarrassing patents among several that it uses to extort Linux/Android (this one in the B&N case). To quote:
Microsoft withdrew a patent from the list of ones that it claims Barnes & Noble violates with its Nook e-readers in the software giant’s case against the bookseller before the U.S. International Trade Commission.
The ITC is not done looking at the anti-competitive patent misuses by Microsoft. Microsoft lobbyists, however, try to change the story. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Patents at 9:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: GMO, a robbery of the right of reproduction (and a potential health hazard), is promoted by Bill Gates for profit, whereupon critics strike back
TECHRIGHTS covers patents and it also covers Microsoft, so the area of globalist/monopoliser Gates Foundation promoting GMO is very relevant to us. This post will not repeat arguments we made before, either about Gates’ promotion of GMO monopolies or the dangers of GMO (see the wiki page for an index of previous posts on that). Instead, it will draw some attention to more controversial sites which notice how Bill Gates is bribing the press while Natural News cites it and writes:
Aaron Dykes of Prison Planet recently gave an insightful TV news presentation analyzing The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s influence over the media to promote their “world health and agriculture” agendas while soft pedaling the downside of all they’re doing.
Such items as “Gates using his money to save lives … etc” have been appearing in several news outlets, including ABC news (2). Meanwhile, items that question Gates’ “philanthropic” endeavors are muffled or marginalized. Those endeavors deal with vaccinations, sterilization, and GMOs. These are depopulation favorites.
The Gates Foundation donated $1.5 million to ABC’s News Project “Be the change; Save a Life,” extolling the virtues of ensuring Africans don’t starve. The NY Times mentioned Gates as the principal private funding source and adviser for world food policy and agricultural development.
In a less controversial site we find this toned-down interview which explains what Gates ignores (they pretend he doesn’t know that, politely enough):
The Flip-Side: What Bill Gates Doesn’t Know About GMOs
[...]
TakePart: In the introduction to his letter, Bill Gates cites the Green Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, saying scientists created new seed varieties for rice, wheat, and maize, and that this resulted in increased crop yield and a decrease in extreme poverty around the world. Do you agree that this is a model to use moving forward?
Heather Pilatic: The Green Revolution is a story that some people like to tell, but it has little basis in historical fact. Take the Green Revolution’s origins in 1940s Mexico, for instance. It was not really about feeding the world; Mexico was a food exporter at the time. Rather, the aims included stabilizing restive rural populations in our neighbor to the south, and making friends with a government that at the time was selling supplies to the World War II Axis powers and confiscating oil fields held by Standard Oil (a funding source for the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the key architects of the Green Revolution).
We can also learn from India, the Green Revolution’s next stop after Mexico. India embraced the Green Revolution model of chemical-intensive agriculture. Now it is the world’s second biggest rice grower with surplus grain in government warehouses. Yet India has more starving people than sub-Saharan Africa — at more than 200 million, that’s nearly a quarter of its population. History shows that a narrow focus on increasing crop yield through chemical-seed packages reduces neither hunger nor poverty.
So no, we do not agree that the Green Revolution offers a promising model for addressing poverty.
This is not about addressing poverty; it’s about exploiting the poor for yet more profit while hijacking the voice of the poor. The whole thing is evil propaganda for people who run society. █
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02.03.12
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Image credited to Groklaw.net
Summary: A few updates of greater importance where the Linux situation is discussed in the context of Android and Novell
THE patent assault on Android is one that we cover here several times per week because Android is perhaps the best example of Linux in the mainstream (criticisms aside) and it helps show the lengths to which Microsoft and Apple would go to derail Linux, even with software patents as we predicted for more than half a decade.
Professor Webbink from Groklaw is perhaps the best source of news about the Oracle vs. Google case, which he claims to be moving along as follows:
Just because the Oracle v. Google case has not been set for trial (and won’t be until at least the time at which Oracle provides its third attempt at a damages report) does not mean the court can’t move the case along, and that is what Judge Alsup has done with his latest order. In an attempt to narrow the issues to be argued at trial, Judge Alsup’s latest order (708 [PDF; Text]) focuses on the copyright issues and directs the parties to provide opening briefs in which they identify each remaining claim of copyright liability and the affirmative defenses to each such claim. In addition, the parties are to identify those issues that should be resolved by the court and those underlying facts that first need to be decided by the jury.
Groklaw continues to face a barrage of FUD from Microsoft boosters who continue to spin/modify the news (in this case about OpenStack wanting to toss Microsoft out) and Microsoft lobbyists who are distorting the story about the ITC and then seeding disinformation in the corporate press along with pro-Microsoft blogs. Pamela Jones from Groklaw debunks the nonsense and explains:
I’m seeing a couple of articles about an initial determination by the ITC against Barnes & Noble on its patent misuse defense, and there’s quite a lot of spin on the ball, thanks to the usual suspects. They are reading a lot into a title of a sealed document. I see many misstatements.
So I’ll explain a little about the process, so you can understand it. For one thing, the title of the sealed ITC initial determination is called an *initial* determination for a reason. It means it isn’t final. The final one comes later. Initial determinations can be reviewed by the full ITC if the defendant petitions for review and even one Commissioner says yes.
Litigation isn’t like football. It is rarely suddenly over.
Most importantly, the materials and depositions Barnes & Noble is seeking in discovery from Nokia and MOSAID have not yet arrived, although the ITC did grant Barnes & Noble’s motion to ask Finland and Canada to provide them, and that’s still ongoing, so there is likely more to go, even at the ITC. So with those materials not yet in hand, Microsoft’s statement today that this means the defense is meritless is… well… to put it kindly premature. I mean, if a determination is made without the complete record being available, what does it mean?
The case is important because it’s about Microsoft’s patent abuses against Android, as well as some of the patent trolls Microsoft is using. Last year we wrote a great deal about Novell’s patents, which went to CPTN, i.e. to Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and EMC (3 of these are Android foes). Here is a new article about the Department of Justice. Part of it says:
Another example of international cooperation was the Antitrust Division’s close cooperation “with the German Federal Cartel Office on the acquisition of certain patents and patent applications from Novell Inc. by CPTN Holdings (a holding company owned by Microsoft Inc., Oracle Corp., Apple Inc. and EMC Corp.). This was the first merger enforcement cooperation the Division had had with Germany in 20 years.”
Novell became just a pile of patents, which gave Microsoft ammunition with which to threaten UNIX/Linux. The authorities needed to step in after the OSI and FSF had filed a formal complaint. Here is the story of another company which rapidly becomes just a pile of patents. It says: “Remember, back in August, shortly after Google’s purchase of Motorola, Kodak looked like the next company in line for an IP-driven payday. Analysts looking at the high valuations of the Novell, Nortel and Motorola portfolios estimated Kodak had $3 billion in IP assets alone: with a market capitalization of just $700 million, it seemed like easy money. Kodak’s stock rose accordingly in anticipation of a white knight around the corner.”
This is of course not innovation. It’s a case of virtual “goods” being used to make lawyers richer and interfere with fair competition.
Novell, by the way, has just been assigned another patent, according to this roundup from January 22nd. Any new patents in Novell’s hands might eventually be passed to Linux foes, not the OIN. █
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02.01.12
Posted in Apple, Bill Gates, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Patents at 6:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Response to reputation laundering from Wired Magazine, the latest nonsense from Microsoft’s lobbyist Florian Müller, an update on Microsoft’s trolling against Android, and a little more of Apple’s
WE are quite cynical about the corporate press. It has become abundantly clear that journalism is dying and instead it gets accommodated/replaced by the PR industry, working at the behest of rich people with an agenda and a nickel for any press still willing to bend over (independent press is likely to perish in the process). Like a husband who tells the policeman or the judge that he deeply loves the woman whom he beats up daily, Bill Gates/Gates Foundation would love for us to believe that he is a master of Open Source. Yes, and Cade Metz trying to portray these racketeers as friends of Open Source (whitewashing Gates at the same time). Why would anyone with integrity do reputation laundering for a criminal and his company that commits acts of extortion? Even Gutierrez gets characterised positively:
But that afternoon was different. At the invitation of the company’s chief legal minds — Smith and Gutierrez — Ramji sat down with Gates, chief software architect Ray Ozzie, and a few others to discuss whether Microsoft could actually start using open source software. Ramji and Ozzie were on one side of the argument, insisting that Microsoft embrace open source, and Gutierrez offered a legal framework that could make that possible. But other top executives strongly challenged the idea.
Then Bill Gates stood up.
No, Bill Gates has been attacking Open Source for a very long time. Remember that Letter to Hobbyists? And all those court exhibits we showed? We oughn’t allow history to be rewritten like this. Over at Free Software Daily, the modified headline of this article states “Meet Mobster Bill Gates, the Man Who Charges Open Source Software even if is free Android Linux” (the original is troll article that attracted many comments, for being more inflammatory than sane).
Microsoft is currently feeding patent trolls in order to attack Linux. Microsoft does not have enough ammunition to attack Linux, so it uses help from the outside.
Pamela Jones, over at Groklaw, writes more about the case that seeks to expose MOSAID, a patent troll that Microsoft is feeding. To quote part of the analysis:
B&N and Microsoft have come to an agreement about Steve Ballmer’s participation in the Microsoft v. Barnes & Noble action at the ITC. They were arguing about it, and they’ve now agreed that Ballmer will not have to testify live at the ITC hearing, currently scheduled for February. Instead, B&N will present designated portions of his deposition, and Microsoft’s lawyers have sent a letter [PDF] to the ITC stating officially that it withdraws its motion for a protective order, attaching to the letter a proposed schedule on the parties’ next steps in figuring out exactly what each side wants in the way of details. This means there will be no further motion practice on the live testimony issue.
[...]
Microsoft is also opposing Barnes & Noble’s request that the record be held open to include Nokia and MOSAID’s evidence, if Barnes & Noble is finally able to get it. And they parties continue to try to whittle into shape what each may use as evidence.
Lots of sealed filings, once again. But don’t worry. By hook or by crook, we usually find out in due time what the filings were about.
I had a chance to talk to Andy Updegrove, of Standards Blog, who as you probably know is a lawyer who does patent work in the standards area. I wanted to pick his brain, because the 2000 patents Nokia sold to MOSAID relate to standards, according to their statements. Just how many patents could possibly be required for a phone to be built? Surely not 1,200 out of the 2,000, I was thinking. Yet, that is the claim.
[...]
He suggested that we read some Department of Justice ‘business review letters’ on patent pools, because a patent pool is an example of multiple patent owners getting together to agree on a price for technology required to implement a standard. That’s not exactly what Microsoft, Nokia and MOSAID say they are doing, but we’re getting warm. You get to read in the letters the way the pool participants set the pool up, what safeguards they took (in the request letter), and the way the DoJ analyzed the request and either approved, qualified, or rejected the request. The controls traditionally include hiring a third party expert to review each supposedly essential claim and determine whether it’s valid, whether it’s essential, and what it’s worth relative to the other essential claims. So he thought we might find it interesting to look at what a legal pool looks like, and then we can contrast that to the actual conduct that is being alleged here.
This case has not been decided yet, but it does help shed a lot of light on Microsoft’s racketeering.
The known Microsoft boosters and even lobbyists (whom they cite) try to make us believe that it’s all over and Microsoft is innocent. Some people fall for it. They also push this tripe into Slashdot with all the bias and misdirection. As Homer put it in USENET, we should just ignore the Microsoft lobbyist. To quote: “Note this is only the conclusion drawn by Microsoft’s pet shill, Florian Müller (who’s now openly on Microsoft’s payroll), and he drew this stunning conclusion from just the /title/ of a docket he doesn’t even have access to, because it’s still under seal.
“It’s also, as the title suggests, just an “Initial Determination”, and may yet be disputed by the DOJ – a fact Müller chose to ignore. He also chose to ignore several of B&N’s valid complaints that might yet cause
the DOJ to overturn this conclusion, even if it turns out to be true and “final”, such as Microsoft deliberately withholding prior art in its various patent applications, and using NDAs to cover up extortion, under
the pretext of “secrets” that are in fact a matter of public record (as all patents are required to be by law). But instead he portrayed B&N’s complaint as futile, because:
“For example, Barnes & Noble claimed that Microsoft asked for excessively high patent license fees, but the OUII quoted passages from U.S. law (statutory as well as case law) that clearly said that patent law doesn’t require a patent holder to grant a license on any terms.”
“Then he completely ignores all the other key points (above). This seems to be the entire basis for his pessimism (or I should say “optimism”, since it’s clear whose side he’s on).”
Microsoft is feeding lobbyists and trolls and it’s easy to see this. Apple is said to have been sued by trolls again, but since Apple itself acts like a patent troll we have no sympathy for it. To quote:
A patent troll is going after Apple for patent infringement of an “electronic alignment system”.
Apple’s spiritual leader’s friend, Larry Ellison, is still attacking Android with patents that he got from Sun. Google gets another opportunity.
Mr. Pogson summarises: “Google argues that Oracle’s experts are not expert as they had no intimate knowledge during deposition.”
Basically, it seems like Oracle’s patent case against Android will be coming to an end. Maybe a copyright allegation alone will be left, so think along the lines of SCO.
OIN is meanwhile growing strong:
OIN today announced a remarkable increase in the size of its community of licensees during 2011 as licensees seized the opportunity to benefit from the value of the growing OIN community and the freedom of action enabled by OIN’s royalty free licensing program. During 2011, OIN’s community grew to over 400 corporate licensees, a more than 60% year over year increase. OIN licensees, which include founding members and associate members, benefit from the leverage provided by a patent portfolio dedicated to the protection of Linux and access to enabling technologies through OIN and shared intellectual property resources.
What’s baffling is that Oracle is in the OIN. It never ought to have attacked in the first place, but maybe it was a favour to the thermonuclear CEO, Larry Ellison’s “best friend” (by his own words). It is not a far fetched hypothesis. █
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Posted in Law, Patents at 5:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Will today’s students become producers or paper pushers?
Summary: How the patent system, controlled for the most part by lawyers, raises a generation of leeches rather than a generation of engineers
WE VERY often emphasise the fact that the patent systems’ main cheerleaders are patent lawyers. Well, Tim has just published a thought-provoking article that starts with a very suitably rhetorical question: “Does Innovation Revolve Around Patent Lawyers?” Here are some bits from his analysis:
A patent attorney named Daren Gibby was kind enough to send me a copy of his new book Why Has America Stopped Inventing? As you’d expect from a book written by a patent attorney, it’s a pretty strongly pro-patent book. I didn’t expect to agree with the book’s arguments, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to engage with the “other side” of the patent debate.
The bulk of the book is a meandering narrative about America’s great inventors—Eli Whitney, Samuel Morse, Charles Goodyear, and many others—and their struggles to enforce their patents against infringers. Whitney, for example, almost completely failed to prevent infringement of his cotton gin patent, and as a consequence made very little money from his invention.
After a few chapters, I began to wonder what the point of all these anecdotes was. After all, the book bills itself as an explanation for America’s alleged decline in innovation. But it wasn’t clear what these blow-by-blow descriptions of the patent enforcement efforts of great 19th century inventors had to do with the modern patent system. Indeed, aside from some hand-waving about the lack of cancer cures and flying cars in chapter 1, the book never makes a serious effort to substantiate the claim that the pace of American innovation has slowed down.
Watch how products are being taxed behind closed doors. The externality is all of us who are not part of this private deal.
“Here’s a post explaining that proprietary codecs drive up the costs,” wrote to us a reader today. It’s a tax on ideas and here is one way to tackle it along with Phoronix‘s analysis.
The first three adhere to the standard Linux library API’s, so should be a straight forward swap in for applications that use them. OpenMAX IL does not have a standard API at this stage, so is a custom implementation. All these libraries are as supplied by Broadcom, the SoC (System On Chip) provider.
In another new post from Mike Masnick he explains how 3D printing is being held back by patents. Innovation anyone?
We’ve seen this before, but here it’s a modern example: work simply wasn’t done on many of these efforts in part because there was no competition. And, in fact, there are still a few patents that really do hinder things, and this is a problem. Considering just how much good these 3D printers can do — especially as they provide more power, do multi-color, and a variety of other features, it kind of makes you wonder just how much we’ve lost by having tons of researchers just sitting on their printer projects out of a fear of getting sued.
Separately, according to some “legal” blog, US judges (“legal” folks) permit software patents. To quote:
Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court spoke on patentable subject matter in Bilski v. Kappos, 130 S. Ct. 3218 (2010), Federal Circuit panels have taken a variety of approaches to the subject. The latest approach is seen in Dealertrack, Inc. v. Huber, No. 09-1566 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 20, 2012). It brings back the notion of preemption as a test for patentable subject matter (also known as patent eligibility). The notion of preemption was briefly touched on in the original In re Bilski opinion, 545 F.3d 943 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (en banc).
This is a European blog. The lawyers in Europe wants software patents simply because it means more business to them, at the expense of buyers of products and engineers themselves. The Bilski case , like all cases, was decided on by lawyers, not scientists, so it is not surprising that they expand their own territory at the expense of producing industries.
In this week’s news we discover that Wipro seeks US monopolies on software, possibly because in India it is hard.
Facebook too is mentioned in this context:
As it prepares for one of the biggest IPOs ever, Facebook is coming under the same fierce attacks being waged against other big technology companies: patent lawsuits.
Facebook itself is also launching patent attacks. Going back to Wipro (a close Microsoft partner like Facebook, but from india), its new patents are leaving room for doubt. Another Microsoft partner, Quest the villain,
gets a patent and brags about it. To quote: “Quest vWorkspace 7.5 delivers low cost desktop virtualisation via patent-pending scalability enhancements, direct Hyper-V integration, fast provisioning, and advanced desktop virtualisation load balancing and provides direct support for Microsoft Hyper-V, including FREE Microsoft Hyper-V Server.”
Here is another update from the patents arena:
Fiserv this month filed a lawsuit in federal court against rival IBM i banking software provider Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) and its Metavante subsidiary over alleged violation of its patents relating to online payments. The alleged violations involve patents held by Fiserv’s subsidiaries, CheckFree and CashEdge, that describe online financial activities, such as conducting account-to-account transfers, creating electronic transaction “pick lists,” and making payments on behalf of others.
And another new one:
Not that it was simple to create. The research began more than a year and a half before USF applied for the patent in 2006. It arose from a project on people’s transportation behavior.
Even search algorithms are being patented:
Melbourne-based researchers are looking to commercialise a search algorithm that analyses networks to identify the most easily exploitable vulnerability chains.
One last example shows us that software patents are out of control in the US and as long as lawyers run the system (politicians and judges) we are unlikely to see much change, only change for the worse. Here is what seems like business methods. Bilski didn’t help much, did it? It’s business as usual. █
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