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Visto Founder Blogs about Microsoft Lawsuit
neelm writes "Reported a few days ago, Visto is suing Microsoft over patent infringements. David Cowen, a founder of Visto (and Verisign) has made a recent blog post about the patent involved. He clears up what exactly the patents involved are, but what may be a more interesting read is the patent itself - issued in March of 2004. It might be nice to see Microsoft defending itself from patent litigation I admit, but I'm not sure I want to give validity to this patent."
The patent sounds like any concurrent versioning system. How can that be "invented" in 2004?
From the blog post:
"These PC's were running on the same large TCP/IP network as my PC client at Bessemer as well our Exchange server, and yet there was no way for me to access my corporate email and calendar."
"These patents were written by programmers who were engaged in building a viable, commercial platform, and genuinely wished to protect the invention."
Here's the deal... He wants to fix a problem, bridge a gap. On obvious gap. The patent system is supposed to protect inventions, not prevent people from creating their own solutions to a problem. I see nothing in that stupid patent that isn't nebulous and pathetic.
"But this time Microsoft is steamrolling its way into wireless messaging through the clear theft of my, Daniel's, Chris', and others' intellectual property. That's why Visto is suing."
Pray, tell, what exactly did Microsoft steal? Did they steal your problem space? Because patents don't cover problems. They cover solutions.
So this guy patented rsync?
Andrew Tridgell has copyrights on rsync as old as 1996, possibly even older.
This patent never should have passed the Novel or Obviousness tests. I find it amazing reading some of these patents that have been issued and finding that the patent itself explains why it should not be patentable. From the uspto.gov website:
"The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention."
Now I'll get a long list of replies with "if it was obvious how come nobody did it before". All I can tell you is that just because somebody hasn't done it doesn't mean its not obvious.
Let me explain it this way, if you have a problem that needs to be solved by developing a software application and you can sit down with a developer and he says "yeah, I can do that" then its obvious. If the developer says "thats impossible" and somebody then spends significant time and resources trying to find a solution and does, they very well may have something that is patentable.
That said I would also point out that in 99.999% of all cases software algorithms and solutions are not patentable, they should be covered by copyright. And copyright covers the actual code a binaries, not reverse engineering. If somebody does the same thing with their own code it is not a copyright violation.
burnin
Whoah! Yes, we will return American criminals provided:
Any American who wants to stay up here gets treated the same as any other country - they just have to follow Canadian Immigration rules:
People do it all the time.
I was refering to the broken system you refer to here as the patent office. Things like these should not be able to be patentable. As I see it, either the people working for patent offices are a little slow (perhaps older people not really up2date with current tidings?), or they are bribed.
How can you patent a system (from what I can see at a first glance) that stores data remotely accessable? It's a fundamental feature of all computer network and has been in existance since the first connection between two computers was made.
There is no fairness, logic or good about that system, it's just broken. My comment refers to that fact, they're fighting over a system that is in my view already so flagrantly failed that I dont care who wins. If Microsoft wins, fine, I'll ignore the outcome. If Visto wins, so be it.
If you need me to translate it down further, try this: I know that sounds great in the 9 seconds it took you to actually think that up, but it's a really stupid way to build a "perfect society" if you bother to put some more thought into it... Ie, discouraging invention is a pretty piss-poor first step on the road to utopia. You may not like our patent system... but the concepts of patents are incredibly useful and valuable to society as a whole.
I'm a businessman. I've had over 10 businesses in 18 years, all but 1 were successful. Not a single business relied on patents, and in some situations I likely could have profited from protecting some processes. I don't see a benefit for society in any monopoly -- especially monopolies granted from government. Society benefits from voluntary cooperation and voluntary trade, not coercion and force.
There are volumes of text on the bad parts of patents -- all of them point to how patents don't make people innovate, they make people lazy. Invent, patent, stop inventing. The areas with the fewest patents tend to be the areas with the most stable products at the best prices.