Microsoft Copies Idea, Admits It, Then Patents It 333
An anonymous reader writes "BlueJ is a popular academic IDE which lets students have a visual programming interface. Microsoft copied the design in their 'Object Test Bench' feature in Visual Studio 2005 and even admitted it. Now, a patent application has come to light which patents the very same feature, blatantly ignoring prior art."
Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Insightful)
A patent used to be something that had invented something new, if whatever they had come up with was already out in the open and common knowledge then there a patent could not be granted.
So many things have been patented late, as far as I know these patents did now show up until a few years ago, yet all kinds of things that has been out in the open has been patented.
Software patents doesn't seem to have anything to do with who invented anything, it is about who first comes up with patenting something and get the application in.
So far I have never heard a sensible argument for why software patents is a good thing. It doesn't look like the big companies that keep on filing these patents would stop developing because there was no such thing as a software patent, they did so long before software patents would ever show up. I haven't heard of a single case where the lone programmer (inventor?) gets a patent for some smart code he invented and the big companies will pay him for his efforts. All that I heard of is big companies (or maybe small companies that invent nothing but has made it their business to file patents for things that already exist) that have asked money from another big company because of these patents.
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Informative)
How-to submit the reference: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documen
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Interesting)
I should so patent that idea.
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Interesting)
I will donate domain space and bandwidth -- and put some of my own cash in the pot -- if people are willing to help design, write and manage the app. I'm vacationing with sporadic access for the next week & a half, but after that I'll try to get all the responders in touch with each other & offer whatever I can to the endeavor. I'm a C# / Asp.NET developer myself, but I'm open to other architectures, e.g. PHP on a virtual LAMP server to start, perhaps? Some sort of mod system would be needed to pair filing suggestions with available funds; nobody would want a system with hundreds of filings just a little bit short of the needed fees, while cumulatively enough dollars were tied up in the pot to address at least some of them. But those are implementation details that could be discussed later...
Right now, the domain is basically "parked" on a host (mind you, with no ads or "Your One Stop Portal for All Your Obvious Ideas Searches" type crap), but yes, I do have my own physical servers & lines when it's time to start real work.
I'm not intent on ultimately controlling the domain & project, by the way. If there's a sensible way to put everything into motivated, collective hands, that'd probably be best.
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Interesting)
Again, in the spirit of what this whole endeavor is about, I grabbed this for community & not personal visibility.
I wonder if the patent objection filing process has provisions for objections on Obviousness grounds, or only on Prior Art grounds? If the Taxonomy ever gets off the ground, it would make a handy "incorporate-by-reference" resource if the former type of objection is permissible.
Anyway, hopefully there will be enough competent & motivated souls stepping up to help make this all happen.
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Interesting)
But here's the tricky part: the finding of incoming patents with obvious prior art, and the time to fill out those forms, review them, and submit them. As a community project, this might be easier than it looks, if the articles can be peer reviewed, commented upon, etc.
So...
1) Paypal account to accept donations
2) System of displaying donation totals and expenditures for which patent
3) Submission of bad patent requests for review
4) Submission of prior art claims for those patents
5) Submission of final Patent form for review
6) Voting system on which Patents we submit against
- this last needs to come last because there's not point on voting against patents you haven't proven are false
7) A system where you can review your donation and which patent it went to block
NGTW!
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<flattery>You're obviously adept at organizational tasks.</flattery> That sounds like a pretty good breakdown of the task. I'm open to Python. Is there a robust, serverless DB system (i.e., purely filesystem based) that's at all scalable? I have MSSQL & MySql installations, and I don't ses a problem with doing FireBird or Postgre either, but I just the portability of self-contained, dependency-free systems wherever possible. (Though FireBird may already meet that criteria...)
Since I'm leer
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Look, I don't want to get bogged down in battles à-la Free vs Open Source philosophies, etc.; I want to do whatever I can to open up the field for more people to help fight bad patents, using any strategy that doesn't have overtly undesirable sid
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Beware of Submitting Prior Art (Score:5, Informative)
If you do, and as is typical the patent office drops the ball and issues the patent, then that prior art is lost forever to you as an anti-patent defence, and cannot be used in a court case.
This is why companies rarely challenge inappropriate patent filings via the USPTO, and save prior art until they need it in a court of law to challenege enforcement of a bad patent, so they can have it argued by their own experts.
The system is broken in many ways, this is just one more.
Bellyaching Software "Patents" (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that it is the responsibility of the party filing the patent to check for prior art, and report their findings to the patent office. This is a clear conflict of interest. However, this is not unique to software patents, only that the effects are more pronounced because the industry moves so much quicker than most.
Reform of the patents system, not abolition of the concept, is required to ensure that they fulfil their purpose.
BUZZZTT Wrong! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Insightful)
The patent system was setup to encourage invention, and give incentives for people to make their work public. Patents are only needed in areas in which invention or innovation are lacking, or are regarded with to much secrecy so as the industry doesn't move forward. Software is a industry where problem solving is a everyday occurrence, and there is no need to give any huge incentives to people. Software is also covered by copywrite, and is one of the few industries protected by copywrite AND patents (the only one i know of actually, but im sure there are a few others probably).
Software is not a industry of the physical world, in which invention needs encouragement, the entire idea of software requires the ability to solve problems, to do things not done before, and overall, to innovate. If a company wants to succeed in software, then they must produce software that keeps on innovating, or they will soon fall behind and customers will then jump to some other software company to get the services they need.
When patents get involved, things go bad. Patents give inventors incentives by giving them a temporary monopoly on their patented idea, forbidding other companies from taking that idea without permission, or until the patent expires. This monopoly immediately discourages innovation within the claims of the patent due to the government approved (thus legally binding) monopoly that cant be removed. Normally, this downside is outweighed by the benefits of the invention within the public domain, once the patent expires, the monopoly ends, and the patent falls into the public domain for any use.
The need for invention is the key to patents. Monopolies granted by patents is a big turnoff to innovation, and this must be remembered when deciding what should or should not be allowed to be patented. Software is already protected by copywrites, also important to remember. Software requires innovation, something patents discourage in the short term (short being the patent expiration term), in the long term, does the software industry really benefit from patents? The answer would be no. Software patents only cover ideas used in software, not actual software. The ideas used would have been created by the need for them by a programmer. Sooner or later, some other programmer would have also come up with the same ideas. Not only that, but software patents try to be generic as possible, they don't just cover implementation, but the whole idea of something. This is what kills innovation in software. Without patents, innovation will flourish as companies wont be scared to death about coming under fire by patents, allowing them to innovate and move the industry as a whole forward. Without software patents, the industry will not suffer from a lack of invention, as stated, the industry requires it just to exist, and if a company did decide "hey, without patents, why should i invent anything?", with will soon find themselfs in a world of hurt when their customers start switching to other software makers (hey, just look what happened to Microsoft and Mozilla, Microsoft won the browser wars with Netscape, and from then on didn't work on IE, Mozilla meanwhile caught up to IE and even surpassed it, forcing Microsoft to update their browser in fear of losing even more people to Mozilla/Firefox and other browsers gaining headway.).
Competition is good in industries, and in the software industry, you compete and succeed by inventing (yes, success is also being bought out by other companies). As noted by Microsoft, without competition, why even bother innovating and inventing? Patents remove competition, and in a industry who's main goal is to innovate and invent, removing competition is what makes companies sit on their ass.
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What planet have you been on? One of the major news stories of 2006 was the case of the lone inventor, Thomas
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Interesting)
And that is a bizarre thing to be trumpeting as a laudable achievement.
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A lot of what Edison is credited with inventing was invented by someone else, but patented by Edison. There's the case of Tesla and the radio... it's an old scam.
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independent invention before patent granted nullifies patent would be a much better system.
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Interesting)
The original use of patent, that I'm aware of, is either "patently obvious" or "patent of nobility". In both cases it represents the making of knowledge public. (For this reason I don't believe that software "patents" qualify as patents. That would require publication of all source code & tools required for making the software [compilers, etc.]. This isn't even approached.)
Now what the USPTO is supposed to be granting is a patent of invention, i.e., the making of an invention obvious, so that all those "skilled in the field" can reproduce the invention. Software patents clearly fail this test, but they frequently, as here, even fail to contain the component invention around which the "making obvious" is supposed to revolve.
I will assert (IANAL) that there has never been a software patent that fulfills the requirements of patent law. This doesn't mean that I believe I have enough money to pay for a challenge, it means that I consider each and every extraction of funds under threat of a patent lawsuit based on patent law to be extortion. And that I consider that the forces of "law" that are complicit in the enforcement of such actions are commiting malfeasance. (Possibly only misfeasance. They may well not know any better.) Believing this doesn't fool me into thinking that I can safely presume that they won't enforce the software patents, it merely causes me to consider the US government to be an illegal conspiracy against the constitution.
I'll admit that this view causes me to be extremely cynical about any and all governmental pronouncements and justifications. I've yet, however, to notice a time when my cynicism was incorrect. (If the Democrats re-instate habeus corpus, contrary to my predictions, then I'll need to raise my opinion of them slightly.)
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In British English corporations are referred to in the plural.
If the USA had spoken, oh, German, (Score:3, Interesting)
German was proposed as the offical language of the US in the 1700s. If I recall right German, Dutch really, barely lost being the official language in Pennsylvania, ie "Pennsylvania Dutch [wikipedia.org]". About the same tyme Benjamen Franklin proposed a law barring Germans from immigrating to the USA.
FalconRe: (Score:3, Informative)
Can anyone explain the grammar rule for why corporations are sometimes considered to be groups of people, in a context when it doesn't look like they should be?
The short answer: this is an example of "metonymic merging of grammatical number" [wikipedia.org]. Under certain conditions, a writer may use a collective noun that usually takes a singular verb form with a plural verb form to indicate that the individuals in the collective are active participants (as well as the collective as a group entity).
The longer answer requires an understanding of these points:
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Using the singular looks funny to me (being British). A company is nothing without the people who comprise it, so corporations' names are simply tags for the group of people who comprise that corporation. 'Scientologists are...', 'Microsoft are...'. Although 'Microsoft' isn't a plural, it's a label that refers to many individuals whose day-to-day actions define 'Microsoft'.
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:4, Funny)
Besides, if people object to "Microsoft are", how do they react to "Windows is shutting down"?
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Funny)
I react very positively to that. "This nightmare is over" is usually my thought.
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It's a shame that I can't trust it to even shut down reliably. Thinking about it, that's my reaction to many of Windows' proclamations - "Yeah, sure, you may say that... but what are you really going to do?"
Meh. All part of the daily hand-holding that is the Windows XPerience. It's like a toddler who's mostly able to walk, but you still have to keep an eye on him just in case he wanders into oncoming traffic.
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The most important thing is consistency, don't flip flop between referring to it as singular and plural, pick one, and go with it (or them).
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sick Software "Patents" (Score:5, Informative)
* be found guilty of a crime
* be sentenced to pay restitution
* petition the government as a citizen
* not have their charter revoked by the state (killed)
and a host of other things. From my (admittedly limited) viewpoint of the subject I would consider that "practically indistinguishable" under our law.
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or are Microsoft "thieving bastards" ?
Oh, it gets worse... (Score:4, Funny)
A quick USPTO search doesn't find any specifically covering brass balls as big as these ones, so look for them to file for that patent pretty soon. Amusing sidenote.. I actually did search, and did come across this [colitz.com]. And a backup (less amusing) source [freepatentsonline.com] if first goes down.
WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Interesting)
A patent means nothing until it has been defended in court.
On the other hand, a patent award gives one a warm feeling and looks great on a CV.
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I'd hardly call that recent. Since then Microsoft has asserted that Linux violates Microsoft "Intellectual Property" but has declined to specify what IP that would be exactly. I don't think anyone would claim that's to help patent reform.
This current incident also reeks of foul play, and Microsoft is going to have to turn around pretty quickly and say "Look how stupid the patent office is for giving us this patent," lest they look bad for the incident. If Micros
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More Evidence (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually, when companies get away with this on a big scale, they get to write history. So, you can look forward to people believing 100 years from now that Bill Gates invented the Internet, object-oriented development, personal computing, graphical user interfaces, and visual development environments. Well, maybe Microsoft will share some of the credit with Steve Jobs, which is just as erroneous.
Vote with your money (Score:4, Insightful)
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Indeed. With RealBasic being priced about equal to Visual Basic and Ubuntu being free I see very little reason to develop for a proprietary platform these days.
Now granted the user base is *ahem* considerably larger for Windows but I think that will change and is changing now.
To use the old cliche "Build it and they will come."
Especially if you can show a cost savings to the upper level of manglement.
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Agreed though, I doubt any of the execs of MSFT give two shits about random infractions of the law. They act with impunity all the time anyways. Just makes their eventual demise even more tasty. [Hint: I bet the Enron folk didn't think they'd go down either]
Tom
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BTW, do you keep your money in the bank, on in a pile of gold? Because I personally am not completely at ease with the fact that "my money" is just a number in some corporation's database.
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I mean like any other rich person why stop at your first billion when you can MULTIPLE BILLIONS!
I think if the stock flatlined it'd still piss him off despite the tangible sssets he has.
Tom
Submit the prior art (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if you care, and if you think you have prior art, submit it to the examiner.
Antipatents? (Score:5, Interesting)
How much searching ought you to do for a patent? If your country signed up to the international patent agreements, then for your patent to be valid, there must be no published or sold prior art anywhere in the world or in any language. This is an impossible search, so the assumption is always that any prior art search is incomplete. If all patent applications are incomplete, then some people may wonder why we start at all. You could just do a cursory search of the current online patents, and allow the application. Microsoft have lobbied for a more open system where patent application becomes easier, and the public community does more of the searching. Unfortunately, patent applications have titles, summaries, and patent indexes that make them easy to search, while products are not searchable in the same way. If you searched for prior art on the Microsoft product, then you would be very unlikely to discover BlueJ.
I do not think the public should be required to support the prior art searh effort, but if they are going to be enlisted, then they ought to have the right tools. What I would like to see is some searchable index of prior art or prior ideas. This could be classified the same way as patents. For my particular field of image colour transforms, I would list all the different ways in which would could generate and combine and apply different forms of colour transform, invert them, apply them, with all the different variations we could think of. Other people could generalize this list, or add more specific implementations, as a patent can cover a simplification as well as a refinement. We would include references to prior art where examples could be found. This would not stop existing patent applications for stuff we know has been around for ages, but it could frustrate all future attempts.
As a software writer and a filer of patents, I think we would be better off with no software patents. If we have to have them, let's make them good ones before they bring the whole patent system into disrepute.
Re:Antipatents? (Score:4, Informative)
This is also one reason why "defensive patents" are complete hokum. If a company really wanted to get a patent just to make sure no one else could, they would just file a SIR: it has all the same information, it gets searched by examiners, and it's a public record. But of course SIRs are actually very rare: it's so easy to get a patent that companies would rather get the patent 'just in case' they need to sue anyone later.
Re:Antipatents? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Submit the prior art (Score:4, Informative)
Umm, no (at least in the USA.) Publishing a patent app after 18 months thwarts the well-known tactic of constantly amending your app so that it stays below the radar for years -- the submarine patent. People would file a patent app, delay its prosecution until a market developed, then get it approved and demand infringement damages from all the legitimate companies that had been working on the problem for years.
Patent scope (Score:2)
Patents and Perjury (Score:5, Informative)
Link to the full transcipt (Score:4, Informative)
One simple problem (Score:2)
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Granted, but revoakable (Score:4, Interesting)
The real test is you present valid prior art to them, and see if they revoke it on the spot.
Re:Granted, but revoakable (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no cost to the patent office for granting patents that are stupid. There is no or little cost to the applicant for appling for a stupid patent. Thats the problem.
A solution (Score:4, Interesting)
The advantages are:
Burden of Patent on the Patenter (Score:5, Interesting)
That kind of consequences would force the filers to carry most of the responsibility for researching prior art and other patent invalidators, rather than the incompetent/overloaded PTO. And weed out many of the crooked patent lawyers who make money regardless of how badly they construct the artificial government monopolies they attempt to create.
Go To The Source (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Go To The Source (Score:5, Insightful)
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Microsoft has no legal/ethical/moral boundaries (Score:5, Insightful)
What, no link to the patent application? (Score:4, Informative)
(Posting AC = No karma whoring)
Hard to defend (Score:2, Insightful)
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They made their previously saleable heap of dung called Internet Explorer FREE.
Sales of Netscape crashed.
I see (to my simple non legal mind) the same sort of behaviour here.
-Find a product that already exists and made by a small company.
-Copy functionality of said product
-Make it Free but closed source
-Original Company goes bust
-Start charging for previously free software
-Profit!
or for the last two
-Lock in. All users of this neat funcyional
Secret Friend? (Score:2)
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The "original company" is a university. The product is already and always has been free. Why would this "company" go bust if Microsoft gives away Visual Studio Express containing similar functionality? In fact, the concern BlueJ raised was that Microsoft "might" exercize this patent and prevent them from distributing BlueJ. However, this has not happened
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No, I don't think that's the case. However, I'm more than a little apprehensive about an academic package that's not open source or Free Software, and whose license prohibits disassembly [bluej.org].
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Microsoft Patent 1.0? (Score:2)
what about patenting? (Score:2, Insightful)
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US Patent #1 (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.cheapass.com/products/boardgames/cag03
Eureka! You've just invented time travel.
But the awful truth is that you're not alone.
In fact, scientists have been inventing time travel since 1814.
But if you have a time machine, it really doesn't matter who invented it first. All that matters is who gets to the Patent Office first.
And by "first" we mean on opening day. Because nothing suits a time machine like U.S. Patent 1.
Futurology (Score:2)
Bet the USPTO grants the patent anyway. Really.
evil (Score:5, Insightful)
The only solution is a total overhaul of the patent system.
(As for the BlueJ feature itself, I'm not exactly sure what's supposed to be new about it anyway. People have been doing that kind of testing since the days of Smalltalk.)
The thing is, engineers don't patent anything (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft is not a single entity (Score:5, Interesting)
The story seems to go like this:
BlueJ becomes popular in academia. When Microsoft ask people in academia which new features they would like to see in Visual Studio, naturally they suggest some of the features that makes BlueJ popular.
Now some people from Microsoft gets assigned to implement this new feature, and for extra credit also write a patent application (or submit the idea to the people who write the patent application).
Later, another person from another subdivision, who happen to be an active blogger, get wind of the BlueJ people are angry that Visual Studio has a new feature copied from BlueJ without acknowledgment. So the blogger find out that it was most likely BlueJ that inspired the academicians to suggest the feature, and acknowledge the fact.
And now, because people think of Microsoft as a single entity, they are angry because Microsoft both patent the idea, and at the same time acknowledge where it came from.
Re:Microsoft is not a single entity (Score:4, Funny)
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If the person implementing the feature didn't write the code then they can't.
If the person who implemented the feature just followed a spec then they can't
If the person who wrote the spec "invented" it by copying other people's suggestions then they can't.
The applications lists Goenka; Gautam; (Hyderabad, IN) ; Das; Partho P.; (Hyderabad, IN) ; Unnikrishnan; Umesh; as the inventors so they've declared they invented it. So what did
Re:Microsoft is not a single entity (Score:4, Informative)
Your point?
Simply Amazing ... Kill ALL patetns (Score:2)
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The alternative? Companies keep their stuff secret.
So, assuming patents would not exist, the Africans would still be suffering from AIDS, the only difference being that the companies had kept their AIDS drugs a secret. (Good luck with reverse-engineering them.)
Patents are not a bad idea per se; its their enforcement and granting that are broken. AIDS drugs in Africa should pass as analogous to "fair use
This should not be surprising (Score:2)
In their eyes they have to try to patent anything they've worked on because patents are some form of security on their work, and they have to keep up with companies like IBM that patent a whole lot more stuff than they do. I would imagine doing so is hard though since places like IBM have more revenue str
wait a second... (Score:2, Interesting)
How this could have happened (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, here's what I think might have happened.
That's my theory, anyway. It goes to show that there's a perverse incentive for large corporations to have a system of information hiding so that it can later have plausible deniability about this kind of thing.
Do we really need a patent system? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, I understand the purpose - The purpose is to allow someone who developes a new technology to be able to make the research costs back by having a monopoly, thereby encouraging innovation.
But, I see two situations:
1. The new invention is so clear an obvious that there is no effort at all to reverse engineer it when it comes on the market. (i.e. Sporks, intermittent windshield wipers, etc.)
2. The new invention is technically sophisticated, and requires significant effort to reverse engineer.
In case one, we probably don't want those obvious types of things patented anyway. In case two, even if there is no patent, the person will have a monopoly while other companies reverse engineer the product, tool up for production, etc.
I just don't think that people are going to stop innovating because there are no longer patents. In fact, I think it will ACCELERATE innovation. A company won't be able to develop a product, patent it, and just rake in the bucks from their monopoly anymore - They will have to make constant improvements to be ahead of the curve.
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One solution would be to have software patents treated differently. Ten years for a software patent is a very long time. So instead we could have simple patents apply for 2 years, medium level patents 4 years and complex patents 8 years. Under this scheme "one click" would have lasted 2 years and given Amazon a clear advantage. Whereas some voice synthesis application may have core technology that could be patented for 8 years. The only alternative to anything like this I suspect is just to get rid of softw
its perfectly legal (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget Sun (Score:2)
If you read TFA, BlueJ is being developed with the support of Sun Microsystems - 'course Sun's recent deal with MS may cool their ardor for defending their IP rights - OTOH, Sun could dredge up the settlement for their Java suit.
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We were talking about Integrated Development Environments, and out of nowhere you mention how you hope people will change the Operating System they use. If you had stuck to RealBasic and Eclipse, then you would have been on topic.