04.22.15

Links 22/4/2015: Fedora 22 Beta, Atlassian Acquires BlueJimp

Posted in News Roundup at 6:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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The Dying Debate Over Patent Scope (Including Software Patents) Replaced by ‘Trolls’ (But Not the Biggest Ones)

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Patents, Samsung at 5:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“In a world where there are $500 million dollar patent infringement lawsuits imposed on OS companies (although this is not completely settled yet), how would somebody like Red Hat compete when 6 months ago they only had $80-$90 million in cash? At that point they could not even afford to settle a fraction of a single judgment without devastating their shareholders. I suspect Microsoft may have 50 or more of these lawsuits in the queue. All of them are not asking for hundreds of millions, but most would be large enough to ruin anything but the largest companies. Red Hat did recently raise several hundred million which certainly gives them more staying power. Ultimately, I do not think any company except a few of the largest companies can offer any reasonable insulation to their customers from these types of judgments. You would need a market cap of more than a couple billion to just survive in the OS space.”

–SCO’s Strategic Consultant Mike Anderer

Summary: The corporate media and Web sites or people who are funded by large corporations have essentially suppressed any debate about issues in the patent granting process, thereby guarding software patents and preventing criticism of large corporations’ power grab

WE are deeply disturbed to see the already-elusive debate about patent scope getting lost in the noise, essentially drifting further away. This long post will put forth observations spanning almost 2 months in the English-speaking media.

Apple, which is patenting a lot software, even image editing software (according to Apple propaganda sites), “ramps up patent portfolio to take on Samsung,” to quote the ToryGraph (UK). Samsung is a backer of Android (albeit one that leans towards Microsoft) and it sells the most mobile phones, which run Linux at their core. So, Apple’s anti-Android (using software patents) agenda is very much relevant to the Free/Open Source software community. We have covered this for 5 years (Apple’s attacks on Android using software patents go back to 2010).

“Why does the corporate media not dedicate much space to cover the inherent issues which cause billions in damages to the technology sector?”Is Apple a patent troll? Well, it often behaves like one, but the media reserves the term “trolls” to small entities/actors. We are supposed to believe that Apple is some kind of heroic titan full of innovation, magic, sparkles and wonder, even though manufacturing for Apple is often done by other companies, including the underlying innovations (Samsung, other Korean/Japanese giants, and many Chinese companies make the components of ‘i’ devices).

Why does the corporate media not dedicate much space to cover the inherent issues which cause billions in damages to the technology sector? Why are corporate shakedowns by large corporations not newsworthy (or hardly worth covering)? These should be legitimate questions. Lies by omission are, by all means, lies.

The recent “John Oliver [segment] on patents [is] mostly just a critique of trivial patents and patent trolls but entertaining,” wrote one person among many who saw the HBO coverage. “I didn’t think it was all that funny anyway or maybe I don’t agree with the focus on trolls instead of patent scope,” wrote another person in response to my post. Even TechDirt said that John Oliver chose to focus on “Patent Trolls”. Since when is the patent issue simply reducible to “trolls”? What happened to the fierce debates over patent scope, as those which were of daily recurrence less than a decade ago? The problem of scope has not been addressed. It’s definitely not resolved.

One article that we found some time ago (a week back) portrayed the issue as “poorly written software patents”. To quote in full: “Congress is expected to take up legislation this year that would make it tougher to claim patent infringement.

“The bill has become a top lobbying priority this year for the tech industry, which says it repeatedly fends off frivolous lawsuits because of poorly written software patents and laws that favor patent holders.”

“There oughtn’t be patents on software in the first place.”The problem is software patents, not “poorly written software patents”. There oughtn’t be patents on software in the first place. They cost a lot of money and their toll on society would probably weigh at hundreds of billions of dollars (aggregated over the years worldwide).

Referring to the US-centric ITC, the British media recently shifted focus to patent trolls yet again. “US trade watchdog ITC needs reform to end $bn blackmail,” it said. What about software patents? Are they off topic now?

Consider press releases such as this one about how the USPTO “will grant RES Software two patents for its technological innovations Dynamic Rule Management and Taskbar Affinity.”

This is a couple of software patents. The USPTO is still granting those, despite changes following a SCOTUS ruling.

What was probably most frustrating this month would have to be Associated Press. It unleashed a lot of biased or narrow articles which lay virtually all blame on “trolls”. Consider this article [1, 2, 3]. The Associated Press (AP) set the tone for some widely-spreading AP reports [1, 2, 3] put only “Patent trolls” in the headlines. See for example the article “This year’s fight for the tech industry: Patent trolls”.

The Associated Press helped spread this kind of assumption under different headlines around the world [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and so did PBS/NPR (Bill Gates-funded), among other large news networks.

“What are politicians going to think? It’s like they are being lobbied by large corporations through the corporate media (often owned directly by those corporations).”Where is the focus on patent scope? What are politicians going to think? It’s like they are being lobbied by large corporations through the corporate media (often owned directly by those corporations).

The political debate has already been perturbed. Watch what Chuck Grassley says. We can see politicians only ever speaking about “trolls” (or “Abusive Patent Litigation” to use Grassley’s term). Consider this report titled “Dem senator looking to slow ‘patent troll’ debate”. To quote: “Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) is trying to end the rush to get a bill through Congress to rein in “patent trolls.”

“Judging by the speedy approval of the Innovation Act in the House last Congress, Coons said many members might not be in tune with the debate.”

They call it “Innovation Act”, but all it does is target trolls. It does nothing to or about innovation. It just helps large corporations push aside patent trolls, except themselves.

“Regarding the Innovation Act”, another article about this misleadingly-named bill, says: “As a student at the University of Minnesota, one of the top research universities in the nation, I am greatly concerned with the proposed legislation dealing with patent reform. I agree there is a need to cut down on abusive patent practices under the current law by so-called “patent trolls.” However, current legislation in Congress is too broad in addressing this problem. The unintended consequences of the Innovation Act are too great to ignore.”

Well, that is not the issue. The analysis above, courtesy of a student, is too shallow and does little to actually show what’s wrong with the so-called ‘Innovation Act’. the “Innovation Act” as they call it is just a wishlist of large corporations. That’s not to say that patent trolls are not a problem at all; they’re mostly a symptom of a much larger problem. What the “Innovation Act” would do is tackle only some actors while leaving large corporations exempt from reform. Rather than call it “Innovation Act” we should call it “The Large Corporations’ Act”.

“532,900,000 Reasons Why We Need Patent Reform Now” is the headline from TechDirt in which a ruling about software patents (or relating to software patents) gets mentioned. TechDirt writes: “Over the last year, there’s been plenty of good news in the fight against the abuse of patents to stifle innovation. A bunch of court rulings have gone the right way, with the biggest being the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Alice v. CLS Bank case, that has resulted in many courts invalidating patents, the US Patent Office suddenly rejecting more patents and a rapid decline in patent lawsuits.”

“A real reform would tackle the patents, not the actors who use them.”A real reform would tackle the patents, not the actors who use them. Many of these actors are parasites, but one can generalise the means, not the ends.

“Conservatives and Patent Reform,” an article by Gary Shapiro, alludes to the above and says: “A serious case can be made that they should reconsider their opposition.”

With or without a bogus bill that does little or nothing to tackle the core issue we will all remain between a rock and a hard place. The problem of “trolls” is being overly exaggerated (not dealing with the patents they so often use) in stories like ““Shopping cart” patent troll shamelessly keeps litigating, and losing”. Corporate media pundits like Bill Snyder also play a role in the misdirection, with articles like “Patent trolls are on the run, but not vanquished yet” or “Why Congress must ensure ‘game over’ for patent trolls” (from The Hill).

It sure looks like the corporations hijacked the debate, it’s all about “trolls” now. Debate over patents must focus on patent scope, yet all the large corporations want us to obsess over trolls (smaller trolls than them). “The FTC should release an interim report to help patent reform,” said this other headline from The Hill and on the third of April we learned from this site that “Conservatives wrong to oppose patent reform” (the bogus reform, not the reform that is actually needed).

In the Web sites of patent lawyers we learn of “Two signs that patent reform momentum may be slowing” and get told the typical myth of “Startups and Patents”. Patents are protectionism for large corporations and only a waste of time and money for startups, which can usually not sue large corporations because it would get them sued back, using a much larger heap of patents from these large corporations.

A recent article by Glyn Moody was titled “Does Patent Licensing by Patent Trolls – Or Anyone – Serve A Useful Purpose?”

Moody alludes to a “paper [which] also provides yet more evidence that the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, designed to encourage the commercialization of research results through licensing, actually turns universities into patent trolls — something that Techdirt has discussed before. Although the authors suggest that further research is needed to confirm their results, it already seems pretty clear that both patent trolls and Bayh-Dole need to go.”

“When some nonsense like “Innovation Act” says it targets “trolls” what it actually means to say is that it targets small entities with no real products. These are a nuisance to large corporations because the corporations cannot sue back (there are no products to sue over).”Yes, universities too can act like patent trolls, not just large corporations do. When some nonsense like “Innovation Act” says it targets “trolls” what it actually means to say is that it targets small entities with no real products. These are a nuisance to large corporations because the corporations cannot sue back (there are no products to sue over).

There was recently some discussion about the case of Life360, including the ‘Dear Piece of Shit’ letter. “Fresh off his patent win against a company called AGIS,” said one trolls expert, “Life360 CEO Chris Hulls has published an op-ed advising other companies on how to respond to similar patent threats.” Here is more from the same expert: “In May 2014, Life360 CEO Chris Hulls received an aggressive patent demand letter. The letter, from lawyers representing a company called Advanced Ground Information Systems (AGIS), told him he needed to pay for a “royalty-bearing license” to its four patents, or Life360 and its customers would have to “cease and desist” from infringement.

“In other words: pay up, or shut down your company.”

In the case of large corporations it would be “pay up, or we’ll block imports.” It can also be “pay up, reduce your revenue/increase running costs, pass costs to your customers”.

How is that different from what Apple is doing? How is that different from Microsoft’s patent extortion? It’s only semantics and labels (“trolls”), revolving around either scale or branding. The debate has been littered with propaganda, so a lot of people have been systematically incited against “trolls” while ignoring the broader picture.

Over a month ago there was a large online argument over trolls because “Patent trolls serve valuable role in innovation, Stanford expert says”. Defending patent trolls is not unthinkable, especially from universities where trolling has become a common practice (we have covered some examples over the years). Stanford staff, some allege, was probably paid to say that or has some conflict of interest. But we suspect the cause of this stance is different. This whole “Stanford” story (it was framed as a Stanford thing, despite involving just one person) led to some strong responses from ‘anti-trolls’ (and trolls only) sites [1, 2, 3], with one arguing that proof is required. To give some background to this (quoting the above): “So-called patent trolls may actually benefit inventors and the innovation economy, according to a Stanford intellectual property expert.

“Stephen Haber, a Stanford political science professor, suggests in new research that concerns about too much litigation involving patents is misguided.”

“There’s almost a refusal to return to talking about patent scope.”The obsession over patent trolls is what bothers us the most, not the stance — however dumb — of Stephen Haber. There’s almost a refusal to return to talking about patent scope. One site that focuses on trolls (“Patent Progress”) lobbies hard for the “Innovation Act”, stating in one of its headlines: “If the Innovation Act Is Bad For Patents, Why Do Large Patent Owners Support It?”

Those “Large Patent Owners” are large corporations, such as those which are funding “Patent Progress” (through CCIA). Watch the tone of recent posts. It’s like lobbying on behalf of large corporations. Another post says “Professor Stephen Haber of Stanford recently came out with a paper that, according to him, “suggests in new research that concerns about too much litigation involving patents is misguided.”

Well, the real issue is too much patent granting, not too much litigation, which usually is simply the result of too much patent granting. Tackle patent scope, not scale of plaintiffs.

Here is a recent “I.P. Scholars’ Letter to Congress re Patent Reform”. “This open letter to Congress,” says the abstract, “signed by 51 economics and legal scholars, responds to claims that there is little empirical evidence available to assess the performance of the American patent system. The letter explains that a large and increasing body of evidence indicates that the net effect of patent litigation is to raise the cost of innovation and inhibit technological progress. The letter also includes a bibliography of relevant empirical studies of patent litigation.”

Why focus on patent litigation and not the scope of patents foolishly being granted by the USPTO?

Covering patents have become frustrating in the sense that mega-corporations keep distracting from the real debate(s), lobbying for laws that instead protect only themselves. A lot of blogs that proclaim to be speaking for patent reform are actually tools of large corporations that fund them. Pseudo activism (lobbying) is when you’d be led to believe that you’re reading from real activists while in reality they’re tools of corporate power. The academics (non-’IP’ academics, i.e. not boosters of the parasitic elements) want software patents and other software patents to end, but corporations want to demolish only their own competition and rivals, thus they focus on ‘trolls’ and the corporate media helps them achieve this.

“Well, the real issue is too much patent granting, not too much litigation, which usually is simply the result of too much patent granting.”The EFF, a relatively independent (from corporations) activism group, now says it is “Fighting for Patent Reform in Washington, D.C.”. Having just tackled the infamous podcasting patent as part of a broader new action to take on software patents, the EFF receives a lot of positive publicity [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18]. Can real change come about this way? Is the EFF influential enough?

There is currently another piece of useless ‘reform’, but nothing is as bad as the America Invents Act, which we wrote about before. “Using the new Post Grant Review and Inter Partes Review procedures in the America Invents Act,” Steph writes, “hedge funds are extorting money from pharmaceutical companies by either filing or threatening to file for re-exam.”

When it comes to pharmaceutical patents, there is no lack of articles about “trolls”, including pro-trolls articles. There are anti-reform lawyers writing about it because to patent lawyers the trolling can be good business; their main concern is that it harms the legitimacy of the system through which they prey on real (producing) workers, acting more like parasites than scientists or even lawyers. █

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The Patents Gold Rush Continues

Posted in Patents at 3:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gold rush memories

Summary: The morbid obsession with monopolising mere ideas still dominates the media, even increasingly in China

LAST month we came across a lot of pro-patents propaganda. One lawyers’ site gave us what it called “WIPO facts and figures” and several sites framed US universities as some kind of champions of patents (see for example [1, 2, 3, 4]). Local news networks tried to turn this into a local issue, e.g. in Tennessee [1, 2] and in Washington, D.C. Even China jumped into this bandwagon and conflated patents with “innovation”. Large corporations in China have increasingly grown patents-greedy and now lead the charts in terms of the number of patents. This is protectionism. To call it “innovation” is simply misleading.

“The most disturbing fact is perhaps the deemphasis of real patent debates.”This is all somewhat disturbing because the obsession with patents, which was typically a north American thing (and to a lesser degree Japanese-Korean), is now spreading to China, which was historically associated with knockoffs and cloning.

This whole cult-like mentality of proponents of patents is occasionally being challenged; while patent lawyers continue to cheer for a future full of patents (more then ever before) there are those willing to ask, “Do patents still work in today’s fast-moving tech landscape?”

The National Post (Canada) published exactly one month ago a piece titled “Getting patents right”. It’s a rebuttal to lobbyists who want yet more patents, even when it’s clearly against the public interests. Richard Gold said that “Canadians would be saddled with an extraordinary number of patents that would have deterred other researchers from investigating the use of known drugs for novel uses.” The same applies to software, among other fields.

The most disturbing fact is perhaps the deemphasis of real patent debates. It has all been reduced to “trolls” now. We shall cover this in the next post. █

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04.21.15

9 Millionth US Patent Tells a Story of Failure and USPTO Misconduct

Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 2:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

USPTO: when quality does not matter, only the payment does

Summary: The USPTO, much like FISA (notorious court for surveillance/espionage authorisation), has become a rubber-stamping operation rather than a patents examination centre, as new evidence and old evidence serve to show

EARLIER this evening we wrote about the OIN’s response to the growing patent problem, HBO’s (corporate media) misdirection, and now we turn our attention to the USPTO, which has been busy hiding or perfuming its systematic abuse.

The EPO, which is now working towards the Unitary Patent Package (see the latest in IP Kat [1, 2]) is becoming increasingly assimilated to the USPTO, where software patents are still, at least in principle, allowed.

“It has actually become a lot more difficult to acquire software patents in the US, let alone win with software patents in court.”“A look at the USPTO’s examples for patent eligibility” is the title of a recent article from lawyers’ media. As we have demonstrated hundreds of times before, patent lawyers work hard to deny the post-Alice reality, which disqualifies many software patents. This kind of bias helps distort people’s perception of the status quo. It has actually become a lot more difficult to acquire software patents in the US, let alone win with software patents in court. That is of course good news and a step in the right direction. This is what can possibly salvage some of the USPTO’s past reputation and perhaps make US patents worth more than the paper they’re printed on.

The lawyers’ site says: “This article is the second installment of a three-part series examining the USPTO’s Interim Guidance on Patent Subject Matter Eligibility. The first installment describes the Interim Guidelines’ implementation of the Supreme Court’s two-part test for determining patent eligibility. Now, we will review examples published by the USPTO of patent-eligible and patent-ineligible claims.”

As we have noted here before, after the Supreme Court’s ruling the guidelines for patent examiners were modified. Surely this can reduce the overall number of patents granted, which in turn makes the USPTO look “less successful” (meaning less profitable, as quality clearly does not count when 92% of applications are "successful"). According to this lawyers’ site, “USPTO Can’t Be Sued For Not Axing Re-Exam, Fed. Circ. Says” and one patent lawyer’s site (vocal proponent of software patents) talks about USPTO fees. There are surely changes underway (less software patents) and many patent lawyers must be nervous.

“Surely this can reduce the overall number of patents granted, which in turn makes the USPTO look “less successful” (meaning less profitable, as quality clearly does not count when 92% of applications are “successful”.”As we mentioned the other day, the USPTO uses some dirty tricks to make itself look better. “US Patent Office Gamed The System To Make Sure Patent 9 Million Wasn’t A Crazy Troll Patent,” said the title composed by Mike Masnick. “As I’m sure you were carefully anticipating,” he wrote, “on Tuesday, April 7th, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued patent 9,000,000. As you of course are already aware, over the past few decades, the USPTO has been rapidly ramping up the number of patents it approves. That’s why, even though patents only have a lifetime of 20 years from the date of application, 1/3 of all issued patents are still in force today. Think about that.”

Watch the press release and self-congratulatory Smithsonian spin. If a country has 9 million patents and 92% of patent applications are eventually accepted, it does not mean the country is innovative, it just means it is too lenient when it comes to patent granting. It means it is unable to recognise real innovation. This is why the EPO (especially its examiners) must guard against the greed of businesspeople like Benoît Battistelli. As it stands, the EPO is not (yet) a laughing stock, only its management is. █

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HBO Helps Shift Debate Over Patents to ‘Trolls’ (Scale), Not Scope

Posted in Patents at 1:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: More of that awkward shifting of the patent debate towards small actors who are misusing patents, not large conglomerates like Apple and Microsoft which use patents to destroy competitors, crush startups, drive up prices, and so on

SEVERAL people have already contacted us regarding the new video shown above (as always, since it’s HBO, not accessible to the British audience at all). John Oliver (working for HBO), who is ironically British despite his show not being accessible to the British public online, spoke about patents, but look at all the headlines it led to. We could find only the following:

• Watch John Oliver Take on Patent Trolls: Annotated Edition
• Patent trolls are out of control. John Oliver explains why.
• Watch John Oliver Explain How Patent Trolls Will Ruin ‘Shark Tank’ on ‘Last Week Tonight’ [Video]
• John Oliver Is the Most Powerful Tech Lobbyist in the Country
• Watch John Oliver Deliver a Trademark Takedown of Patent Troll
• John Oliver Throws Patent Trolls Under the Bridge on ‘Last Week Tonight’
• John Oliver takes on patent trolls in this hilarious segment
• Video: John Oliver explains why patent trolls are such heinous vermin
• John Oliver Explains How Crazy Patent Trolls Really Are

With the exception of one headline (“Most Powerful Tech Lobbyist in the Country”), it’s all about “patent trolls”, isn’t it? That sort of sums up the case about patents, right? That’s what large corporations, such as HBO, would like us to believe. If John Oliver is acting as a “lobbyist” here, he sure helps lobby politicians to tackle the wrong thing. Scale of plaintiff isn’t the principal issue, especially given the strong correlation between patent trolls’ lawsuits and software patents (the large majority of patents that they use).

“HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver did yesterday a piece on patents,” wrote to us a reader, but from what we can gather (without having access to the video because of HBO’s silly policies) it overemphasises “trolls” without noting that large corporations often act just like trolls but at a larger scale and the real problem is patent scope, e.g. software patents, patents on genetics, etc.

We are planning/hoping to do many articles about patents this week, time permitting. We are going to show how the corporate media has been systematically emphasising the issue of “trolls” as the only (or main) issue with the patent system. It’s only make believe — made by large corporations and their lobbyists. █

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Software Patents Are Still Menacing to Free Software: OIN Expands Scope, HEVC Adds to MPEG-LA Burden/Tax, Google and Facebook Give in on Patents

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Google, Patents at 1:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Making distribution of software strictly contingent upon payments

Summary: A look at recent news about software patents and especially Free/libre software, which is inherently incompatible with them

SOME time ago the OIN announced that it was extending its ‘coverage’ of ‘protection’ for Linux-related packages. “For this update,” is said, “115 new packages will be added to the Linux System, out of almost 800 proposed by various parties. Key additions are the reference implementations of the popular Go and Lua programming languages, Nginx, Openshift, and development tools like CMake and Maven. This update will represent an increase of approximately 5% of the total number of packages covered in the Linux System, a reflection of the incremental and disciplined nature of the update process.”

It’s a shame that they don’t mention GNU at all, but let’s not get too pedantic about words and ‘brands’. Simon Phipps from the OSI covered this almost a week later (the technology media largely ignored the OIN’s announcement), writing that “Docker, Puppet, LibreOffice, and the Go language are the latest additions to the Open Invention Network’s extensive patent nonaggression umbrella” (patent pool may be more accurate a term than nonaggression umbrella).

“Out of nowhere,” the inventor and developer of Ogg wrote some weeks ago, “a new patent licensing group just announced it has formed a second, competing patent pool for HEVC that is independent of MPEG LA. And they apparently haven’t decided what their pricing will be… maybe they’ll have a fee structure ready in a few months.”

So a new patent troll emerges to attack Free software in multimedia, adding its weight (and tax) to that of MPEG-LA, a patent troll that’s already viciously criticised by Simon Phipps. It’s not getting much better, is it? The OIN has no way to protect against such patent trolls. If they are non-practising, then there is no way to retaliate with a defensive lawsuit, is there? That’s just why we deem OIN not part of the overall solution, just a sort of duct tape. The OIN does not lobby for patent reform that involves elimination of software patents. The OIN was founded and first run by proponents of software patents (it was initially managed by a man from IBM, perhaps the leading or biggest proponent of software patents).

“It is somewhat understandable that Google fears destruction by patents given all the patent attacks against Android, multimedia codes that are FOSS (VP8/9), etc.”Meanwhile we have noticed (last night) that Google goes deeper into the patents mess. “Google is a large company that has plenty of technology and many innovations,” says the report, “and in turn they hold plenty of patents on those technologies, but they still fell behind other big name tech companies last year for the biggest earners of U.S. patents. According to Fortune though, Google did rise up the list to reach being the company with the 8th largest amount of U.S. patents being awarded to them last year, gaining around 38% more patents in 2014 than they had the previous year which totaled a number of 2,566 U.S patents in all. With such a large portfolio it must seem like a daunting task to keep up on all the information related to patents in Google’s portfolio, and that may be true, but Google’s legal team has more than a few tools at their disposal to get the job done and one of those is an analytics software called PatentIQ.”

It is somewhat understandable that Google fears destruction by patents given all the patent attacks against Android, multimedia codes that are FOSS (VP8/9), etc. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and numerous smaller trolls that they are feeding (Rockstar Consortium and MPEG-LA, to name just a couple, let alone Intellectual Ventures, CPTN, MOSAID/Conversant, and Acacia) are usually behind it.

“Kudelski Group and Google Enter Into Patent Cross License Agreement,” said this headline very recently, adding not many details except this: “The Kudelski Group, a leading independent provider of media protection and value-added service technology, and Google, today announced they have entered into a multi-year patent cross licensing agreement.”

There is clearly a systematic issue here and unless we manage to get rid of software patents in the US, this issue won’t just go away.

Simon Phipps wrote another related article recently. Titled “Facebook gives in on patent grant”, the article explains how occasional patent bully Facebook tries to appease its critics:

Late Friday, Facebook announced it’s finally giving in to pressure from the open source community and fixed its open source patent grant. While most people felt the intent was good and welcomed the original version of the grant, it was worded in such a way as to give Facebook a significant legal advantage in any open source community where it was the initiator.

While current versions of modern open source licenses, such as the Apache License, the Mozilla Public License, and the General Public License, all include coverage to patent rights associated with the copyrights the licenses cover, older licenses like BSD and MIT include no explicit patent grants. Facebook was following common practice by giving a full license to any patents necessarily infringed by users of code in Facebook projects that incorporated the grant under those licenses.

For the Free/Open Source software world the patent situation has become very tricky, so in the coming few posts, spread across the coming few days, we are going to explain where we’re at when it comes to patent law. It’s not looking too good because large corporations diverted the entire public debate to “patent trolls”. The corporate media helps them do this. █

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The Latest Developments Around Microsoft’s Clever Attack on Android/Linux

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 12:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Show of ‘love’ by aggression

Summary: Microsoft’s campaign of destruction, extortion, etc. against the most widely used Linux-powered operating system is revisited in light of new reports

ONCE upon a time there was a company called Nokia which dominated the mobile market and then started moving to Linux. It quickly became a top contributor to Linux, in the development sense, and later there were rumours about it embracing Android (or exploring it alongside MeeGo). But Microsoft killed Nokia (using a mole) before Nokia could actualise any of this and Nokia’s Linux ambitions were never realised, except in the company founded by former employees (Jolla). Tizen and Sailfish OS have yet to fulfill the promise of MeeGo, or else they will go down in history just like WebOS, which LG now owns and develops (Tizen is developed almost exclusively by the other Korean giant, Samsung).

It is now being reported that quite unsurprisingly Nokia may be getting back to Android endeavours, without any reliance on or affiliation with Microsoft. We have heard that for a while, but this time it sounds more substantial. Whether Nokia considers going down the same route as Cyanogen (‘Microsoft Android’, i.e. ‘Microsoft Nokia’ again) we don’t quite know yet. One thing we do know is that Microsoft attempts the embrace, extend, extinguish approach against Android right now. That’s what the ‘new’ Microsoft is trying to do. According to this new report about Ballmer, Sinofsky and other people who are no longer at Microsoft, “Steve Ballmer killed an early version of Office for iOS because it compromised Windows, Bell said. He added that Steve Sinofsky’s reign was marked by infighting, hampering Microsoft’s strategic response to competition from Apple and Google.”

“It is not atypical for the media, and especially for foes of Android, to rewrite the history of Nokia and how Microsoft destroyed it.”The takeover of Nokia had multiple objectives including patent extortion of Android. It worked only to a certain degree. Nokia revisionism has just been reported to us by a reader, who told us that this article from an Apple propaganda site includes “revisionism.”

“Elop killed Nokia’s phone division,” iophk wrote to us, emphasising the part which started with: “But the company was…”

It is not atypical for the media, and especially for foes of Android, to rewrite the history of Nokia and how Microsoft destroyed it. There ought to have been a European investigation into it, but it never happened. In December last year the New York Times wrote that “Google’s Detractors Take Their Fight to the States”. The author focused on Microsoft and said that Sony’s leaked “emails show the extent of the efforts with state attorneys general. The messages detail how the Motion Picture Association of America — the Hollywood industry group — and an organization backed by Microsoft, Expedia and Oracle, among others, have aggressively lobbied attorneys general to build cases against Google in recent years, sometimes in complementary ways.”

Microsoft also uses Nokia to attack Google and Android at a regulatory level, as we showed some years ago. A new article titled “The Google gold rush” says: “No sooner had Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, accused Google of violating antitrust laws last week than the mobile phones of Brussels-based lawyers started buzzing with messages from LinkedIn telling them that Microsoft’s local law firm needed two anti-trust lawyers — and fast.”

We have already written a great deal about Microsoft’s role in these anti-Google actions which coincide with Microsoft’s attempt to ‘hijack’ Android from Google. “Google’s Biggest European Headache Isn’t Search,” says this new headline, “It’s Android.”

Yes, it's all about using Cyanogen and patent extortion against Android while European regulators limit Google’s response.

Whether Microsoft’s embrace, extend, extinguish approach will work or not remains to be seen. Microsoft may have tried similar tricks before, e.g. using Nokia and partners like Facebook (Home), Amazon and others before. It never worked.

Here we have so-called ‘hackers’ bringing more Microsoft spyware (Cortana or Portaña is software that records Android users and transmits the audio to Microsoft) carrying water for Microsoft. One article explains that “Portaña is apparently communicating with Microsoft’s servers, and it’s not a strict port: the hackers have not recreated all the digital assistant’s features. Portaña naturally can’t interface and integrate with Android and its various features like Cortana does with Windows Phone.”

Either way, Microsoft benefits from this. It’s part of the notorious datagrab effort. One way to interpret the whole “cloud computing” buzz is a concerted effort to gather people’s data in very few companies servers’ (worldwide, by merit of replication), especially if these companies already have a special relationship (e.g. subpoenas, PRISM interceptions and so on) with spying agencies in many countries. █

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The Microsoft ‘Community’ is Maligning the Free Software Community

Posted in Site News at 12:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Promoting the “will code for food” myth

Summary: Dishonest generalisations and baseless deductions portray the Free/Open Source software communities as a nasty place that leads to poverty and despair

Stephen Walli, one of Microsoft’s longest-standing moles in Free/Open Source software communities (we wrote about it even in 2008), joined Microsoft, left Microsoft (acting as a mole for a while), joined Microsoft again (in a more senior position, again as a sort of top mole), then left Microsoft again because Microsoft is shutting down 'open' so as to quit pretending it cares about Free/Open Source software. How long before Walli re-joins Microsoft (the third time around)? He is now at HP.

Weird articles from Walli are the rule rather than the exception. He occasionally mocks those who are not friendly to Microsoft’s agenda or are friendly towards the FSF/GNU/GPL/copyleft/Free software. Being a Microsoft booster, mole, etc. Walli does not do much to hide his affiliation. He is an on-and-off employee (salaried) of Microsoft and this new article from him, hosted by a Red Hat-run site (he habitually posts there), is attempting to preach what Free/Open Source software communities should be like. We find it disturbing whenever Microsoft people try to preach to Free/Open Source software communities what these communities should be like, especially because Microsoft is constantly attacking Free/Open Source software communities. That’s like the Pope explaining to Muslims how they should behave, or vice versa.

Yesterday we saw some guy called Derrick Wlodarz (not familiar with him) posting a vicious attack piece against Free/Open Source software communities. He uses misleading comparisons (apples versus oranges), selective quoting (even of trolls) and all sorts of old smears against migrations to GNU/Linux. It’s a really ugly piece of work and this anti-Linux piece comes from BetaNews, where trolling against GNU/Linux is common (usually it’s from Mr. Fagioli). “He holds numerous technical credentials from Microsoft,” Wlodarz says about himself. So here again we have the Microsoft bunch smearing Free/Open Source software communities, exploiting the fact that Free/Open Source software communities work out in the open, unlike proprietary software companies where everything happens secretly and marketing people help hide the nasty elements. Microsoft boosting in Wlodarz’s articles is quite the standard though; just look at his latest articles, titled “Migrating from Windows Server 2003: 12 best practices straight from the trenches”, “Windows RT: Did it really die? Absolutely not and here’s why”, and “Windows Phone 8.1: Why I ditched Android and couldn’t be happier” (not a single positive thing to say about Free/Open Source software, only negative things). Using systemd resistors to badmouth Linux (and by extension Free software) is just so easy, especially because the debate has been so open, as is always the case in the Free/Open Source software world.

“Some of the world’s wealthiest companies are using and also producing Free/Open Source software.”Last but not least, there is some FUD today in the Financial Times (FT is widely distributed). Longtime Microsoft booster Richard Waters attacks Free software in the FT and spreads this attack to other sites too. His premise is wrong and biased. It’s the “can’t make money from FOSS” smear. It is very baseless, it shows his ignorance, demonstrates bad research, and perhaps bad faith (he is loyal to Microsoft and has a long history of such hostility towards FOSS).

Many proprietary software companies are dying every day because they are not financially viable. Just because one Free software-based (not really FOSS, but FOSS-based) company died Microsoft boosters think they can legitimately generalise and make it seem as though supporting Free/Open Source software means being poor. Some of the world’s wealthiest companies are using and also producing Free/Open Source software. I myself have always made a living only by writing Free software; my wife does too. █

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