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Will Flash Be Taken Off The Shelf?
bugninja writes "According to an article at News.com, Adobe wins 2.8M from Macromedia today for using some patented interface stuff in Flash. But this isn't the end, further legal battles could require that Flash be removed from Macromedia's list of "products for sale". We may not all be Flash lovers, but is it right to take a good product away from so many people who really do like it just because another company's product isn't taking over the market like they hoped it would?"
Update: 05/03 13:29 GMT by J : Speaking of Flash, yesterday eEye discovered
a very serious security hole
in the version of Flash distributed with most copies of Windows. Go
download
the fixed release.
. A key part of having a patent is defending it. If Adobe fails to defend their patents, they'll lose them.
Bzzzt. Try again. This is true for Trademarks but not Patents or Copyright.
From Adobe's FAQ at http://www.adobe.com/adobefacts/faq.html#Q11 they are not claiming to have a patent on all tabbed palettes but only on those that can be customized, separated, and reorganized by users. Also for all those who say Adobe is claiming a patent in tabs in general check out Question 17 on the FAQ. Lastly check out the pictures that Adobe has on the site showing the problems...I bet the court took on look at those and had a lot of questions. Daniel BTW Now whether this patent should have been issued is a whole different matter and I am sure that others will cover it.
There is a tendency, especially in the OSS/FSF world, to under-estimate the significance of innovations in software. While I am largely against the current patent system, my dislikes for it revolve around the duration of patents, and the inability of clerks to apply or monitor the requirements for innovation.
You consider "tabbed palettes" ludicrous. With the benefit of hindsight, I can hardly disagree ... but were they innovative at the time, before world + dog started using them?
Maybe a better example (unpatented, fortunately): toolbars. Would those be patentable? Are they (were they) innovative? We managed to get through over 20 years of GUI use without the widespread use of toolbars. Anyone know when they first appeared?
Assuming a windowed environment, the use of a title bar with some system buttons can be considered obvious: that has been around since the beginning. But the idioms by which we further break down interfaces and make them accessible are developed over time. Which necessarily implies that there is room for innovation: doing something which is NEW, and not just a variation of what has been done before. And that is patentable.
So we're left with two questions: should such innovation be patentable; and are tabbed palettes new or a variation?
I assert that GUI innovations SHOULD be patentable (although I'd like to see a much shorter duration on all software-related patents). There are individuals and companies which spend a lot of time, effort and money researching GUI concepts, improving ease of use, and generally developing idioms which gives their software an edge ... but then have that idea reused by others in less than a couple of months, because the development cycle is shorter than the research cycle.
From Adobe's site:
As for tabbed palettes ... this is a more difficult one. But first you need to understand the patent. This is not just about a tool dialog with a tab panel in it! The patent is available from Adobe's site, and a set of animations illustrate the infringment.
As you can see ... this patent is about multiple tool dialogs (palettes) which dock together to form tabbed panels within a single dialog. Suddenly the idea is not so obvious anymore. Dockable components which overlap to save space ...? That's not a universal GUI concept; showing and hiding tool windows or popping up dialogs in a stack is a traditional means to handle this problem. Arguably Adobe DID innovate in this instance.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Actually it's not flash - it's their own package called Live Motion. It produces Flash-compatible graphics and SVG-based anims. SVG is open-source and where Adobe wants to go. Flash is binary and somewhat more constricted and where Macromedia keeps it's cashflow. Adobe wants to kill 2 birds with one stone...
It's happened already, ask Google about it.
The result was that MS said "well if you fuck with us, we'll fuck with you- drop this or we'll
stop making Office for Macintosh."
Apple bowed under the pressure, and nothing really was made of it.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
This is not a good idea for Adobe since you have to consider who their market is
Flash does something that most other products are NOT able to do. Make interactive sites easy enough for even GRAPHIC developers to create. Most of the people I find that LOVE Flash love it for it's ease of use. All of those people are graphic designers the same people who buy Adobe Photoshop. Adobe has a bad PR hurricane just ready to brew over this if they decide to push for Macromedia to pull Flash
Also, what I find absolutely hilarious is Adobe's Front Page which, of all things, uses Flash
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this is one of the many reasons why software patents are bogus - it's not a patent on an invention - that is, a new product that does something new, or something old in a new way. It's a patent on a concept, not an implementation. After playing with Photoshop for 20 minutes I know enough about these tabbed palletes to invent my own that would infringe the patent - yet the actual code I write would bear little similarity to Adobes, the binary I generate would be almost totally different - in other words, I would have invented a new way of doing something old (display tabbed palettes). This is like me seeing someones veggie chopper, deciding that I can make something that would do the same thing, and creating one that, while it does chop veggies, does it in a totally different way than his does. Thats not patent infringement, but in software it is? Please.