Sadly, on any random day, we could probably pick a case like this. Today it appears to be Spotify's turn to face a lawsuit for "infringement" of a spurious patent that should never have been granted in the first place.
The abstract of the patent begins:
"In order to distribute music information from a central memory device (2) via a communications network (4) to a terminal (6), this information is organized in a digital music information object."
As you can probably guess from this opening line, and sadly like so many other "software" patents, the rest is pure flannel: a very broad overview of the blindingly obvious steps that one would take in designing an application, but without having actually invented any non-obvious implementational details. Pretty much every line of the patent leaves you coming away thinking "Sure, that's obviously true, but what's your actual invention?". It's another example of how the patent system urgently needs to be reformed with at least:
- patent examination which goes beyond the intelligence of a chimpanzee on hallucinogenics (or as a next best thing, to paraphrase Donald Knuth slightly: if you would expect a 1st year software engineering student to be able to solve a problem as a homework assignment, you shouldn't be able to patent the solution as an "invention");
- severe punishment for companies that attempt to file spurious patents;
- more severe punishment for false claims of infringement (such measures do already exist to discourage large companies from bullying small developers, but they clearly don't go far enough).
There's also an interesting article in this week's Pod Delusion on the subject of patent trolls, looking at another recent case of patent abuse (Lodsys-Apple).
Showing posts with label software patent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label software patent. Show all posts
Friday, July 29, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
Will Jonathan Schwartz's blog post finally persuade Oracle to pick its toys up and put them back in the pram?
In case you've missed all the commotion, or just found it a little bit dull, I remind you that in August 2010, Oracle filed suit against Google, claiming that their Android operating system violates various patents held by Oracle after they acquired Sun Microsystems.
The extent of damages that they can actually claim for appears to be in some doubt. After an initial claim of several billion dollars, and a judge effectively ruling "don't be so silly" last week, the claim may be reduced to as "little" as 100 million dollars. If I had 100 million dollars, I wouldn't be sitting round writing silly blog posts. But to Google, that's petty cash.
Now, to naive bystanding programmers such as myself who are not lawyers, a few things always seemed a little bit odd about this case:
Or put another way, the whole case smells of somebody scratting around through their recently acquired arsenal of patents looking for an excuse to sue. Rather than learning to play happily with all the other children in the classroom, Oracle seems intent on shouting "But Miss, the red crayons are mine!".
Meanwhile, commentators had noticed the curious deletion of blog posts of previous Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Unfortunately, such Orwellian attempts to rewrite history don't tend to work on the Internet. Thanks to nothing more sophisticated than a search in The Way Back Machine, a key post from "Jonathan's Blog" has been restored to its former glory. And in this post, Schwartz states: "I just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of others from Sun in offering my heartfelt congratulations to Google on the ennouncement of their new Java/Linux phone platform, Android". As commentator Steven Vaughan-Nichols has also pointed out, this doesn't exactly sound like Sun were saying "We disapprove of Android because it violates our patents and will be suing Google for billions of dollars".
It will be interesting to see if this evidence can persuade the two parties to finally bang their heads together and get on with more interesting things. Like it or lump it, Android is a key market for Java technology, with Android accounting for a 30% share of tablet shipments in April-June 2011, for example. I can't help feeling that it would be more conducive to the platform's development for Oracle and Google to have a more sensible working relationship.
The extent of damages that they can actually claim for appears to be in some doubt. After an initial claim of several billion dollars, and a judge effectively ruling "don't be so silly" last week, the claim may be reduced to as "little" as 100 million dollars. If I had 100 million dollars, I wouldn't be sitting round writing silly blog posts. But to Google, that's petty cash.
Now, to naive bystanding programmers such as myself who are not lawyers, a few things always seemed a little bit odd about this case:
- would a company the size of Google with the legal resources it can afford really just go ahead and commit billions of dollars worth of patent infringement and hope that "nobody would notice"?
- if there was a big problem with Android's use of Java technology, why didn't Sun raise this at the time?
- some of the patents in question really boil down to some quite small, specific points of implementation (e.g. specific details of implementation of protection domains, the "pre-processing and packaging of class files", and some implementational details of the virtual machine), many of which could probably be worked around by using alternative implementations or (and hence) a reasonable licence fee negotiated with Sun if need be.
Or put another way, the whole case smells of somebody scratting around through their recently acquired arsenal of patents looking for an excuse to sue. Rather than learning to play happily with all the other children in the classroom, Oracle seems intent on shouting "But Miss, the red crayons are mine!".
Meanwhile, commentators had noticed the curious deletion of blog posts of previous Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Unfortunately, such Orwellian attempts to rewrite history don't tend to work on the Internet. Thanks to nothing more sophisticated than a search in The Way Back Machine, a key post from "Jonathan's Blog" has been restored to its former glory. And in this post, Schwartz states: "I just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of others from Sun in offering my heartfelt congratulations to Google on the ennouncement of their new Java/Linux phone platform, Android". As commentator Steven Vaughan-Nichols has also pointed out, this doesn't exactly sound like Sun were saying "We disapprove of Android because it violates our patents and will be suing Google for billions of dollars".
It will be interesting to see if this evidence can persuade the two parties to finally bang their heads together and get on with more interesting things. Like it or lump it, Android is a key market for Java technology, with Android accounting for a 30% share of tablet shipments in April-June 2011, for example. I can't help feeling that it would be more conducive to the platform's development for Oracle and Google to have a more sensible working relationship.
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