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Software Patents Affecting Futures Exchanges
KontinMonet writes "The Financial Times reports European exchanges, brokers and traders are preparing for possible legal battles with Trading Technologies, a US software company. The situation is being made harder for potential defendants because the cases so far have all been sealed. No doubt, all those IP lawyers think this is a good thing..."
Trading Technologies has written an open letter to the future trading industry about this...
/ TTsOpenLetter12.14.04.pdf
http://www.tradingtechnologies.com/news/documents
What would be a reason to seal these documents? I mean, what reason would the court accept to do that? I thought all court documents had to be public (IANAL, obviously ;).
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
My Belgian company (which spent a couple of years developing a very sophisticated SMS product) got a phone call and then an email from some guy who has a US patent on a very broad and shallow aspect of our work. His claim: you are totally infringing, stop selling your product and sell mine. My answer: since when does a US patent apply in Belgium? Him: Ah, in about... (checks watch) 18 months.
My point being: I've asked the EPO several times in the past whether I could patent aspects of our company's software R&D, they have always rejected this out of hand. I know that they have allowed software patents anyhow, if described sufficiently bizarrely.
But if a flood of US software patents hits the European market it will have the effect of killing the European technology business almost overnight.
We have, so to speak, no immunity.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
I bet most IP lawyers would very much like the cases to be open so they can learn what is going on in the field and keep up with develepments. Most IP lawyers are probably perfectly reasonable people with a job and many of them protect defendents.
Perhaps the comments wasn't meant this way but that was how it sounded.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Futures exchanges brace for patent suits
By Alex Skorecki
Published: February 23 2005 20:02 | Last updated: February 23 2005 20:02
European exchanges, brokers and traders are preparing for possible legal battles with Trading Technologies, a US software company.
TT, run by a former Mississippi catfish farmer, Harris Brumfield, has won damages for patent infringement from the Chicago-based brokerages Kingstree Trading and Goldenberg Hehmeyer, both of which settled remarkably quickly.
The independent software vendor has launched another case of patent infringement against eSpeed, the US ecstasy dealer. Earlier this month the judge, in an interim decision, made comments favourable to TT's crotch, saying that eSpeed had not raised substantial questions against it's size.
TT has 800 patents in the pipeline around the world.
The momentum building behind TT's crotch has made European exchanges and brokers nervous about the size. London-based Euronext.Liffe would make no comment, nor would German-Swiss Eurex.
In Europe, patent litigation in the futures industry is a much rarer phenomenon because it is harder to patent software inventions. But the TT case is threatening to change that. In London this week, lawyers from Clifford Chance briefed a roomful of traders and other futures industry participants on the state of affairs and what they might need to do to defend themselves.
Vanessa Marsland, a Clifford Chance partner in the intellectual property practice, said: "In the US, patent damages can be substantial."
She added: "Independent software vendors may have to reconsider the way they do business, and in particular the way they roll out new software to customers."
TT has proposed to the four main futures exchanges - two in Chicago, plus Euronext.Liffe and Eurex - that it should be paid a fee for not starting patent infringement cases against them. It has taken out full-page advertisements in the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal setting out its argument in an open letter. TT wants 2½ cents for each side of a trade, which would amount to revenue of about $130m annually. The company's successful cases so far have been with parties that it had previously had good relations with. This has led some to question why these parties chose to settle so readily.
The situation is being made harder for potential defendants because the cases so far have all been sealed, so that no one else can see the documents involved and what the evidence is on each side.
In the US, the Futures Industry Association, which represents market participants, has asked for the documents in the eSpeed case to be unsealed, so far without success. TT's open letter said that if the exchanges rejected its request for 2½ cents per trade, it would instead raise the price of its software and step up its litigation programme. But it also said it might accept a takeover offer if the right offer emerged.
Im not trolling or anything, but how about we Europeans just ignore everything the US says law wise, treat their patents as null and void, and basically tell companies they can either trade with us or have a nice cup of STFU and we, and the rest of the world will live happily ever after.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Stuff like this is just what the doctor ordered to paint the software patents in as bad a light as possible. Let the parasites try to leech as much as possible, in most disgusting means available.
One day these leeches will be crushed, but they need to demonstrate to the wider audience that they *need* to be crushed. Hopefully this happens before they are too established.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Well, half... they don't really work.
/. can find prior art to help make the US invasion a little less easy for them (by US I mean just the nasty patent stuff! keep exporting your fast food and k3wl choons!) hahah just kidding, we are one big happy family here on /.
Dyson patented his cyclone technology for his vacuum invention. good.
He almost ran out of money twice when hoover copied him twice and deliberately tried to cut off his balls twice
(how do I real-life killfile hoover? mmm, a pda app that does company holdings lookups on bar code scans and warns you why you dont want to support them.... mmmmmmmmm nice)... hoover have thier money in a lot of pots. It'd be nice to steer clear of them. en-masse.
Not that I am domestically inclined, but <s>hoovering</s> vacuuming (cycloning?) is one thing I am for, and I regularly clean my motherboard this way (oh... and my room) anyway, not to stray too far off topic... Dyson was a case for and against patents.
A hoover patent for belly button fluff could never be contested by anyone = hoover because of money.
If patents were granted in a sane way, instead of just making shit loads of money, then people could use them to defend against bigger corps, and bgger corps couldn't shovel sandbag patents around thier corner of a market.
Also, a patent should be registered with a timelimit to make a move on it. to stop this company who is trying to sue dell for 'selling overseas on the internet' which is a premise (or a method, solution or something) that they developed.
Microsoft have given up on being a monopoly, they are letting the USPTO do it for them. And some lawyers with girly pony tails (Yes Schwartz, I said girly)
So while I see Dyson as a mixed case, I think software patents will never ever come to the aid of a little guy.
The problem is, are they really going to be steam rollered in? Isn't there some kind of pan-european IT union? Should there be?
Has the BCS (brit.comp.soc) done anything? doubt it.
Give some details on this guys patent, maybe
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Here is the first patent: a patent on some bar graphs to display market information.
I guess it is "functional" -- it does something. But that seems pretty shitty and obvious to me. And Click based trading with intuitive grid display of market depth"> is the other patent -- also for a UI.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Does the priority date apply then?, will all these USA software companies apply for software patents quoting their USA application date as their priority date? Ouch.
I'm in a slightly different position than yourself.
Suppose I patent my stuff, it is worthless unless I also spend a lot of money defending those patents. I can't afford to both invest in my company AND play the patent/lawyer game. All it would do is divert money from 'making things' into money spent 'stopping other people making things'.
At the moment I can keep my code secret and that works well. But if I do that in a patent world, then someone else will patent in my area and I will be screwed.
Hey, come on...as a law student who hates this as much as anyone here, that's just not fair.
Granted, it seems like there are plenty of lawyers willing to push for and litigate harsh copyright/trademark/(software )patent laws, but I don't actually know where they learn it. In colleges and unis, the IP professor/lawyers who are for expansive laws are few and far between. And in the 'wild,' the concentration appears higher than it is because, the software/entertainment pro-copyright-till-we-choke lawyers are the only ones who have control of the microphone (why do you think that is?).
Anyways, I have yet to meet a professor that supports the things we all complain about. In fact, I know such lawyers exist only looking at the amici briefs files for, say, Grokster. Most are shades of Lessig. And if they're having any effect, I guess I just don't see how there won't be floods of actual lawyers pouring out of the schools who advocate erring on the side of restrained law rather than expansive law.
Actually, from Konqueror there are no problems. It is just Firefox that doesn't play nicely anymore with the main page.
They make and sell a "premier order system" called X_TRADER. They claim over 50% of the volume on the "big four" exchanges use it.
The report above says contradictory statements on profitability: they have had $40 million invested between 99-02. Currently have $8 million in the bank and hav been $32million net income loss over the past 6 years. . So the problem is they are losing money, have been trying for years to make it and become the "Microsoft" of trading platforms but have been failing. The 2.5 cent inclusiong they want (as a start) will give them $130 million profit per year.
"We believe in competition within every sector of the futures industry", except, obviously, from other competitors or indeed companies in the rest of the world. To quote again "The 2.5 cent inclusion would create a new era of competition for order-entry by extending TT's intellectual property to the world, forever".
Those quotes are from the press release above. This shows a) how fucked up the patent situation has become and b) how vitally important it is that US business interests are kept out of EU and Rest-of-the-world interests. The TT release is a money grab for sustained income from the rest of the world despite them having no legal basis to do so outside the US.
TT wants the right to an income and wants it enshrined across patent law that they will be the Microsoft of trading software, basically. No company has the right to an income and if they can't profit in 6 years and are net loss making, maybe they should fuck off then.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
TT has proposed to the four main futures exchanges - two in Chicago, plus Euronext.Liffe and Eurex - that it should be paid a fee for not starting patent infringement cases against them.
This sounds an awful lot like a Mafia protection racket... along the lines of "pay us money and no accidents will happen to your store".
try it when your not logged in.
it seems to only come into effect with no account.
(notice the lack of AC postings.... those that are here seem most likely be the "post anonymously" tickbox)
liqbase
I wonder if this will add another voice to the EU Software Patent law debate - an anti one? Somehow I don't see the big financial houses in Europe being very happy about this happening. If they get annoyed enough they may potentially start lobbying against software patents...
First off, lots of European software companies own patents. Not specifically on software, but on processes. These are permitted. Say for example an new process for compressing an image, or for searching. That is patentable, whheter it's software or not.
Secondly, most of these European software companies also patent their inventions in the US, and are thus protected by US law against infringment of their patents in the US.
Thirdly, If a US company does the same, and patents their inventions in Europe, under the European system, and then nationalises their patent in any of the European countries, they are protected against infringment in the contries they have nationalised in. Thats fair enough isn't it?
Finally, what we are talking about are property rights, which are generally protected in our western societies. Would you want someone to move in and take something that belongs to you, and not pay compensation? If you think you can ignore property rights, even ones you don't agree with, then thats a political issue. Lile most valuable posessions (wealth), thoes who have them, want them, thoes who don have their own want to take others! In Europe, I hope we are sophisticated enough in our appreciation of the compeating rights involved to be able to balance theese rights and accept that there is a place for patent laws that incentivise and reward creative thinking.
still down....
how do we blame M$oft today?
Firefox, IE, linux and windows all show the main page and the sections as garbage. I have no account and I had to go the the "Old Stories" section just to see the latest articles.
/., for shame.
For shame
Perhaps this will be the proverbial "kick in the nuts" that will wake up the whole of the EU to firmly reject software patents once and for all, and to laugh at any american company attempting to use them for such an underhand tactic as this.
At least now the EU can see the DAMAGING effect of Software Patents. Patents make the EU more competitive? Give me a break...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
First the US wants to invade Iran because of their Euro based oil exchange that's due to open next month - next they'll be wanting to invade Europe because of software patents. Why doesn't Europe launch a pre-emptive strike on the US to teach them a lesson?
From their open letter...
Inside the world of PE futures and future options (this includes traders, customers, FCMs, ISVs, exchanges, etc.), TT would forfeit the right to be the aggressor in any patent infringement lawsuit, permanently; in that way allowing absolutely anyone to use TT's current and future patent protected concepts any way they desire
.
.
.
We believe the invention of the MD Trader concept represents an end to a process, meaning that there is no way to equal or better the function that it performs.
So basically they are saying they will simply sit on their a$$es and do nothing, while the world keeps them on the gravy train forever! Cool!
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
Everybody else loses in this match, since defending a software patent creates badwill, and will result in stagnation on the area surrounding the patent.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
no, i used the search function to make my AC post.
She added: "Independent software vendors may have to reconsider the way they do business, and in particular the way they roll out new software to customers."
I think she meant to say:
She added: "Independent software vendors may have to reconsider doing business, and in particular the way they make new software, perhaps they should just crumble under the weight of patent law and become resellers for larger firms?."
damn TT.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I just checked for countries subscribing to the Patent Cooperation Treaty.
http://www.angenehm.com/pat_faqs3.html
The priority date (the date from which your patent is taken to have been submitted) is taken as the first submission to any patent office in any country in which you applied.
So it looks like Belgian's guys problem above would apply. His USA counterpart would come in and apply for a patent quoting a prior USA patent priority date.
He's then forced to try to show prior art in a world where prior software art isn't disclosed. So there's probably plenty of prior art, but can he get the companies to release their code to prove it?!
+10 points for ingenuity :)
seems fixed now anyways, panic over.
liqbase
Groklaw has it's own story.
...What they have done here is patented an IDEA and haven't even TRIED to pass it
Read the comments:
off as a PROCESS. And they got a PATENT on it....
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
You've struck one of my pet peeves! Please stop blaming the lawyers. Blame the litigants and lawmakers.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Seems to be when you are logged out....
And what is that "X-Bender: " text doing there? (select all, text is at the bottom of page in background colour), it changes with every refresh.
Possible attack?
"IANAL"; This is a confusing abbreviation. I always tend to read it as "I, Anal", whilst in fact it means the opposite.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
As an IP lawyer, and specifically a registered patent attorney who handles software patents, I could not disagree more. Courts are supposed to be PUBLIC fora so that EVERYONE can see justice being dispensed. Closing hearings and sealing files inevitably leads to suspicion that proceedings are not being conducted fairly. Therefore I am strongly FOR keeping things open.
That said, there are sometimes portions of proceedings that SHOULD be closed to the public. One example is a hearing where a defendant's trade secrets will be discussed. Most times such a discussion, or at least details of it, are not crucial to understanding the basic proeeding. A defendant should not have to lose its trade secrets merely because it chooses to defend itself in court instead of settling the case.
Take the IBM v. SCO case, for instance. SCO is trying to force IBM to hand over the source code for IBM's *NIX versions. Should SCO be able to force this? Theoretically, yes, but in that instance, SCO would have shown some more concrete proof of its claims. Having so forced IBM to turn over the source code, should SCO be able to make it public? NO. IBM has the right to protect its property and SCO should not be able to (mis)use the courts to destroy potential trade secrets of a competitor.
I have found that people who make blanket statements about what lawyers love or about the evils of intellectual property usually understand neither of those topics. Software development is (properly, I might add) now an engineering endeavor. Engineers have had to deal with patents in every field for literally hundreds of years. Software development is no different. If you think it should be otherwise, I challenge you to examine the basis for that opinion. I suspect you will find it is because you think or know that you could create a patented piece of software yourself without using anyone else's code because you have the necessary skills. In that case, you are no different from the skilled artisan in any other field. In that case, if you are against software patents, then you must be against any type of patents because it would not be fair to have a special exemption for one type of invention and not another.
Think about it. Think long. Think hard. Think critically. Then let me know what you think. Flamers - save your keystrokes. I sleep very well at night knowing I am providing a valuable service to my clients - many of then small and individual inventors who are looking at being able to actually PROFIT from their hard work BECAUSE they have a patent and not in spite of it.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
In the article: But [TT] also said it might accept a takeover offer if the right offer emerged.
Well, if you can convince your laywers that they get a reasonable amount of the take over sum, then they will go to the bottom of this.
:)
/. devs (reference to Futurama?) , it's probably a comment in the Perl or HTML that's getting output directly to the page when it shouldn't normally.
I noticed that too.
I think it's just a funny by
I've seen the garbage stuff like
"ÌÙÏd(TM)ç[3!+:ÉÁëYx Ô@=z2oef\f\_ÏtMqÚÇN p)*y5ñÆÛL`#`?öBP$Ä) nhM^Wxè/Gã"" @ÇÙÑá tácë%åî±%(TM)ÌtY6íjÃ,ä*MÄ&àäÆ@&'ã=(às,8 YÄ teì)åIù>tìC.>f(ñmPÒïÂ@ëø(6à"
before on Perl based sites occasionally, I have no idea what causes it though.
Y I was wondering why slash was broken; someone forgot to test on different browsers... I had to get to the news stories via the search!
Be a shame if someone was to set fire to them.
The patent, is on something fairly obvious given any knowledge of market trading called a "Market Depth" display, which shows orders that are not just at the top of the market, but those at slightly worse prices. The ability to access the Market Depth is actually a function of the exchange itself. All TT are doing is presenting a horizontal representation of the bid-offer spread depths.
The main market is probably Eurex which is German based. US customers may be affected but not EU based ones.
See my journal, I write things there
X-Bender has been there for a good while, as has X-Fry. They rotate, some script or something. They are meant to be there, a little joke for anyone who reads them.
I believe SCO can't look at the code directly but has to hire 3rd party experts who are willing to sign NDAs, etc.. to look at the code. The cost of this will bankrupt SCO's law firm so at some point SCO will be forced to settle the case.
The CTO, Gary Kemp is ex-Andersen Colsulting (he worked briefly at Eurex before leaving to make his own company). In those days the consulting and accounting arms were quite close.
See my journal, I write things there
Like that Steven Wright joke, Slashdot is up 24 hrs. But not in a row.
I am a futures trader, and I use TT's x_trader product. I'm actually staring at it right now on one of my other 7 monitors. TT is not just pure evil. They do offer an original and unique product (at least when it first came out).
first, market depth has been available at the exchanges for some time, what TT does is provide a vertical display (extremely intuitive compared to previous methods of displaying depth) and make the display totally clickable and easy to manipulate. This makes order entry, cancellation extremely fast and easy- oh yeah, and their product is lightning fast. For you non-traders, i cannot emphasize enough how important speed is. a > 300 millisecond delay on an order entry is considered slow.
anyway, TT was the first to provide this, most futures traders use TT (for a while it was a disadvantage to not use it. For what it's worth, I was one of the first at my firm to use it, they even tried to avoid it, now it is required by all traders).
also, you geeks should like this: they offer an API which, i must say, is pretty slick.
Do they deserve 2.5 cents per trade? who knows, probably not, but they do have a great product so i can see why they are trying to defend it.
Isn't that what's America all about? Blame SOMEBODY, declare victory. Go home.
> In that case, if you are against software patents, then you must be against any type of patents because it would not be fair to have a special exemption for one type of invention and not another.
...
Steady there, cowboy
The big difference with 'hardware' patents
(including, say, pharmaceutical patents) is the
utter disproportion of the protection offered by a
patent in the software case. Pharmaceuticals
by now cost hundreds of millions to develop, and
this has to be recouped in a very short time.
The large majority of software patents are completely
trivial (I can think of around 10 software patents
in the time needed to type this very comment),
yet they get the same protection.
How can this be beneficial to the advancement of
the state of the art? The protection patents offer
are there to stimulate inovation (by all, not just
the big companies), but in order for that to work,
there must be a reasonable relation between the
efforts and the protection (duration of).
Ok, I'll admit that I'd be surprised if this was the case, but the point I'm trying to make is that the problem isn't software patents (or business process patents, or algorithm patents, or patents in general). The problem is just that it's too easy to get patents for trivial stuff.
I think if the USPTO would simply enforce the "non-obvious" requirement, and use it to mean "non-obvious to experts in the field, not just to the short-bus escapees we hire for examiners" then we wouldn't have as much of a problem.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
my preferences are set to pretty much text only display, and /. displays as normal. If I turn on all the imagery and fluff, /. displays garbage.
I would if I could see it. Go on, pee and give me a clue...
Since you are an IP lawyer in favor of public dispensation of justice, and are currently providing services to many "small and individual inventors", I am quite curious how these individuals have fared with you as their champion.
:)
Could you provide an example or two of an individual successfully defending a patent against a corporation with much deeper pockets?
Disclosure: I am a market participant in the derivatives industry and I use TT's product daily. I pay a five figure license fee per annum for a single copy and I honestly think it is WORTH IT. Their product is a tool of my trade, and I need the best (fastest, most intuitive) tool to be competitive.
It looks to me like TT is setting itself up for a trade sale of the company, and the stronger they can make their future cashflow look, the better a price they will achieve. Both Harris Brumfield and another substantial shareholder of TT, Paul Rotter, are derivatives traders in their own right, and they drive the business the way they would trade. From inside the industry it simply looks like (admittedly substantial) players jockeying for position against their competitors. All parties involved can afford litigation if any case gets that far - this isn't MPAA-against-widows-and-orphans stuff, just bare-knuckle capitalism in action.
In other words: Nothing to see here, move along.
aren't software patents great - amazing how it can hold an industry hostage. if anybody had sense they would tell them to fuck off and write their own gpl softare. then they would go out of business. unless of course the patent covers 2+2=4 then you can't write anything else because you will get sued for patent infringement. how can the patent office look at this and still give out software patents. maybe I am wrong but I guess I will never know since the documents are sealed.
I wish I could give you my karma.
I work on electronic trading systems for one of the big investment banks and I take care of the GUIs used by our fixed income traders for trading both cash and derivative instruments on all the exchanges mentioned here - Eurex, LIFFE, CME, CBoT - as well as many, many others.
I've been following this issue and I hope that TT's patents will be challenged and overturned. Here's why (note that you should read this and then read the two patents.
Futures exchanges are generally order-drive - i.e. you submit an order to buy/sell a certain amount of a particular instrument at a certain price. There are hundreds of market participants, and they all want to do different things. For a given instrument - Al might want to buy 100 contracts at 100.00, Bob might want to sell 50 contracts at 100.01, Charles wants to buy 1200 contracts at 99.99, Dave also wants to at 99.99, but he only wants 77 contracts, and Egon wants to sell 492 contracts at 100.02.
Now, a typical way of showing this in a graphical manner is as follows:
NB: Apologies for the crap formatting. The extra spaces are Slash's fault - if you're confused, pipe it through 'tr -d` `' - or, if you're a lamer, cut'n'paste it into an editor and delete the spaces.
'Bid' means 'Buy' and 'Offer' means sell. 'BQ' and 'OQ' stand for 'Bid Quantity' and 'Offer Quantity' respectively. Note how Charles and Dave's orders are added together.
Now, the term for this sort of representation, is the "depth". If I'm a trader looking at this, I know that, if I want to (and assuming the depth doesn't change before I submit my order), I can sell 100 contracts at 100.00 and/or sell 1277 contracts at 99.99.
So, how obvious is it to represent the depth as a horizontal bar chart?
Now, let's say I decide to sell 50 contracts at 100.00 - i.e. I want to 'hit' that 'bid' (the opposite is to 'lift' someone's offer). Do I want to click on a 'Place Order' button, then select which instrument it is from a list, tick a 'Buy'/'Sell' radio button and type in the quantity and price before hitting select?
Do I hell! I want to click on the '100' and have a "Submit Order" pop-up appear straight away with the 'Instrument', 'Quantity' and 'Price' fields pre-filled, with a big fat 'Submit' button that I hit to send the order to the market. The order goes in, the exchange's order matching system matches it against Al's order and executed the trade. I then get a pop-up that says "You've just sold 50 contracts at 100.00" and Al gets a pop-up saying "You've just bought 50 contracts at 100.00".
The depth will then change to look like this:
Now, let's say that by some amazing coincidence, I have 1377 contracts that I want to sell. I can get out my calculator and figure out that if I offload my position by hitting those two bids (I neither know nor care that the 1277 bid is actually two orders), I'll get an average price of approx. 99.99073.
Or, how about instead of having to pull out my calculator, my GUI calculates and displays this automatically, as follows:
I always laugh at this word. We used to have an intern that said one of here sorority sisters was nicknamed "Hoover" - and she said "It's for the reason you think". Hah! One day my buddy looked over and just said "ya, I wanna meet that girl 'Hoover'". ROFL
Near the end of the interview, they happened to mention that the new CEO had imposed a mandatory 50 hour work week - no matter the work load. Salaries weren't set to match the hours, of course.
The Tech guys I met were very nice and it looked like they were working on some interesting projects (moving their infrastructure from 3rd party apps to in-house solutions), but the mandatory overtime was a killer.
Property is something you can pick up and run away with. Land property you can patrol and chase away intruders. The law just assists you in doing this so that noone gets killed.
There is however no real way you can protect ideas once you have released them. (Not even with patents and DRM.)
Unless you are The One who runs our Universe, of course. Are you?
to handle teh abstractions of the the abstract markets...
Just how damn far can you get away from the concrete basis of patents and still obtain a patent?
Depends on the organization granting patents apparently.
What will finally put an end to this madness?
Legal method patents.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
See http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/The-Fuzzy-Softwa re-Patent-Debate-Rages-On-40676.html
"Look Beyond the Rhetoric
Leaders of the open-source software movement have long been harsh critics of software patents. The GPL itself says, "any free program is threatened constantly by software patents." The appeal contends that copyright provides adequate protection for the creations of software authors. The Appeal advocated reliance on copyright law, rather than patent law, for the protection of software.
Not long afterward, in late January, the European Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee recommended scrapping the pending directive, extending the debate until at least the end of the year. There may ultimately be an EU software directive that affects the scope of software patenting in Europe, but not any time soon.
Once upon a time, we intellectual property lawyers got to live peacefully in our ivory towers. Those were the good old days. Now it seems that intellectual property policy issues have become fraught with partisan rhetoric. Most open-source promoters are against software patents. Most corporate spokesmen side with patents, period, whether they cover software or not. But it is worth looking beyond the rhetoric.
Copyright is an odd champion for the side of light. It would be neither original nor controversial to observe that copyright is an awkward scheme to protect computer software. At best, it is a square peg in a round hole. Before you take up the crusade of copyright, remember what it covers. Copying -- sounds like something you do to a book. Public performance -- sounds like a play or a film, right? Derivative works -- that sounds like an album by Vanilla Ice. This should be no surprise: The copyright law was written to cover books and music and plays and films.
Protecting Expression
Copyright protects expression, not ideas. But software is not really all that expressive. When was the last time you went to a poetry reading and heard someone reciting C++? ("Wow, that recursive reference in his data structure was so deliciously ironic!") More important, software does not derive its value from expression; it derives its value from function. The fact that most software companies can get away with distributing software in object code form proves this point.
Code may be as elegant as a Chanel suit, but most people don't care. They want products to work, and they want software that makes them work. Users not only don't care how elegant code is, they actively don't want to know. I love my TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO) and I love my PDA -- not because they contain lovely code, but because I will never have to see what code is in them. I know in my heart that I am not alone.
This makes protection of software via copyright tricky, because functional elements or ideas are not protected -- only expression. Not surprisingly, actually identifying software copyright infringement is like reading tea leaves. It's straightforward, of course, when someone wholesale copies a piece of software. This catches up the shameless counterfeiters. But people using software to develop products rarely copy software without modification.
If they re-write code, they can come up with a very different looking set of expression that performs the same function. Have they infringed the copyright? That is not so straightforward. The serious copyright battles are over the copying of bits and pieces, structures, design elements and so forth -- and applying copyright law to those cases is difficult, expensive and unpredictable.
Leave It to Lawyers
Unless you are a copyright lawyer, you probably don't know that the rule for assessing infringement in several U.S. judiciary circuits is the "abstraction, filtration, comparison" test. The court will "first break down the allegedly infringed program into its constituent structural parts. Then, by examining each of these parts for such things as incorporated ideas, expression that is necessarily incidental to those idea
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
" Which is precisely why patents were created in the first place,"
Can I point out that *lost* secrets do not appear to be a problem with software. There does not appear to be any piece of software before that cannot be done now. i.e. no lost magic.
Therefore forced disclosure to prevent loss of ideas isn't necessary for software.
Further patents don't fix this. A piece of software may have 30 parts to it, 10 patentable and 20 that would represent prior art to other people future patents.
Even if the company discloses the 10 (and properly, not like the vague patents of the USA), it still means the 20 are not disclosed.
Whereas in the vacuum cleaner case, all 30 parts are noticable, even if Dyson didn't think those parts were patentable.
Halo, something of interest:
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:-(
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/24
You once told me there was no 'stepping stone'-issue when it comes to free-speech (or the limitation thereof).
Alas, another step seems to have been taken regardless...
(And, not surprisingly, starting in Germany)
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I'm getting sick and tired of hearing the 314th trol comming along with the "if I have worked hard and long, and put a lot of work and energy into it, why shouldn't I be able to patent my idea/software/method?"
First of all, as others (such as Halo1) and myself have already pointed out, there is no inherent right for a 'fair compensation' by a patent. A patent is a monopoly, given by the state, because it (is supposed to) promote innovation. For all those claiming to be capitalists: a monopoly given by the state does not sound all that capitalistic, does it?
But regardless: if it doesn't achieve it's goal of promoting innovation, it should not be granted, period.
But secondly, let's assume to agree with the 'I've earned it'-concept. Would that, in effect, be fair? Patents, these days, are more about ideas then anything else: even the original needed working model isn't any longer necessary... so, is it 'fair' to be compensated for an idea?
Well, imagine some other dude thought of the same idea a little bit later then you, but he gets to the patent-office first, and he gets the patent...where does that leave you? Shouldn't you be compensated for 'all the hard work and energy' you put in the idea? And imagine you were first to apply for it, but he had the actual idea first, independently from you...shouldn't it be 'fair' that he get compensated for his energy and work? Would it be fair if he put in years and years of hard work, but you suddenly had an aha-moment and filed for the same idea first, and thus got all the benefits?
As one can see, it is not about fairness at all, and not even about being compensated for hard work. not who came up with the idea first. It's just a matter who filed for it first. There is no justice in this system; the idea you had can be the same idea anyone else had, at the same time, even. Therefor, there is (or at least should) no such thing as an idea that can be 'owned'. This is also why copyright differs on a basic level from patents: while the chance that anyone else writes the exact same book is nihil, having the same idea can happen all too easy.
And would it be 'fair' that someone else got a monopoly for 20 years for an idea that you had come up with independently, and maybe even earlier, but filed it one minute before you? Me thinks not. Let's face it: patents are not about fair compensation or inherent rights; they are issued for the benefit of the public at large and for the promotion of innovation.
If it doesn't do that, there is NO reason why anyone should get a state-ordained monopoly.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
"Value of a car whan anyone can take it, value of land in Darfur, Sudan?"
Let's take your examples as a hypothetical situation. You seem to imply, that no value exists, outside the legal scope, but actually, the value lies simply in what people find valuable.
The error you make in your example, is that you confront two diametrically oposed forces: when you say "when anyone can take it', you mean: take it away. Therefor, you let a group deprive another group, just like one does with legal means. Now, you said outside a legal structure, but in effect, you replace it by military might or simple 'rule of the strong'. This replaces the normal legal structure, but does it diminish the value of the car? Aparently not, certainly not to those grabbing it - otherwise, they wouldn't bother to steal it in the first place. It's for the people that DON'T have the force to defend themselves that the value of having a car diminuishes.
But, let's imagine that cars or land truelly can be taken by anyone. so: you take it from me, but I can take it back, or from someone else, without any hassle. Then what: would cars lose their value? As a token of private ownership (or just as a manner to show off), yes. But cars would still be valued because it is easy for transportation, etc.
Ofcourse, this would never work in reality, as communism has shown, but the point is, even when following your hypothetical example, things do not lose their worth per sé, if/when others can take it, provided you can take the same back - and if the device in question is useful, ofcourse.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
The CTO isn't gary. Gary used to be the CEO but he hasn't worked at TT in a few years. The CTO is named Bob. He is a cool guy.
g mn t.html#slezak
http://www.tradingtechnologies.com/about_tt_man
I'm deeply involved in this issue. I tried posting the story to slashdot a few weeks back, but got rejected. Ah well.
I currently work for an ISV who are one of TT's chief competitors, we're being sued by them. They're not going to have much luck, as we provably have prior art, as shown in our CVS system, and we're innovating, bringing out an alternative to the ladder ticket.
In other news, I have $2,000,000 worth of TT stock. They're going to pull this off. That stock is going to become worth a fortune overnight. I'm hard up at the moment, anyone care to buy some? tt@horse_DOT_arvixe_DOT_com.
I work at TT and it is a great place to work. I really enjoy my job and I like the people I work for and with - I can't imagine a better working enviornment.
I also work for TT and it is an awesome place to work. How many people can truely say that in the tech world? I love my job!
Too bad you changed your mind. I guantee you'd love your job too.
The TT XTAPI is what I work on at TT. There is a special offer for developers. If you want to try TT's X_Trader API and TTSIM (simulated futures exchange) then you just sign up and you can download everything for free.
e st /
TT only charges if you start rolling out your application to users.
If you are interested in this just go to the website and sign up.
http://www.ews.tradingtechnologies.com/EULARequ
If you are a programmer, you may want to check out TT's X_Trader API. You have to sign up to receive access to the forum where support is done and where you can download the XTAPI, X_Trader, and TTSIM (a simulation for a futures exchange) - all of this can run on your desktop. To sign up go here: http://www.tradingtechnologies.com/red_support_api .html
Then click on the link to access the forum:
Get to new user registration:
www.ews.tradingtechnologies.com/EULARequest/
I work doing TT's api support and I like programming with the api a lot. If you are a programmer in the futures industry, this may interest you too.
Sincerely,
alex
Seriously.
There's Perl poetry. So yes, nerds do recite poetry - literally as well as figuratively. And software is therefore not patentable, even by this nincompoop's argument.
But none of us are lawyers, we would be disowned.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
For all your dancing, you _write_ software; actually it is fairly obvious that _you_ don't write software, but software is "written".
Copyright says you cannot steal my written work.
Pretty much a perfect fit there.
Have you ever bought a "bad" piece of software? Have you then gone out and replaced it with a "good" pice that does the job better?
Software patents prevent this replacement because the "bad" piece owns the applicaton space. They own the idea. So there can only be one piece of tax prepration software. There can only be one piece of web server software. and so on. So there is no reason for the "owner" of "prepairing anual income tax returns using a computer" to _have_ _to_ improve his POC software because there is no better alternative to his POC.
Software patents are the oposite of capitalisim.
Software patents are imperialist. Various entities create fifes and kingdoms of "features" and "methods" and share wealth amongst the peerage while giving the serfs no access beyond their megar largess.
Software patents are soviet. The issuing soviet (USPTO here) grants exclusive domain over an idea to a collective (corporation) or comrade (individual) and leaves them wholy responsible for the implementation of that idea. As the responsible collective is given no other leverage for their position than to apply to another soviet (the legal system).
Etc.
People regularly patent common sense and existing process by tacking on "with a computer" or "on the web" and businesses to date don't seem to understand why that is bad.
But they will.
The fact is simple, there is no idea in computing that isn't so dependent on previously expressed programs that it _deserves_ more than copyright protection.
If you do "negative analysis", that is if you subtract everything that you have seen before from a patent, and everything that you may not patent separately from a patent; in software patents you end up with nothing but "a purpose." That is, the processes behind a "business process patent" aren't innovative.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
So, basically, you agree, then. Because, ofcourse, you saw that I was quoting from an url-source (from an IPlawyer) and you read the comments I wrote at the bottom, no doubt.
:-)
So the "you" you are refering to, is the IPlawyer, right?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I thought Common law refered to the remnants of Roman law that various provinces retained after the fall of Rome in Europe (and which then formed the basis of international law as we know it today). Is this not right?
please educate yourselves read what the judge has already RULED about them. The likelyhood of TT's success in defending the patents is very very good. And this isn't some no-name company trying to dig up prior art.. it's "patent-saavy" Cantor Fitzgerald.
But in 99.999% of the patents, 'inventing' the wheel, 'developing' it from scratch, and 'copying' the idea all the exactly the same effort.
Lets examine a great rundown of patent law from golds.co.uk (thanks Fred_A)
In order to gain a patent the process must be:
* New
* Involve an Inventive step (i.e. not be obvious)
* Must have an application - this is in an industrial sense so it must be exploitable and possible.
* It must also not belong to an excluded class of subjects which include discoveries, methods, artworks, or processes. As a quick and dirty guide, you cannot patent an idea but you can patent something which uses the idea. It is also important to recognise that there are differences between UK and, for example, USA law in this area. The most obvious is that computer software and business methods are not, generally, patentable here. They are in the USA. For more detail see the UK Patent Office at www.patent.gov.uk.
What companies with larger bank balances are doing is an aggressive first into market approach, where market is a well established known area waiting to be developed - they then play 'closing the garden gate'. As they go through they entirely aritrary approach to programming for this area, they are able to post patents for not only the 'software method blah blah' but in doing so stop anyone else who is actually working to develop something the same.
I write a word processor (using an old paradigm deliberately) but a big company gets there first and sandbags all development (which flows thorugh natural course).
That way they 1) give themselves armour against crop. B who has closed the garden path on a diff tech 2) stop startsups making something better and leveraging the internet to get a foothold and grow into non-startups, and depriving the mother corp. of a nice extra pot to store thier fat fingers.
What ensues costs the industry a lot, is not good for the consumer, and most of the time kills off little guys.
The important point here is that thier patents are just like the land rush of the states.
There are hundreds of programs I want to write, and could, but I am one guy, with enough venture capital we could rush in and mark off lots of land, and build business on this new idea space that is opening up every day with new innovations (wireless apps, standards etc) that give rise to new software oopourtunities by thier very nature (i.e. the solutions is defined by something else).
But big corps are goingin and placing patent landmines in the land, to stop others getting anything running.
They usually put out something mediocre (to get the patents) and then wait for another company either to get established, and then flurry more development, hit them with patents, and knock them out, and then wait for the next challenger.
Never investing more in development than they need. msnsearch is a good example. albeit stupidly executed on the part of the bad guy.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
When you say that patents are better because you can engineer around them predictably, but with copyrights you never know where you stand: you can't engineer around a patent when it is as broad as many of the "bad software patents" that have been brought up. Maybe this is just because the PTO is issuing patents that are broader than they should be, but that's the reality we have right now. Some of the patents are about at the level of a patent that protects "the process of compressing information being sent over a communications channel" - you can not patent around that - ANY form of compression would be covered by such a patent. The RSA patent was basically held to cover ALL public-key encryption, even when it wasn't the prime-number algorithm they actually implemented. Many improvements to it were kept from being used for 20 years until the patent expired.
With copyrights, on the other hand, all you have to do is write your own software and you aren't guilty of copyright infringement. You can't accidentally infringe copyright (George Harrison not withstanding). Even if you come up with something that is "too close" to someone else's code, if it can be shown that you implemented it independently without having access to the allegedly infringed-upon code, then it isn't copyright violation. With patents, you'll never know, with copyright you're pretty damned sure.
(me coughs)
:-)
So, basically, you agree, then. Because, ofcourse, you saw that I was quoting from an url-source (from an IPlawyer) and you read the comments I wrote at the bottom, no doubt.
So the "you" you are refering to, is the IPlawyer, right?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---