06.18.11
Posted in America, Law, Patents at 8:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Electric lobby
Summary: More new evidence that huge corporations with tens of thousands of patent monopolies are those which also control policy
IF THE USPTO proclaims to be there to serve the public, then it sure does a shoddy job. Being the granter of monopolies, it merely helps shut the public out and artificially elevate prices for the benefit of huge businesses (and the billionaires who run them). The sooner the citizens realise this, the greater the opposition to the USPTO will become (especially the “P” in USPTO).
Last week we showed that Intel was attacking public interests while pretending to do the opposite. It argued that software patents were good for the public. What a shameful, shameful lie. The “IP” crowd echoes Intel’s message by saying (in this case) that “Intel on necessity of software patents. It has 45K patents worldwide and invests $300-500M year in #smallbiz”
There is nothing like PR, is there? For a company which is worth (market cap) almost 1,000 times what it claims to invest (for profit) in small businesses this is purely propaganda. And that says nothing about the small businesses that Intel crushes all the time, even by breaking the law and then shredding the evidence. We have covered this before.
The president of the FFII responds with:
@ballard_ip Smallbiz cannot compete with Intel on patents. I should challenge Intel on their claim of hardware == software
Another company which is even larger than Intel would be GE, which also promotes software patents and other stuff which harms Free software. Well, according to this new article, “GE Joins Apple in Urging Congress to Let Patent Office Keep Fees”:
Apple Inc. (AAPL), the AFL-CIO and Yale University were among businesses, unions and universities urging House lawmakers to include a provision in pending legislation that would let the U.S. patent agency control its own funding.
More than 150 companies, schools and groups sent a letter today to House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, expressing their support for letting the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office keep all the fees it collects from users.
Conspicuously missing from this debate are representatives of the public. It just shows that to the USPTO the public does not matter. It’s not justified. The truth is, patents as a whole hurt the public in many ways, except perhaps members of the public who are highly ranked in some corporation like GE. Patents are for them. To the rest it’s just an issue that oughtn’t really exist. It is not just issues like cost of medical treatments but also minor things that relate to society and not purely cost; consider Microsoft’s patent’s on cameras that refuse to work (as a patent). Apple too making phones turn against their ‘owners’ based on this new article which says or at least asks, “Apple to ban iPhone concert filming?” Well, Apple is always serving the copyright cartel, which is abominable in itself. Well, now they pursue a monopoly on this Hollywood suck-up. Ain’t Apple a dreamy company? █
Disclosure: My sister and her husband work in Intel and GE, but I reserve no judgment because principles come first.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 8:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The freedom of Free/open source software is taken aback by cloudy weather and Mono becomes part of this problem
PROPRIETARY software is neither winning nor losing. The same goes for Free software and the only clear winner seems to be something worse than proprietary in the sense that it makes people’s own data proprietary, where the proprietor is hardly those people. We sometimes refer to this as “Fog Computing”. Another troubling trend is the emergence of so-called ‘shops’ or ‘stores’ for applications (or apps for short). These turn Free software into something indistinguishable (or hardly distinguishable) from proprietary and under the excuse/reason of ‘security’ users are prevented from installing their own code/program on devices which they thought they bought to own. This has “DRM” written all over it. In recent years we saw Mono catering for that latter market rather than the Free desktops which users can actually control.
A short while ago we wrote about the problems that Nat's Xamarin will be facing. It is interesting to note that despite Microsoft bias in the company, its CEO reveals that they go with Google’s ‘Cloud’ (or Fog Computing) rather than Microsoft. To quote his blog:
So part of my first three weeks as CEO of Xamarin has felt like a trip to a toy store. Everyone loves window shopping, so here is a list of some of the tools we’re using to run our startup…
To their credit, its not too bad. But they are facing a mountain they may never manage to climb. For them, “success” is also a success for Microsoft, which is not doing too well at the moment. Jos from OpenSUSE writes about the subject of ‘Cloud’ in this new blog post which says:
The ‘cloud’ has been a buzzword for quite a while. While some are still rather cynical towards the concept, products like mobile phones with Android have shown the value of putting your data in that huge, amorphous network of servers somewhere. Apple recently introduced their new cloud service and Microsoft has their cloud too. So with the other major players talking cloudy, what does Linux have?
Apple and Microsoft do their silly things because they never cared about rights (of users) and their freedoms. Entities which promote software freedom need not bend to the will of trends that instead they should antagonise. To put Free software on the so-called ‘cloud’ without an Affero-type licence is similar to the inclusion of Free software in binaries-only stores (see the VLC saga). It evades the goals of ethical software. It is about ethics and freedom, not market share. █
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Posted in Intellectual Monopoly, Patents at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How people who are against software patents eventually become named for companies’ patent monopolies
Clearly enough, there is a point where paying a wage becomes conditional upon no longer being truthful to oneself. This subject was discussed yesterday in IRC and also mentioned a few years back when we saw Novell/GNOME people applying for software patents (due to the employer’s pressure). These are patents that end up in Microsoft’s hands, attacking Linux and other Free/open source software. Remember what Java’s inventor wrote about his patents after these had been used against projects complementary to Java.
Developers do not have misconceptions about patents. To patent lawyers it’s like a faith; it doesn’t matter what is true, as long as it’s convenient. The main victim is the wider public, on whom the large corporations and their lawyers are waging a war. Many members of the publics, who are supposed to be represented by politicians, really do fall for the illusion of patents correlating with innovation, where the relation is falsely assume to be causal. The only causality here is that patents cause decreased pace of innovation as they offer exclusive privileges, a monopoly of sorts.
Members of the public are under no obligation to drink the Kool-Aid, but what happens when one’s wage depends on such vidws? The culture of indoctrination by managers is one that is very dangerous for the same reason that soldiers blindly obeying orders from ‘superiors’ can lead to catastrophe. It removes logic and ethics, resulting in what’s sometimes called “machine men” (or women, to be politically correct these days).
Several months ago we showed that the partly Microsoft-owned Facebook had become a patent bully. It is amassing software patents either by filing or by buying them. This new article tells us that inside Facebook the engineers do not like patents, but they are being pressured to change their views:
Facebook’s “hack-a-thons” are the stuff of geek legend. Every month or two, software engineers stay up all night to brainstorm new features and write code to create them.
Refrigerators are stocked with Red Bull. Chinese food is delivered. House music plays till morning — and so do some of Facebook Inc.’s in-house lawyers.
Patent counsel Nair Flores’ input so impressed the engineers at one recent session that they gave her a hack-a-thon “hero” award: a replica of the helmet worn by Boba Fett in “The Empire Strikes Back.”
“Being able to relate and integrate at the hack-a-thon got huge respect from the engineers,” says Facebook General Counsel Theodore Ullyot.
Since Ullyot’s arrival in 2008, he and his team have made patents a priority. One thing they’re doing is trying to coax more patents from the engineers by breaking down the walls that separate them from lawyers.
How shameful. This is what the patent lawyers bring to a lively culture of code. They are not there to breed innovation but to create fences. It ought to be mentioned that, as we showed many times before, present and past Microsoft developers occasionally speak out against software patents. It is a risky opinion for them to share because their paycheck depends on it. Part of their wage comes from patent extortion by Microsoft. █
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Posted in Law, Microsoft, Open XML, Patents at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary:”Minister Simon Power confirms the NZ Patent Bill will be passed without any changes. Computer Programs excluded,” heralds a leading Free/open source proponent in the large island
OUR dedicated page about NZ (wiki for kiwi) accumulates most of what we wrote about New Zealand’s fight against foreigners and their helpers inside the country — those who wanted monopolies on software recipes. There is good news this week.
“Minister Simon Power confirms the NZ Patent Bill will be passed without any changes. Computer Programs excluded,” writes Don Christie, citing this page. He also writes that:
“Method and apparatus for performing a marketing campaign on behalf of an advertises” – Business method patents in NZ – Patent App #591806
Maybe they can invalidate this just as they drove away this Microsoft OOXML patent a few days ago. It was not invalidated but withdrawn according to a press release. It remains for the “embedded” loophole (masking software as hardware) to be removed or explicitly addressed by the patenting guidelines. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 6:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
(ODF | PDF | English/original)
“Android tiene una cuota de patentes. Usted tiene que licenciar patentes.”~ Steve Ballmer
“… Microsoft deseó promover SCO y su pendiente demanda en contra de IBM y el sistema operativo Linux. Pero Microsoft no quizo ser visto como atacando a IBM o Linux.” -Larry Goldfarb, BayStar, inversor clave en SCO abordado por Microsoft.
Resumen: Microsoft hace un buen uso de su topo dentro de Nokia para imponer impuestos a la competencia (elevación de sus precios), mientras que también está tratando de bloquear al propietario de Android, Google, de conseguir patentes.
LA extorsión de Microsoft no es noticia. Este sitio ha cubierto desde 2006. Este sitio previó diferentes aspectos del problema y explicó con bastante exactitud lo que sucedería.
Como explicamos ayer[http://techrights.org/2011/06/13/cant-beat-them-tax-them/], Microsoft está imponiendo impuestos sobre Android, mientras que los medios corporativos en su mayoría le siguen el juego en vez de realmente denunciar la práctica de penalizar la competencia con una sanción sin ni siquiera un juicio. Esto es chantaje y ya hemos explicado por qué, incluso hace 4 años [1[http://techrights.org/2007/06/08/shuttleworth-on-racketeering/], 2[http://techrights.org/2009/07/17/racketeering-melco-microsoft/], 3[http://techrights.org/2009/12/29/microsoft-extortion-software-patents/], 4[http://techrights.org/2009/07/24/red-hat-on-microsoft-two-face/], 5[http://techrights.org/2009/09/08/staples-employees-anti-linux/], 6[http://techrights.org/2009/07/01/patent-racketeering-myhrvold/], 7[http://techrights.org/2008/02/22/open-for-patents/]].
“Microsoft quiere que Google permaneca indefenso mientras que el departamento legal de Microsoft, dispara a los distrubudores de Google uno por uno, incluso llevando a algunos de ellos a la corte (por ejemplo, B & N, Motorola) …”En lugar de atacar directamente a Google a través de patentes, Microsoft va a los distribuidores (menos incentivados para contraatacar), que es el equivalente a hacer chantaje de estilo de la mafia por ir tras los clientes de la tienda con una pistola, intimidando a uno por uno hasta que la tienda ya se queda sin clientes. Para empeorar las cosas, cuando Google (el tendero en esta analogía) quiere conseguir un arma para su protección, Microsoft (el mafioso) interviene y hace el papel de “policía” de nuevo. Sí, el delincuente se hace pasar por policía de nuevo. Microsoft está tratando de impedir que Google obtenga patentes a pesar de que Google no utiliza ningún tipo de patentes ofensivamente y Reuters escribió sobre ello por primera vez[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/14/us-nortel-idUSTRE75C5WT20110614] en la cara de las cosas.Microsoft quiere que Google permaneca indefenso mientras que el departamento legal de Microsoft, dispara a los distrubudores de Google uno por uno, incluso llevando a algunos de ellos a la corte (por ejemplo, B & N, Motorola):
Google no deberia ser permitido de comprar miles de patentes que pertenecen a la quebrada Nortel Networks en términos de la venta actual, Microsoft dijo el lunes, el plazo para las ofertas en una subasta seguida de cerca.
Microsoft, que reclama una “licencia mundial, perpetua, libre de regalías a todas las patentes de Nortel,” tras un acuerdo de 2006, dijo en una presentación ante un tribunal de quiebras de Delaware que los acuerdos existentes deben ser transferidas a cualquier nuevo dueño de la propiedad intelectual, que abarca muchos campos.
Mira quién habla …
Este comportamiento es absolutamente vergonzoso de Microsoft, que no hace mucho tiempo se embolsó las patentes de Novell con el proxy CPTLN. Microsoft el hipócrita es una vez más, haciéndose pasar por un agente de la ley[http://techrights.org/2008/02/02/microsoft-industry-cop/], mientras que en realidad es Microsoft quien debe cumplir la ley y ser sometido a juicio. Aquí hay más artículos sobre el tema [1[http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20070945-75/microsoft-raises-concerns-over-sale-of-nortel-patents/], 2[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/nortel_google_microsoft/]].
“Microsoft está usando Nokia por sus patentes y es probable que el próximo objetivo de este topo de Microsoft (Elop sigue siendo el octavo mayor accionista MSFT) es agravar todos los dispositivos que funcionan con Linux, elevando sus precios al igual que SCO quería elevar el precio de cada instancia de Linux.”Pero espere, esto se pone peor. Después de haber sometido a Nokia[http://techrights.org/2011/06/10/microsoft-is-abusing-the-market/], adivinar lo que su mole, Elop, va a hacer a continuación. Patentes que “licencia” a Apple, lo que ofrece espacio para la imaginación. Bueno, lo hemos dicho desde el principio, porque Nokia había dejado caer pistas al respecto. Microsoft utiliza Nokia por sus patentes y es probable que el próximo objetivo de esta mole de Microsoft (Elop sigue siendo el octavo mayor accionista MSFT) es agravar todos los dispositivos que funcionan con Linux, elevando sus precios al igual que SCO quería elevar el precio de cada instancia de Linux. Es todo lo que Microsoft tiene como una estrategia, ya que ha perdido en el aspecto técnico en los teléfonos (como lo hizo en los servidores en los días de SCO). Por lo tanto, ahora se recurre a la recolección de patentes[http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2011/06/13/ios-5s-fancy-new-camera-trick-microsoft-has-a-patent-on-it/] y la extorsión, a veces por encargo (por ejemplo, Nathan Myhrvold y Paul Allen). Advirtimos acerca de esto en varias ocasiones en 2007. “Se ve mal”, nos dijo un lector de Finlandia por E-mail, señalando a este artículo[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20070970-37/apple-agrees-to-pay-nokia-patent-licensing-fees/]:
Apple se ha comprometido a licenciar patentes de teléfonos móviles propiedad de Nokia que desató una disputa legal de larga duración entre las dos compañías.
En el acuerdo se asentarán todos los litigios sobre patentes entre Nokia y Apple, y los dos se retiren sus denuncias respectivas con los EE.UU. y la Comisión de Comercio Internacional. Además, Apple va a pagar un Nokia un único pago no revelado y un curso de las regalías, Nokia dijo hoy.
Los “derechos de autor en curso” no se especifican y una abstención enorme ha sido enviado por el topo de Microsoft en Nokia. El a veces cómplice de Microsoft el Register cita a Microsoft Florian[http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Florian_M%C3%BCller], quien ha estado TRABAJANDO DURO PARA QUE LINUX SEA AGRAVADO Y FRACASE. Sí, Florian Müller, el cabildero que se apoya en los periodistas[http://techrights.org/2011/04/16/how-mobbyists-operate/], sigue cambiando de máscaras, esta vez[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/nokia_apple/] a “analista de patentes”. Para citar a The Register: “En su patente blog Mueller Florian analista sugiere que esto abrirá el camino para Nokia empezar a extraer dinero de los fabricantes de teléfonos Android, señalando que es casi seguro que en violación de las patentes de Nokia por las que Apple ahora paga licencias. “En este punto es realmente correcto para un cambio. Hace apenas unos días Elop el topo insinuó que Android se deriva sólo o con base en el éxito del iPhone.
“Hace apenas unos días Elop el topo insinuó que Android se deriva sólo o con base en el éxito del iPhone.”Nos pareció divertido que alguien en el IRC cree que Müller es citado es una señal de su credibilidad. Como hemos explicado anteriormente, Müller trabaja -por encargo de Microsoft -enviando correo masivo a periodistas, exhortándolos a imprimir sus citas en artículos para que después pueda alardearse de ellos. Hace afirmaciones falsas acerca de sus credenciales[http://techrights.org/2011/01/29/where-is-ms-florian-provenance-es/] y que también propaga desinformación (en su haber, su Inglés es excelente). Así es como los grupos de presión suelen trabajar. Este en particular pasar su tiempo en Twitter hablar con los abogados de patentes (software pro-patentes) y pro-Microsoft bloggers como Bott, Enderle, y otros. Uno sólo puede imaginar quién está financiando sus esfuerzos de cabildeo. En cualquier caso, hoy en día en las noticias que encontramos otro recordatorio[http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/risk-taking-and-social-networking-in-the-new-broadband-era] de que los abogados de patentes son fríos y apáticos cuando se trata de los daños causados por las patentes de software[http://techrights.org/2011/06/14/odf-wins-in-russia/]:
En la segunda parte de las Preguntsas y Respuestas de Computerworld y una entrevista con un abogado de propiedad intelectual …
¿Qué te están diciendo tus clientes sobre el cambio en la ley, con exclusión de las patentes de software?
Tengo clientes que tienen patentes de software y otros que están relajados acerca de ello y no se molestan en obtener una patente si pudieran. Se trata de caballos para los cursos. Creo que lo que realmente necesita cambiar es la posibilidad de obtener patentes sobre las “innovaciones” que no son realmente nuevas.
Escuche lo que Linus Torvalds acaba de decir acerca de las “innovaciones” (vídeo de abajo). Está a unos 20 minutos desde el inicio. Uno tiene que preguntarse cómo Torvalds se siente sobre el gigante de la tecnología de su país de origen (tiene doble nacionalidad, ahora) se convierta en un esclavo de las patentes-manejadas por Microsoft. █
Translation produced by Eduardo Landaveri, the esteemed administrator of the Spanish portal of Techrights.
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