“Software patents are a huge potential threat to the ability of people to work together on open source.”

--Linus Torvalds

Summary: The real patent battle is fought not in Congress (with corporate lobbyists) but in the courtroom, with a growing number of outcomes which are favourable to Free/libre software

SOFTWARE PATENTS are severely damaged in the US, especially following the Alice case (ruled by SCOTUS one year ago). The latest cases, which we covered this month, serve to show that software patents are dropping like flies in the courtrooms, even when landing on courts that are historically very friendly towards software patents.

"District courts used Great Atlantic to invalidate patents en masse, much like is done today after Alice," Patent Buddy wrote the other day. Nevertheless, the corporate media focuses on other matters.

"It looks as though software patents are rapidly dying."Joe Mullin has revealed that yet more software patents have just died and not a patent troll was behind them. "Rovi," he explains, "provides digital entertainment guides to cable companies and others and has long used its patents to enforce its dominant position in the market. That strategy has come in for criticism, with Rovi's patents being viewed as covering the basic idea of an electronic TV Guide. That was especially true when Rovi used its patents to go after Internet companies that wanted to make their own guides and not take Rovi content, like Hulu and Amazon."

Well, these patents are now dead and Wall Street-centric media says that the company is downgraded. "Multichannel video programming distributors may face the same struggles in court," says the author, "but those patents are less abstract than software patents, according to analysts."

Mullin wrote also about Newegg (yet again), showing that it won a patent case that had been brought against it by TQP. "Two weeks after online retailer Newegg filed a petition complaining about "excessive and unreasonable" delays in getting a final judgment in its patent case," explains Mullin, "the judge in that case has handed Newegg a big win."

It looks as though software patents are rapidly dying. Every death of a software patents can become precedent for future cases involving software patents and the higher the court, the higher the impact. One lawyers' site tries to frame this as a "troll" issue, talking about "the projected cost [7 billion dollars] of litigation filed by non-practicing entities, or patent trolls, in 2015."

What about non-trolls (or very big trolls that the media won't call "trolls")? Some media circles are trying to tell us that Microsoft alone makes billions of dollars from extortion against Android alone. The main problem is the patents, not the entity asserting these patents.

Speaking of Google, which is an important example because Microsoft is still attacking it using patents (trying to force Android makers to bundle Microsoft software), there is a new effort to combat patents using prior art. As corporate media put it, "Google is bringing its search powers to bear in hopes of doing what Washington seemingly can't — roll back a wave of abusive litigation from companies that, according to their critics, simply want to line their pockets with ill-gotten settlement money." There are many articles about it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. In the form of sourse code, not just publications, it ought to be possible to demonstrate prior art and invalidate a lot of software patents. There is plenty of prior art and duplication in the field of software because a lot of people are able to practice it (requires just a keyboard, no manufacturing).

"It sure looks like this whole cult of "IP" proves problematic not just for Free software but for software in general (monopoly on APIs for instance)."When patent maximalists (IAM) covered it they said Google's "mission" it to "help raise quality standards", but that's nonsense. Google just doesn't want this patent mess that is looming over Free software like Android. It's not about "quality" of patents, it's about patents. Google is still wrestling with Oracle (patents and copyrights) and as this new post put it a couple of days ago: "Out in the real world, the lawsuit between Google and Oracle is preparing to head back to a lower court after the Supreme Court said it would not take the case. At UC Berkeley yesterday, the repercussions of that decision were discussed, along with many other topics around patents and copyright law as they pertain to software, art and more."

It sure looks like this whole cult of "IP" proves problematic not just for Free software but for software in general (monopoly on APIs for instance). Large proprietary software corporations such as Microsoft and Oracle are abusing so-called 'IP' to impede if not altogether destroy their emerging rivals. ⬆