Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Beats Macromedia In Tabs Patent Case
An Anonymous Coward points to this Adobe press release, writing "Adobe has won in its rather-silly patent lawsuit vs Macromedia, which covers the "tabbed palettes" UI used in so many applications these days. Hard to believe this one stood up in court, but hey..." Slightly less happy is Macromedia's release.
although the piece of UI in question is a relatively stupid and worthless piece of *h*t, that doesn't change the fact that what they're doing is essentially obvious to professionals in the field of UI design. This is pretty much going to be true of almost everything the patent office touches, except possibly compression algorithms or computation algorithms. Those things, I actually agree that the patent office could be involved in those where they are non-obvious, since they can have a significant effect on the speed of simulations or calculations, which can often be weeks or months long, involving several computers.
On the other hand, a great deal of algorithm work and research comes from universities, and I would hope that companies are not permitted to take the work of others and then go and patent it as their own. That wouldn't be fair.
The other thing is that software patents don't really need to be as long as physical object patents, since it is much easier to recoup costs which ought to be lower, and since manufacture and distribution can take place extremely rapidly where the product is information or software.
Other than that, I think that software patents could be beneficial to society as they provide inventors incentive to release their methodology to the public domain in exchange for temporary legal protection from competitors disassembling the product and using ideas which cost research money to find.