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Macromedia Bites Back Patent Style Versus Adobe
Arkan writes "After Adobe sued Macromedia over their patented
tabbled widgets, Macromedia has made counterclaims against Adobe
for using their patents on graphic element blending (5,467,443), and sound waveform editing (5,151,998 and 5,204,969)."
And Abodadobe to you all?
Bleh!
... they lick each other's asses ...
Actually, we sniff each other's arses. We only lick our own arses. And remember, on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.
Chris
Laine Walker-Avina
"In
Here's my beef with the legal profession: there is no balance.
In most spheres of life, resources devoted are weighed against benefits gained. For example, money goes to NASA or education or defense based on price-return deliberations in Congress. Or, using your first example, money goes to bakers only to the extent that people hunger for their goods. More recently, HMOs and insurers have enforced cost-benefit calculations on the medical field.
But the logic of cost-benefit has yet to arrive in the legal sphere. There is no checking force on the flood of money going into lawyers' pockets, as there is for bakers (since people desire only so much food) or defense contractors (where we weigh military need against cost) or doctors (where insurers have strict limits on what they will pay for). With this absence of cost-benefit thinking, barriers to litigation are now at toe-stub height, procedures once a case begins are grossly protracted, and consequently the legal profession has become a black hole for society's resources.
So, sure, we need legal recourse to have a stable society. But many of us feel that we've gone far, far beyond that level of litigation.
PNG is not a proprietary format. It's a wonderfully open format that has many great features. Alpha transparency, lossless compression, supports 24 bit color, has good interlacing abilities to load faster and makes files that are smaller than a comparable GIF.
I agree that what Amazon patented was fine, as a DEFENSIVE patent. Amazon, however, used it OFFENSIVELY, suing Barns & Noble with no previous provocation.
That's why I'm boycotting Amazon. They weren't using it defensively.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
Here's the way things go in the Corporate World. Coroporations, ideally, use each other to increase both's revenues. Example: IBM buys advertising from Leo Burnett. Leo Burnett buy rigs from IBM. Corporations also go after end-user dollars to increase revenues. That VA Linux server puts money in VA's pocket. A small store buying a POS system puts cash in the pockets of the corp they bought it from. Anti-ideally, corps can cannibalize each other. That's what's happening here.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Maybe I'm getting confused by the overuse of the word "said" and "derived" in their patent. Can somebody explain what the element blending patent actually refers to? I've read it, and to me it seems as though it may be something like Adobe's ability to link layers, and then by scaling one, you scale another. Is this a correct analogy?
Somewhere there is a happy middleground, or maybe not so much as happy but mutually dissatisfying. I like the idea of patents and IP in general, but I think, like so many others, that this has gotten too far out of hand. Perhaps a new level of bureaucracy within the Patent Office that needs to be contacted in cases of suspected patent violations. This would add months to the process of making a claim against someone, add tons of paperwork, and would then become enough of an obstacle that only something that a person considers a major infringement would be pursued.
A zero-tolerance society is not a good society at all. God forbid we have a zero-tolerance speed limit of a zero-tolerance litter law.
Of course this always boils down to the same issue: the US patent office accepts too many stupid patents. The question is how do we, average citizens, affect some change in that government agency?
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
I'm going to patent "I'm going to patent 'I'm going to patent something obvious" stupid comments on /.
"Our competitor has dubious patent A. We know it won't stand up in court and we'd like to do A. Now we can either 1) go ahead and do A, and fight the inevitable lawsuit--even though we'll win, this will cost us half a million dollars, minimum; or 2) we can get dubious patent B--then when they sue us for A, we sue them for B, and we settle out-of-court with a cross-licensing agreement."
This is why I don't blame Amazon for the one-click patent and won't boycott them (well, at least not for that)--that's just a symptom, and treating the symptom does not cure the disease. The root cause is that these patents are being granted in the first place.
Patent examiners are overworked (given an entirely unreasonable quota of patents they have to examine in a given time) and underpaid (making significantly less than their counterparts in industry). Of course, it doesn't help that the House of Representatives has voted to take away $295M in patent fees from the USPTO in FY2001. The patent office should be quasi-privatized, like the post office, and allowed to keep whatever revenue it collects, and not have its budget gutted by congress for other programs.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
With for example bread, the baker wins because he gets paid for the bread. I win, because I get bread.
With the suit-counter suit situation, probably at the end of the day there will be a cross licensing agreement made, where macromedia are allowed to continue doing what they are doing, and so are adobe. They could have avoided the whole mess by not doing anything. In this case the lawers win, because they get paid, but the companies loose, because they pay but get nothing in return.
I'm going to patent "I'm going to patent "I'm going to patent 'I'm going to patent something obvious'"" stupid comments on /.
I'm going to patent "I'm going to patent "I'm going to patent "I'm going to patent 'I'm going to patent something obvious'""" stupid comments on /.
You are telling me that there is literally no limit on the ability of private companies to spend money on defending their property, while contrasting this with the fantastic, rational, incorruptible process whereby the US Congress decides to spend money on placing unnecessary air force bases in marginal districts of MidWestern states.
Think about this for a while: Your example of a rational cost-benefit analysis is the US Congress' decisions on spending taxpayers' money
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Your sentence reads better thus: So, then, if someone invents a fantastic tool to break into houses [and copy the contents {thus destroying their value to the owners}], then conventional property [law] will be "rendered obsolete", then, will it?
And the answer is still "no".
-- the most controversial site on the Web
It's worth noting that PNG, the format used natively by Macromedia Fireworks, and PNG, the Portable Network Graphics format, aren't exactly the same. Macromedia embeds all kinds of wacky vector, layer, and texture information inside the PNG file (PNG is a raster format), which in other respects conforms to the standard.
You can export plain vanilla PNG files from Fireworks, though. It's really a pretty nifty program.
Have I done any design work?
I remember Illustrator 88, and used to tile pages with hot wax to send to the printer (digital file? what's that?).
Although Adobe's UI has always been better than FH, FH has always had a few more powerful features than AI. Until recently you couldn't even use a TIFF in AI.
Despite having used AI professionally for about 15 years, I still can't figure out why the selection tool and the direct selection tool are two separate tools. FH manages to do exactly the same job with just one, single, selection tool. And they introduced drag-and-drop color editing, as well as the live blending their current patent case is talking about. And they've always had a better autotrace tool (though since Adobe stopped trying to push Streamline so much they seem to have improved AI's).
So yes, I've done some design work with just about every version of FH and AI since they have been commercially available. Whle the Adobe UI is better, FH has won on features for about a decade now (as well as most magazine review shootouts)...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Looks like the only people who are going to profit from this are the lawyers.
This is like the cold war - it operates under the principle of mutually assured destruction. It's a bit sad that this is the best outcome under the state of software patents. Everyone sits on their missiles, but no one dares fire them because they are vulnerable to the enemy's missiles.
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...
That's ok, because Abode is just a cover company for the real Adobe with no assets, so if they loose the lawsuit macromidia can have that company...kinda like a decoy.
guys please do some double checking, at least on the headline...
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
This is a joke...period. The lax attitude of the U.S. Patent system is simply making a fortune for the lawyers! The shear concept of a software patent is absurd to me, perhaps if someone comes up with an entire new OS concept and wants to patent it...OK, but to patent an idea (such as one-click shopping) which is simply an application of common techniques (draw pixels to screen, use a cookie to save people typing) it is a farce.
We all know this is going to end up with either a settlement (lawyers win) or a long trial with one company taking the spoils (lawyers and one company wins, everyone else including the consumer loses due to less choice). Please keep my legal system free of this...please, please, please.....I think I better get marching and making T-Shirts
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Widgets are pretty fundamental cornerstones of the GUI environment. Can you really judge some to be intellectual property.
Also, what's going to happen when and if the whole thing gets ported to X? All the widgets are dynamic and can be changed. Is Adobe going to create a widget scheme that cannot be changed? And in doing so, you would be breaking their license agreement?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I love it when the competitors of the company I work for fight aginst each other!(beats a partership) Mohaahah! "I love it when a plan comes together"
Sorry for this being a bit offtopic but i hope people interested in software patents would take the time to sign this petition.
/. story but it hasn't quite made the front page yet.
http://petition.eurolinux.org/
It's really only relevant to europeans since it's a petition to the European Union authorities who are currently reviewing the validity of software patents. Whilst they haven't been made legal here I believe something like 55% of the board support implementing them.
Personally I feel software patents stifle innovation and whilst actual algorithms should be considered seperately I feel patenting something as simple as those in this story is just wrong.
For the record i've also submitted this as a
Why would Macromedia sue Adobe over it's car made out of clay, anyway?
BilldaCat
I'd actually like to see one buy out the other
Huh? How would having one single graphics company with 90% market share improve the products? When Adobe bought Aldus years ago we all thought the competition was going to be gone, luckily Macromedia managed to form itself out of the remains of the last small-time competitors in the graphics arena.
And the small print on the Aldus Freehand contract meant that Adobe didn't get to kill it like they'd planned to (and thus make Illustrator the only game in town), instead it reverted back to he developers and they went on to make the company we know and love today...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Why not your personal files? That's your information, and it's valuable to you. "The Real Slim Shady" is Eminem's information, and it's valuable to him (and to the company which he sold it to).
See, I get this feeling that Slashdot is very keen on their own intellectual property, but against everyone else's. And that's a fairly difficult position to defend.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Someone should patent unnecessary lawsuits. That way, every time one of these companies comes up with a frivolous lawsuit like this, they could be countersued by a third party. The punitive damages could make a great source of income.
Of course, the other alternative would be to get rid of patents like this in the first place, but that would require change, and change is bad, right?
1) Adobe's patent is on floating tabbed widgets
2) Macromedia patent 1 allows you to interactively edit defining elements of a graphic, and have the graphics automatically update (1991 filing date)
3) Macromedia patent 2 is on displaying multiple sound waveforms and allowing you to interactively edit and mix them (no, it really is almost this broad). (1988 filing date)
4) Macromedia patent 3 allows one to display a single waveform and change parameters of the waveform. (1992 filing date)
That is all OK, we will be free and clear of these patents in the year 2010 or so. It seems like Europe is going to have a substantial advantage in software generation, since the European countries don't allow stupid tripe like these patents.
In fact, I think Adobe should go rot in hell with Microsoft for running a monopoly. I hate their tactic of giving away thousands of copies of Photoshop to schools so it becomes the "Industry Standard", and then charging $700 for a fricking drawing program. Screw that, I'm not your bitch anymore, Adobe.
(*this statistic randomly generated for your pleasure.)
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This is reminiscent of when 3dfx sued NVidia over a multitexturing patent, and then NVidia sued 3dfx over five controller design patents. Are these tactics becoming standard practice in business ethics? This is funny and pathetic at the same time: "They sued us for WHAT?!?! Well, then, you file lawsuits against them over infringing patents X, Y, and Z!!!"
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer