(jpeg 7k) (jpeg 25k) (No gifs.)
4,197,590: Method for dynamically viewing image elements stored in a random access memory array.
Note that some of the material about patents on this site is dated, and some of the patents mentioned may have expired in some countries.
See the User Friendly cartoon for January 7th, 2001 about the U.S. Patent Office.
The rest of this document contains the following sections:
The League for Programming Freedom is opposed to software patents.
It is not enough that an article is new and useful. The Constitution never sanctioned the patenting of gadgets. [...] It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.
The PTO is the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Europe has the European Patent Office.
Gérald also published a research article in French in July 2003 titled La face non patente des brevets logiciels. PDF and LaTeX versions of the article are also available, on this page.
"Developing software is [now] like crossing a minefield," says Richard Stallman, the originator of the free software movement that has developed the GNU/Linux operating system. "With each design decision, you might step on a patent that will blow up your project."[...] Rather than copying a failed American policy, the Europeans could be exploring alternatives to patents that might provide protection without sinking the intended beneficiaries. No doctor would approve an untested drug for his or her patient. Nor should Europe inflict such a remedy on its already weakened software industry.
This column is about U.S. patent 5,933,841, which [...] is now owned by [...] SBC Communications. [...] Called a "structured document browser," the patent [...] claims as Ameritech's original idea the concept of having elements on a web page that don't change, yet apply directly to other parts of the page that do change.
[Many standards bodies] often refer to such licenses by the term "RAND," which stands for "reasonable and non-discriminatory." That term whitewashes a class of patent licenses that are normally neither reasonable nor non-discriminatory. It is true that these licenses do not discriminate against any specific person, but they do discriminate against the free software community, and that makes them unreasonable.
The US Patent Office issued patent 6,368,227 on 9 April to Steven Olson of St Paul, Minnesota for a "method of swinging on a swing". The award has generated a mixture of chuckles and frustration at an overworked patent system unable to catch absurd applications.
This [SSSCA] law would effectively announce the end of innovation in digital technology: it would become illegal to create any hardware or software that failed to incorporate controls chosen by the content providers.
There is an on-line petition against the SSSCA ("government policeware on your PC") that American citizens can sign.
Mr Keogh said he patented the wheel to prove the innovation patent system was flawed because it did not need to be examined by the patent office, IP Australia.
The Temporary Restraining Order temporarily prevents Juno from displaying third party advertisements in the Juno ad banner window.The patent, which issued December 6, 2000, applies to a process that enables an Internet service provider (ISP) to display advertisements or messages through a window that is separate from the browser.
Darren Reed, in a recent posting to the IP Filter mailing list, has asked for a legal opinion about patent 5793763. This patent may have far reaching effects for all NAT software.
NAT is crucial for firewalling, load balancing, and failover.
The monster telco believes a patent filed in 1976 - and granted in 1989 - proves it owns the intellectual property rights to those natty little devices that link Web content together.
Also, see this press release: EuroLinux Congratulates British Telecom for Demonstrating the Absurdity of Software Patents
This petition is directed to the European Parliament. Its goal is to warn European Authorities against the dangers of software patents. This petition is supported by the EuroLinux Alliance together with European companies and open source associations. Please make this petition well known to everybody concerned.
This PTO press release is commented by Don Marti and Richard Stallman in this message. The PTO commissioners may be graded on the amount of time it takes to issue patents.
I [Don Marti] am nominating Richard for the Patent Public Advisory Committee, and I encourage everyone else to think of a person who can represent the interests of users and inventors harmed by software and business methods patents and nominate that person. More info at: http://zgp.org/~dmarti/uspto_committee
In his interview with J.S. Kelly, Richard M. Stallman, the father of the GNU project, talks about how software patents have been a problem for programmers for nearly 20 years and why he's leading the boycott against Amazon.com.
Making abstraction of the legalese, claim 7 says in short that you can compress an arbitrary sequence of two bits down to one bit.It took three years to the patent office to ascertain the validity of such a patent. A person with basic knowledge in mathematics and data compression can find the flaws immediately upon first reading.
This patent illustrates the general incompetence of the U.S. Patent Office. See more details about this patent.
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 13:44:18 -0800 (PST)
From: Paul Rubin
Subject: more bogus patents (not software)
From AIP What's New (today's issue):
2. PATENT NONSENSE: INFINITE ENERGY MEETS INFINITE BANDWIDTH. On Tuesday, BlackLight Power was awarded a patent for a chemical means of shrinking hydrogen atoms into "a state below the ground state." The, uh, inventor, Randall Mills, calls his teeny little hydrogen atoms "hydrinos" (WN 22 Jan 99). Mills describes them as, "the most important discovery of all time...up there with fire." The second most important discovery, I suppose, would be to find the hydrino line in the spectrum. In November, a patent was awarded to Media Fusion for Advanced Sub-Carrier Modulation, a method of transmitting data over ordinary power lines with a 10 GHz bandwidth. The claim is that magnetic fields surrounding the conductor can act as a waveguide. In a classic understatement, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has issued a warning to members that Media Fusion's claims "lack scientific merit."
We have an old system that was adapted to a new technology without being thought through, with unfortunate results. If it turns out that the software patent system is actually a hindrance to business - and not a boon, as the patent system was in mechanical engineering, back when steam engines were being invented - well, gee, maybe we should do away with software patents.
The problem is simple: The #%@$# Patent Office is handing out exclusive rights so broad and general they cover everything. And greedy attorneys are in a frenzy. If the trend continues, innovation will be halted.
Lawsuits are threatening to dampen the dynamism of the internet because, even when they are obviously spurious, they add so much to the cost of doing business that soon amateurs and upstarts might not be able to afford to compete with anyone who can afford a lawyer.
How could sound legal reasoning lead to a patent policy that so obviously undermines competition, discourages innovation, and distorts market dynamics in an important, emerging industry? As you'll learn in this essay, you don't get the answer until you trace this reasoning back to the earliest decision that enabled patent seekers to win government-guaranteed monopolies for software algorithms [...]
libgd allows CGI scripts and other programs to create GIF images on the fly. With GD.pm, Perl scripts could do that, too. [...]According to the Unisys Corporation, I'm a fugitive from justice. A rogue Webmaster. A flaunter of national and international treaties. My Web site uses (gasp!) GIF images. Chances are that you're a fugitive, too.
A company like IBM can defend itself by using its large patent portfolio, but small companies and individual developers will not have that power.
It is not enough that an article is new and useful. The Constitution never sanctioned the patenting of gadgets. [...] It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.
This article mentions a list of patents that were judged obvious by the Supreme Court and were thus invalidated.
The fact that a patent as flimsy and as spurious as this one has to be brought all the way to this Court to be declared invalid dramatically illustrates how far our patent system frequently departs from the constitutional standards which are supposed to govern.
If you can get your elected representative to take a position on software patents, we would be interested in publishing it on this site.
The FTC has issued a report calling on the US Patent and Trademark Office to apply tougher standards in granting patents. Congress should also establish a mechanism to permit companies to challenge patents more easily, it advises.
[...] Commercial software raises the issue of computer security, since one does not know what is inside. This is why I am against software patenting in Europe. It would kill innovation and reinforce litigation terrorism
The tide was turned by a groundswell largely co-ordinated through EuroLinux, although it would be wrong to assume that the issue is just of concern to open source proponents, as there are major implications for the ethical part of the software industry. Oracle opposes the patentability of software and believes that existing copyright law and trade secret protection is adequate, while Adobe, Autodesk, Borland, Novell, Synopsis and Wind River Systems have also developed their businesses without resorting to building a portfolio of software patents. Content-king Bertelsmann regards them as "inhibiting innovation". [...]Yesterday's skirmish in Munich was a well-won battle, but much work remains to be done in convincing national governments and the EU that software patents are fundamentally wrong, anti-competitive, and only in the interest of those trying to establish toll roads along the previously-open highway.
(From Linux Weekly News:)
The U.K. Patent Office has put up a request for comments on how software (and business method) patents should be treated in the U.K. and Europe. There is also some interesting information to be found in there, including the fact that some 15% of all U.K. patents now are "software-based."They seem truly interested. "We want to know what you think about this so that Government policy is evidence-based and relevant to business, commerce, and consumers - in other words to you. So, whether you are in the software industry, financial services, are a software user, a consumer, or are otherwise interested, we want to hear from you." The deadline for responses is December 15. (Thanks to Alan Cox).
On Thursday 19th October 2000, the European Commission announced the opening of an official consultation on the economic and social impact of software patents in Europe. In order to help European Authorities to conduct an open consultation, the EuroLinux Alliance of software publishers and non profit organisations debuts a public forum and a rich knowledge base.
The way current regulations are written, you could probably get a patent for the practice of selling hair dryers over the Internet. If two congressional Democrats get their way, the days of "obvious" business practice patents are numbered.Congressmen Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) and Howard Berman (D-California) have introduced the Business Method Patent Improvement Act of 2000
BT owns what it calls the Hidden Page patent, which was filed in the U.S. in 1976, granted in 1989 and isn't due to expire until 2006, giving the company the intellectual property rights to hyperlink technology. [...] Berners-Lee's work was based on, among other things, earlier work carried out by Ted Nelson, who is generally acknowledged to have coined the term hypertext in his 1965 book, "Literary Machines."
BT - which owns the patent to hypertext links - has begun its legal fight to claim back millions of dollars in licensing revenue from US ISPs. [...] Intellectual property attorneys, Kenyon & Kenyon yesterday filed a case on behalf of BT against Prodigy [...]The monster telco said a patent (# 4,873,662) filed in 1976 - and granted in 1989 - proves it owns the intellectual property rights to those natty little devices that link Web content together.
Apparently, on December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and 17 researchers at the Augmentation Research Center, Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park, California presented a 90-minute live public demo in which hypertext was wheeled out for all to see. The demo also included the first public appearance of the "mouse". Real Player footage of the demo can be seen here.
Warnock is quite right that our forefathers expressly recognized the legitimacy of government-granted monopolies to subsidize "authors" and "inventors" in their work to "promote the Progress of Science and useful arts." But this is not because the framers were especially fond of "intellectual property." (Jefferson, for example, hated it.) Their purpose instead was as much to limit that power as to grant it.
In December 1994, UNISYS announced it would sue developers based on their patent on LWZ compression, an integral part of the GIF specification which is used by web browsers and tools that display GIF files. The U.S. LZW Patent expired on June 20, 2003. Check out our GIF page for some history.
MP3 (MPEG-1, Layer 3) is a very popular coder/decoder that compresses standard audio tracks into much smaller sizes without significantly compromising sound quality.
[...] Hence the message Dutch developer 8Hz Productions ("two students in Amsterdam programming for the sake of learning") recently received from Fraunhofer regarding its open source 8Hz-MP3 software. Says the organisation: "We have received an email from Fraunhofer (as have more developers) to negotiate the licensing for the MP3 encoder. As we are poor students, paying the license is not really a viable option."Fraunhofer wanted $25,000 a year from the two students
So what is viable? Well, nothing beyond charging for the software or scrapping the project. 8Hz has chosen the latter [...]
RMS has been pointing out that MP3 is hampered by patents for a long time now; the proof-bearing pudding is on the way.
The owner of most of the intellectual property inside the MP3 format is Germany's Fraunhofer Institute [...]That company already charges MP3 download companies about 1 percent of royalties, while hardware companies must pay 50 cents per unit shipped. MP3 encoder companies, such as Musicmatch, pay Thomson about $5 per unit, contributing to the relative scarcity of free MP3 "rippers."
Worried about steadily rising royalty fees for online MP3 music companies, a group of open-source developers has created a new music format they say will be free and will equal or better MP3's quality.[...] the German research institute that helped create the format is beginning to collect its dues, charging companies that create MP3 software and hardware or sell MP3 downloads. Next year it will begin charging Webcasters, it says.
The Washington Post published an article about the "inventor," Bruce Dickens, titled Y2K Patent Fortune Pending?
Infoworld has a column by Ephraim Schwartz on this story.
In related matters, after being featured for two years on Amazon's web site, Jeff Bezos' "radical patent reform policy proposal" suddenly disappeared without a trace sometime over the past few weeks.
The "Amazon.com Patents" link has been removed from the "About Amazon.com" page and links to An Open Letter From Jeff Bezos on the Subject of Patents are now redirected to Amazon's home page.
With last week's secretive, sealed BN "1-Click" lawsuit settlement, it kind of looks like Amazon no longer has any use for Jeff Bezos' "call for radical patent form" that helped quell the Amazon boycott movement.
Noting that "The Web is fragile" and "Archive.Org is scotch tape that holds it together", Scripting News' Dave Winer runs an item that illustrates how all those folks who posted links to Jeff Bezos' original "call for radical patent reform" are now unwittingly hawking Amazon products thanks to a simple redirect.
Those people can change those links to the GNU Project's Boycott Amazon page.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday overturned a preliminary injunction granted by a lower court judge in Seattle in December 1999 prohibiting Barnes & Noble.com from using one-click shopping technology that allegedly infringed on arch-rival Amazon.com's online shopping tool.[...] "We have said throughout this case that we do not intend to sit back and allow Amazon.com to stake a claim upon any technology that is widely used. Allowing them to do so abridges our rights as a leader in e-commerce, but more important limits the choices of customers," [Barnes & Noble] said.
In late September OpenTV applied to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to broaden the scope of a patent originally awarded to the company in 1998 so it includes "one-click" shopping. [...] Should the Patent Office decide in OpenTV's favor, Amazon could be forced to either pay licensing fees for one-click shopping or abandon it altogether. Ironically, that's the same position Amazon has been trying to put Barnesandnoble.com into for the past year.
Amazon is not alone at fault in what is happening. The US Patent Office is to blame for having very low standards, and US courts are to blame for endorsing them. And US patent law is to blame for authorizing patents on computational techniques and patterns of communication--a policy that is harmful in general.
a ZDNet article about a new software patent related to electronic commerce.
Helmut Dersch of Germany has written an image processing program called "Panorama Tools". Anyone could download this free program from Helmut's web site.
IPIX have their own fisheye derived spherical VR system/software where they charge the user for every spherical VR created. IPIX have tried to intimidate Helmut Dersch by hiring a London law firm, Olswang.
See the original April 1999: email messages that describe this situation.
News item:
On January 19th, 2000, Paul Rubin nominated Helmut Dersch for the next Free Software award:
I would like to nominate Helmut Dersch for the next Free Software award. Helmut wrote the Panorama Tools suite which are really cool programs (can be used in conjunction with GIMP) that are GPL'd and are used not just for stitching panoramas, but for correcting geometric distortion and color distortions found in most digital cameras, and can also be used to flatten out pictures taken with fisheye lenses.IPIX based their whole sleazy company on a patented program that takes fisheye images and flattens them out to look rectilinear, and then charging people $25 per license key where you need a new key for every picture; of course that flattening is just one feature of Panorama Tools. IPIX threatened Helmut with the patent and he located some articles from optics journals in the 1960's saying how to do that remapping and told IPIX to bug off. He was forced to shut down his web site temporarily but was able to reopen it without giving in to anything as far as I can tell. I'd like to be able to say that IPIX was totally hosed, but amazingly, for unfathomable reasons, people continue to buy their product.
In 1996, E-Data attempted to aggressively enforce the Freeny patent. Read more (from 1996).
This latest ruling indicates that the courts consider the patent, filed by a company called E-Data in 1985, a valid patent. E-Data's plan is to charge a license fee for all data downloaded over the Internet.
The E-Data mentality strikes again: comments by Stephan Vladimir Bugaj (31 October 1998).
The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work....This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.-- Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 US 340, 349 (1991)
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