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This story really had my head spinning I know I should expect such things by now but it still doesn't register as real. Someone seems to own the idea of clicking on an item and buying it off a web page. This idea has officially been studied by the US Patent Office and found to be non-obvious and to provide a significant contribution to our technological state of the art. Please note, this is not for a moment a patent on the details of how such a thing is implemented nor on the underlying hardware/software/protocols behind such a device. This is a patent on the amazing idea that if you want to buy something, you click on the thing that says "buy it now".
Is it possible for adult humans to really feel that this "idea" is a substantial innovation that deserves protection? I cannot believe it is. There is a maxim that says, "never attribute to malice what could adequately be explained by incompetence". Frankly, my mental scope for human incompetance does not stretch far enough to encompass such an incredible screw up.
Here's another one, this dispute has been chugging along for ages in this case RIM deserve no sympathy because they have already laid claim to the "idea" of a device that you hold in your hand while pressing buttons with your thumb (like say, a TV remote control). This register article covers one of the RIM patent extortion attempts. It seems that RIM also claim to own the idea of having emails accessible from a mobile device. Check out this discussion of USP 6,219,694 which includes the claims and why they are not original.
Anyhow, one wonders what is the patent that bit RIM in the arse? Strangely enough, none of these patent-related news stories actually provide the patent numbers, nor a description of the patent claims. Shit, we wouldn't want readers to actually have a clue about what is going on here would we, they might realise what a ripoff this whole scam really is. Well NTP are the company holding the damaging patents here and there are 5 under review (5,625,670; 5,631,946; 5,819,172; 6,067,451 and 6,317,592) plus a further 11 that have not yet been disputed, most importantly USP 5,436,960 which lays claim to just about any system that transmits email through a wireless network. Even though email goes back to 1971 and the idea of wireless data transmission goes back to before WWII, somehow it is amazingly original to have the idea of sending email over wireless. Moreover USP 5,436,960 does NOT explain in any detail how to actually build a wireless network, nor does it explain how email works, it just gives broad outlines of some routers and some mobile devices and a gateway of two. The limited technical details that it does provide tend to describe a line-switched network with characters being converted to DTMF bursts (similar to very old modem technology) which is nothing like our current day packet switched networks. Of course, the whole point about email is that it doesn't matter what sort of network you send it over... but if you take that point of view then why should it be an original invention to run it over wireless?
So both RIM and NTP have patents on the same bleedingly obvious idea and learned judges are taking this stuff seriously.
Not to be outdone, the Europeans also want to get in on the act or at least some of them do. It's a big eye-opener as to how faar out of touch ordinary people are from both the technology that affects their lives and the legal process that governs how they live.
Here's one lawyer's opinion which actually tries to analyse the issues. I'll cover a few of his points:
Open-source advocates who want to use the law to abolish software patents miss an important point. "The Law" is not just a lifeless creature of statute. At the most abstract level, "The Law" is a social contract that is composed of policy choices, economic theories and social values determined by the community at large through the democratic process.
Completely untrue! In fact, it is the software patent supporters in Europe who have bypassed
the democratic process by ignoring the European Parliament's direction to restart
the whole legislation process. The European Council forced through the current
legislation without even giving discussion opportunity to some of their own council
members. Determined by the community at large through the democratic process
--
I'll believe it if and when I might happen to see it, and I know I haven't yet.
The Pony Express example is also rather disingenuous. Philip H. Albert is trying to suggest that by opposing software patents, the Open Source community is also attempting to stifle innovation. He is careful not to actually say it, he just hints it.
It would have been one thing to help displaced Pony Express workers by retraining them as telegraph operators; it would have been another to help them by banning the telegraph.Who is trying to ban the Telegraph here? The anti-patent activists are the ones standing up for freedom and less industry regulation. They are the ones who want to have the opportunity to go out, create and innovate without being told that someone else has a monopoly on some trivial idea that no one even realised was an idea because it was so obvious that everyone just did it without a second thought. How about the following gem:
Patent law is meant to encourage innovation, and innovation can sometimes be disruptive.
He cannot even bring himself to say that patent law does encourage innovation, only that it is meant to encourage innovation. Oh the joys of good intentions. How about we sit down and get a really objective look at how successfully patent law manages to achieve this objective? That's the whole damn question isn't it?
The anti-software-patent crowd can point out that the software industry managed to grow and innovate for a lot of years without patents being allowed on software. Now various groups have tried to get existing laws reinterpreted to sneak software patents in, and they can stand up with a straight face and pretend that software patents have always been allowed. Since every patent has a date, it is very easy to just look at how the numbers of software patents have rocketed up in the last five years but that's only facts, why bring them into the discussion?
This next one is an outright lie, and you can really tell who owns his loyalty:
One camp insists on abolishing software patents. The other camp insists on maintaining the status quo.
This lie has been
dubbed the "Nothing Happened Lie" by the NoSoftwarePatents website.
Let's just get this clear, the law (both in Europe and USA and even Australia)
clearly states that software is NOT patentable. The status quo is and
has always been that software patents are illegal. Various patent offices have
been busy reinterpreting the law -- that is to say, a non-elected group of people
have taken the law as written by the elected representitives of the citizens
and decided to change its meaning for their own convenience. What was that
we heard about democratic process
? Did the introduction of the first few
software patents ever go through public debate? Has parliament in any nation
explicitly approved software patents even now? Absolutely not.
The camp that wants to abolish software patents also wants to reestablish the status quo and ensure that the law remains unchanged and interpreted exactly as written.
The easiest way to see which way the wind is blowing is to note that even software-patent advocates in Europe make it clear that they do not under any circumstances want to allow the patentabilty of software as such. This is their secret way of saying that they do want software patents. Maximum double-talk is usually a sign of something nasty going down, and maintaining the status quo is not what the pro-software-patent lobby want.
The deadlock benefits neither side because it is doubtful that software patents are going to go away in the foreseeable future.
On what basis is it doubtful? What Philip H. Albert seems to be saying is that he already knows who is going to win... interesting... I'd be interested to know how he knows this and what information he has access to.
Curiously, some opponents of software patents don't seem to object to patents per se, just to software patents.
Not curious at all, every other industry has had patents for a long time, they have grown to accept it. The software industry grew up without any patents and it grew up without any hindrance on who could write software and what could be done with that software. This freedom has been the attraction of the software industry and the reason people choose software as a way of life rather than other industries where any real opportunity to innovate has long ago been stifled by big business and excessive regulation (e.g. the automotive industry once offered the opportunity for small garages to actually build cars, today such a thing is entirely impossible).
There are a bunch of other reasons, software is the most complex human creation by some orders of magnitude, software has depended from day one on techniques being stacked one upon another in intricate layers and software is amazingly malleable with the same technique being put to a variety of uses and being rebuilt into new and adaptive forms that are only abstractly related to the original. Finally, software is very closely related to the abstract language of mathematics (which is also excluded from patentability, and has always been so).
Let's drop our swords, put away the battle flags, and mellow out a little. It doesn't mean the end of Middle Earth as we know it.
There is no doubt about it, software patents are a direct attack on the entire concept of Open Source and Free Software. They are a systematic methodology for wresting control out of the hands of individual authors and into the hands of big business. This is not the time to get mellow and the patent advocates aren't dropping swords, so neither should anyone else. The patent advocates are are only getting started calling the legions into place. As we saw in the European Council, truth and justice means nothing to these guys, they use any and every tactic in the book and quite a few more besides.
I'll also point out that when it comes to preparing for war, the anti-software-patent group didn't start this, we were happy with the original concept which excluded both software and mathematical algorithms. We are only defending what was ours to begin with.
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