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)."

Comments

Standard Business Practice

[Sodium Attack]

This shows very well why companies feel the need to get dubious patents.

"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.