Adobe Sues Over Tabbed Widgets

angst_ridden_hipster noted one that you'll find hard to believe. Adobe is suing Macromedia over the patent they seem to have on tabbed widgets. Now I'm torn: Is this lamer than one click shopping? Definitely not as lame as hyperlinks, but pretty sad.

Re:More than Tabs

At my previous company, I implemented a "tear-off tabs" interface for a graphics application (Windows and IRIX). After meeting several times with our legal department, we decided that Adobe's patent was effectively too broad to be enforced, so we went ahead anyway.

The gist of our arguments were that the patent sounds suspiciously like tear-off menus, which have been around (in OpenLook) since before Adobe filed the patent.

(Aside: implementing tear-off tabs in X/Motif/ViewKit was a seriously fun and annoying excercise!)

Re:Not all tabbed widgets

I got that too, that the patent is just on tabbed palettes, however, IMHO Adobe isn't on very strong legal ground, after all, tabs are quite common and as such it would be hard to prove infringement. Personally I can't even see WHY they were allowed to take out a patent on the damned things in the first place, maybe its just cuz the patent office loves to hand the things out...

Anyways, for more information see the adobefacts website [adobefacts.com] which unfortunately seems to be ./'d (or something) at this time... anyone manage to grab the pics before it went down?

-GreenHell

Re:Not all tabbed widgets

OS/2 2.0 had tabbed palettes in 1990. The tabs were on the right side though.

Lotus Apps had very Adobe-like tabbed palettes going back to 93 or even earlier. I've seen countless program launchers that operate on that principle (had one running on my Mac back in the early-mid 90's) Even Microsoft is now getting into the game with tabbed palettes (Office 2000 web controls, screen shots of MacOffice 2001 UI.), even if you don't quite consider a Windows Control Panel to be a tabbed pallete.

screen shots

The screen shots Adobe posted look pretty similar to the Macromedia products in question. I'm really wondering though, even though they deny it, if they're running scared from Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver.

Stats? Anyone?

Also, how much doctering of the actual default screens did they need to do to make their case?

Re:stop confusing "obvious" with "simple"

Whether Macromedia would have thought of it is irrelevant. Whether someone well versed in the field (user interface design, presumably) would think of it is the test.

Let's see, how great a leap is a tabbed widget? Wait a minute, all my life I've seen tabbed widgets! Prime example? Your personal phone book is probably a tabbed widget with little tabs indicating the beginning letter of the names on the associated page. Come on, how great a leap is it to apply that to a computer interface? How great a leap is one click shopping? It's as simple as someone saying, "Hey, it takes two clicks to do this. Wouldn't it be good to do it with one?" These *ARE* obvious.

Transistors are both elegant and simple, but by no means obvious. The internal combustion engine, conceptually, is both elegant and simple, but not obvious. A user interface design that mirrors a real world object can be elegant and simple, but is likely to be reinvented if you put a class of undergraduate computer science students on the task, let alone a talented and well versed professional. A user interface design that mirrors a real world object will NEVER be innovative. A patent that basically says "I do $COMMON_THING_IN_THE_REAL_WORLD, but I did it on a computer!" should never be granted. That's imitation, not innovation.

patent is not for all tabs

It seems to me, after briefly reading the patent [164.195.100.11], Adobe are not trying to protect just any old use of tabs.

Their first claim describes a standard tabbed dialog box UI component, with the additional function:


"and

combining the additional set of information, displayed in a different area of the display from the established area, into the group of multiple sets of information so that the additional sets of information may be selected in the same manner as the other sets of information in the group. "

I have not seen this software in use, but this sounds like a control in which other controls can be dragged into it, and appear on a new tab.

More than Tabs

Without doing a reasonable amount of research into this, like reading the patent or seeing the Macromedia product, I would guess that what we're talking about here is more than just tabbed windows. Heck, if it were just that they'd be suing a lot more folks than just Macromedia.

Photoshop utilizes a number of floating dialog boxes with tabs that switch between the various tools. Where Adobe's stuff is unique is that you can drag those tabs out to create new dialog boxes. You can also drag between different boxes to form new combinations of tools within a dialog box.

Okay, so customizing floating dialog boxes isn't exactly earth shattering stuff. Lot's of other folks have similar kinds of interfaces, but Adobe apparently owns this concept when utilizing tabs to customize them. You can have floating dialog boxes, and you can have tabs on them, but you can't use those tabs to customize them.

Personally, I think Adobe is going to lose big time on this one. Those tabs emulate file folders moving between drawers, and with a heavy precedent for the folder analogy througout GUI's I think they're going to have a hard time maintaining this one. On the other hand, it is a very cool feature for customizing the look and feel of Adobe products which nobody else has done a good job of emulating without duplicating. It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.

Macromedia responds

Macromedia has issued a press release [macromedia.com] denying the patent infringement claims:

MACROMEDIA DENIES ADOBE PATENT INFRINGEMENT CLAIMS

San Francisco, California--August 10, 2000--Macromedia, Inc. (NASDAQ: MACR) announced today that it categorically denies the claims made in a lawsuit filed earlier this afternoon by Adobe Systems Inc. The claim alleges patent infringement relating to user interface features of Macromedia products.

Macromedia believes the claims made in the Adobe lawsuit are without merit. The company believes that U.S. Patent No. 5,546,528 is invalid and unenforceable and that Macromedia does not violate the patent. Macromedia advised Adobe of this belief when first contacted by them in 1996, and readvised them when they last contacted Macromedia in May, 1999.

Talking about patents... EU is about to pass laws making software patents possible in Europe. Check out eurolinux.org [eurolinux.org]'s petition [eurolinux.org] to warn European authorities against software patents.

--

A pondering

Obviously, Adobe doesn't give a shit about the opinion of the hacker community; in this regard, they are like most corporations. Is there any evidence (anecdotal will do) regarding how corporations treat the opinion of their stockholders (outside of annual meeting type stuff)?

See, I own a bit of Adobe stock, and it's been doing pretty well for me. If I write them a letter saying "You're being jerks and abusing IP, cut it out", that letter goes in the circular file. OTOH, if I write "You're doing things to lower the value of my investment, cut it out", I hear a vaguely implied threat that "I think that I might be able to sue you for being jerks and costing me money." Hacker opinion might not count, but the thought of a class-action suit can generally get a few mental wheels turning.

Any thoughts? I dropped an email to Investor Relations already (can't hurt), but I'm wondering if others think this might work (and would be willing to do likewise). If it might work in this case, might it work in the general case? Might it be possible to influence the companies we hate by buying stock in them and grumbling about our investment?

I suspect that the answer I'll get is "It won't work, go do something useful", but I'm curious.

Prior art

I created a tabbed widget in 1986, and have documentation to prove it. Furthermore, I was divinely inspired -- the idea came to me in a Quaker Meeting, when I should have been thinking about something else entirely.

Re:yahoo calls this "news" ?!

How come some fucking idiot always posts this comment whenever slashdot links to a newswire story using some site (usually yahoo or excite) as the gateway? How come a bunch of fucking morons always mod it up?

Yahoo does not run the story. Yahoo does not claim that it is news. That's why it's served from biz.yahoo.com (the Newswire gateway), marked "Press Release, Source: Adobe Systems Incorporated" and tagged with the Canada Newswire graphic. This is so painfully obvious when you actually take the time to open your eyes and READ.

Yahoo didn't write the story. Adobe did. You want the news story? Wait till you get the WSJ blurb in *tomorrows* paper. Want to start talking about it now? Read the newswire Adobe propaganda - the only thing available at the present time. Obviously you have no clue how the media works. Slashdot feeds you something a little bit uncut and all you can do is complain? I thought most of you people were supposed to be a cut above the rest?

~GoRK

Look and feel lawsuits

The old look and feel lawsuits were copyright based. They failed. I believe the justification for that is that user interfaces are functional and not expressive or something along those lines.

However patent lawsuits based on look and feel are a separate issue. A UI can be considered a process for communicating with the user (processes are patentable) or as a design (possibly a design patent could be used).

And there is a third option. If the UI is distinctive in form instead of in function, it could get protection as "trade dress". This is related to trademark law - if something is distinctive as belonging to a company - like the colored cases of iMacs or the specially shaped Coke bottles (*) it can be protected as trade dress. This concept could be extended to UIs that look like those of the company claiming infringement.

There is an informative article about trade dress protection for UIs at http://www.fenwick.com/pub/trade_dress_for_user_in terface.htm [fenwick.com]

The article says that idea is dying, but it possibly could still be used by a litigious company to harass a competitor.

I'm not a lawyer, but it seemed patently (no pun intended) obvious that at least theoretically the concept of trade dress could be applied to a UI, even before I heard of any such attempt.

(*) The Coke bottle is a great example of trade dress. It is still so familiar even to this day that they decided to put a huge Coke bottle replica on the Las Vegas strip as part of the Coca-Cola store. Everyone recognizes the shape instantly as belonging to Coca-Cola - that is what trade dress is all about.

Patent interpretation

First - IANAL. I'm just a grad student who has had to read patents for my work. I've developed a bit of the patience needed to read these works of obfuscation, so I thought I'd take a gander at Adobe's at the IBM database [ibm.com]. Here are a few thoughts. From the synopsis, they are patenting a method to (1)section off a small region of the screen to display often-needed information and (2) using multiple selectors within that section to allow the user to choose which info to see, at which time, the information is displayed, displacing the previously shown info. First thought: This patent was filed in 1994 and granted 1996. In 1993 I was developing software on NeXT computers for multi-view interface menus & manipulators, using drop-down selectors. This work was based on prior demos from the NeXT community. It seems that prior art makes trivial the Adobe patent. Looking at the patent itself: p1 - Ahh.. tabs... I've seen these in Illustrator (which I use for technical figures). Handy little things, those. p2 - image of Apple menu p3 - image of Apple dialog box p4 - images of icon interface bars; iamges of tabbed palettes p5 - images of palettes p6 - flowchart of tabbed interface logic p7 - intro: Hmm... they contrast their method (persistent info) to menus (drop down, then disappear) & dialog boxes (disappear after use). Menus get longer, dialogues more cluttered with greater info. Palettes will solve this problem in user interface design. p8 - preferred embodiment: Seems to be saying that this patent covers all uses of tabbed interfaces for compact information flow, with any combination of previous developed menus, dialog boxes, icon palettes, etc. p9 - p8 cont.: Here's a juicy quote: "The technique of the invention provides a way of combining palette controls to allow multiple sets of controls to occupy the same screen space. The invention allows any number of palettes to be combined or separated at the user's discretion." The claims given don't seem to require tabs. Thought on p6 - this chart is pretty similar to the logic used in getting multi-menu windows to work on the NeXT, as mentioned above. Thought on p9 - claims not requiring tabs. Common practice in patents is to make your claim as broad as possible, so I'd expect Adobe to do the same. Other thoughts - if you've been in the science/engineering business then you probably know that it's common practice to file patents on anything you can afford to file on, making the claims as broad as possible to maximize potential profits. It's also known that larger companies sometimes file facetious patent-infringement suits against smaller ones to bleed of cash (and possibley market cachet) and thus hinder their product development & sales. Following the claims, it seems this work was laregly accomplished well before 1994. (Given a NeXT computer, I could probably resurrect examples of such code.) It would seem that Adobe is following time-honored business practices of siccing lawyers armed with dubious patents against competitors.

Adobe must be in trouble.

If Adobe has to use such marginal patents in tactical legal maneuvers to bolster its business, it looks to me like they must anticipate financial trouble. Stock analysts, take notice.

Beyond that, their pronouncements on intellectual property seem particularly hypocritical given that their core technology, PostScript, was developed by the Adobe founders while at Xerox PARC, and I doubt that Xerox got a lot of money out of Adobe for that.

Flabbed Midgets.

Most people don't realize that midget obesity is a serious problem and that Adobe is just stepping up here in the best interests of those little people affected. Macromedia has flaunted its use of Flabbed Midgets for a long time now and it's not fair to us or them that they can benefit from Adobe's considerable R&D expense regarding these short, fat people -

oh wait, what did you say? Trapped gidget? Oh, tabbed widgets. Right.

Forget it.


Hotnutz.com [hotnutz.com] - Funny

Look and Feel?

This sounds awfully familiar. It's an interface issue, not a functionality issue. I don't have a problem with trademarking an interface (trademark infringement has to be nearly exact to mean anything in court) but an interface paradigm is another matter entirely. They should sue MS and AOL while they're at it. Plenty of other folks using tabs, too many to name. Of course, Amazon took the one-click patent against their biggest competitor, ignoring all else. It would seem to me like this is very selective targeting for Adobe.

Prior art...

Avery has been making manila folders with those litte tabs for years. I think they should sue.

Press releases are funny

I always have to laugh at the wording of press releases of any kind. Just a bunch of marketing dweebs trying desperately to make their company sound important.

"We are taking this action now, after notifying Macromedia on several occasions that its products are infringing our patent. The remedy sought is straightforward -- we ask them to stop infringing our patents," said Bruce Chizen, Adobe's president.

Those bastards at Macromedia! How could they steal your widget tabs? After the months and months of blood, sweat, and tears your company poured into it! Obviously, ole Bruce is not happy with this turn of events, but those evil Macromedia people left him no choice!

"Adobe will not be the R&D department for its competitors"

Damn, Bruce, you sure are one shoot-from-the-hip, no-nonsense kind of guy. I bet right after saying that, Bruce went right back to the grindstone, to go crack some heads and burn the candle at both ends. He is obviously doing this for the good of the stock-holders, and not for the cheap publicity and chance to make millions of dollars in court.

"Adobe will aggressively enforce its patent portfolio and protect the interests of its stockholders," said Colleen Pouliot, Adobe's senior vice president and general counsel.

I wonder if Colleen was in the 10th floor executive-only meeting room (with drink bar, stocked mini-fridge and recliner chairs) when she made this statement, or on the private company jet on her way to Aspen? Nice to see Adobe stockholders have a pitbull like Colleen on their side. Wow!

OK, enough cut-and-past fun. I just had some leftover sarcasm I had to get rid of.

Parasitic Apps

You can have open source, you can have software patents, and you can have large companies. Pick two.

Consider the following example of what happens when the three are mixed together.

1) Macromedia comes out with a cool tool with a crappy user interface called Flash.

2) Macromedia does something pseudo-open source like and generously releases the SWF file format (and some sample code) to the world at large.

3) Although the specification isn't crystal clear, there's certainly enough information within it for Adobe to come out with an internally labelled "Flash killer" called Live Motion. Live Motion is essentially a Parasitic App. It exists on the good graces of Flash. The only reason it has for living is that it has a better user interface than Flash (which, as already noted, has a stinky interface).

4) The Parasite (Adobe) after laying its eggs in the brain of its host, then attempts to eat said brains via this very lawsuit, accusing Macromedia of the same Parasitic behavior which it itself has already commited.

The only difference, as I see it, is that Macromedia gave Adobe an open invitation to eat its brains and Adobe didn't.

Re:screen shots

I disagree. While the interfaces are similar, they are suing as a stall tactic. Adobe is hoping to create fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of Macromedia developers and their IT managers.

"Should I buy Macromedia if we run the risk of having to learn a new interface in six months?" is the question that might be asked.

As for Flash being dead because Adobe made a new tool, well, Freehand, Dreamweaver, Flash, Director and QuarkXPress are all products that survive (and indeed are better, IMHO) competition with Adobe.

Adobe came late to the game with ImageReady, was forced to bundle it with Photoshop 5.5 so it would actually ship. Meanwhile, Fireworks integrates nicely with Dreamweaver and Flash. OTOH, Photoshop's web obtimization capability is quite clearly tacked on, not designed from the ground up. Web designers know this. The guys in my office work w/ Macromedia products for precisely this reason.

Consider this, why did Adobe feel compelled to be able to import Flash graphics?

Can I stop working now?

I am in the process of finishing up coding a TTabControl and TPageControl for project Kylix [borland.com]. Does this mean I can stop working and go home now?

-- I'm not a Linux guy but I play one at work. --