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New Prior Art Cited In 2nd Eolas Patent Rejection
theodp writes "To be able to reject the Eolas browser plug-in patent a second time, the USPTO had to add the teachings of G.Toye after Eolas' response prompted the examiner to withdraw his previous finding that was based solely on the teachings of the W3C's Dave Raggett and Tim Berners-Lee. It's unclear where the Toye prior art came from, since the W3C didn't offer it when it asked the PTO to overturn the patent. Also, a newly available document reveals that the W3C's widely-publicized prior art filing, which was hastily made without community input, differed little from an unpublicized filing that was made weeks earlier by attorneys from Microsoft and AOL."
Getting that Eolas ruling overturned is a good thing. I for one am sick and tired of the bloodsuckers grasping patents to block innovation so they can make an easy million of patenting an idea they never implement.
Software patents are bad... when you come up with an idea, and go about developing a large programming project, something is seriously wrong when the legal team does patent research and discovers that all that in house code that was written violates 30 patents.
Something needs to be done... immediately.
Cheers,
James Carr
I'm getting tired of reading about this patent fight in particular. For what? Plug-ins running in a browser. Has anyone up until this point ever heard of OLE in Windows? Its allows one application to work seamlessly in another e.g. a word document in excel, or quicktime in a web browser. Though they are different in many ways, they are the same concept. Plus OLE has been around since windows 3.1.
I disagree. Copyright is the protection you should get for your code, not patent.
Patent is far too broad to cover something like software algorithms. Software is another science where ideas are built upon other's ideas. Nothing's built in a vacuum here, but yet people still come off thinking that their code is somehow special and that nobody else would have thought of it.
Patent is obviously a bad idea because we're winding up with situations like this stupid Eolas thing. It's like someone (Fraunhoffer?) thinking they are the only ones who can do audio compression because the MP3 patent covers any similar algorithm. While they haven't sued anyone yet as far as I know, they have stated that Vorbis likely infringes on their patents. That's just ridiculous.
>You shouldn't be stopped from making something because someone else thought of it first.
Nobody is stopped - you can do it while paying patent royalty.
There is no system of mandatory licensing in effect that would prohibit a patent owner from seeking unrealistic license fees.
In fact, the patent system is used by the NSA to prevent progress in the field of cryptology for example; patents can be designated "secret" and still be in effect. Their staturory timespan even only kicks in after they've been declassified.
So if you independently invent a means of cryptography, or of code cracking, that has been patented by the NSA, unbeknownst to yourself, they can force you not to implement it, without even telling you what they've patented. And when they get round to telling you, you still have to wait 17 years.
Copyright and patents aren't "ownership rights" or even "monopoly rights" (which implies that you're at least selling something); they're prohibition rights (look ma, no act of congress!).
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
It would be ever worse of algorithms were copyrightable!
No, it wouldn't.
Patents at least expire in 20 years, but copyright is forever (less one day).
Cripes, people, learn the difference between the two. Copyrights and patents aren't the same thing with different terms of expiration. They're related, but conceptually different. Copyright is what prevents me from cutting and pasting the contents of a romance novel (or copying the executable file of MS Word) and selling it as my own work. I am free to write my own romance novel (or word processor) because I'm not copying someone else's work. It's called "copyright" for a reason, i.e. the right to make copies.
Patents, on the other hand, are short term monopolies on methods and processes. You would not (to construct a bizarre example) be able to patent MS Word; rather, you'd patent the concept of a word processor itself. The problem with algoriths and source code is that it straddles the line between machines and written work: it is the code that makes the machine perform the process. Because of this, the USPTO has been instructed to treat an algorithm as a machine that performs a process. This is a bad move, in my opinion. Code has more in common with mathematical formulas (non patentable) than machines (patentable). I think what the original poster meant was that specific algorithm code should be copyright protected, and the algorithms themselves should be unpatentable.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.