Online Rich Media Patented

An anonymous reader writes "Balthasar has been awarded a patent on "Methods, systems, and processes for the design and creation of rich-media applications via the internet" ( USPO 7,000,180). In an article at news.com the company claims that "The patent covers all rich-media technology implementations including Flash, Flex, Java, AJAX and XAML and all device footprints which access rich-media Internet applications including desktops, mobile devices, set-top boxes and video game consoles". The patent was filed on 9 February 2001, five years after the original Flash application, FutureWave Splash, was introduced in May 1996."

Comments

Good luck enforcing it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, let's see them try to sue anyone based on this patent. Any half-competent defense attorney will drag up enough prior art to knock these jokers back to the '80s.

It'd be nice if patents like these weren't granted in the first place, but at least there's a self-correcting mechanism built into the system. Shame it has to be such an expensive process.
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perl -e '$??s:;s:s;;$?::s;;=]=>%-{<-|}<&|`{;;y; -/:-@[-`{-};`-{~" -;;s;;$_;see'

Re:Good luck enforcing it

[gvc]

Perhaps any half-decent lawyer can have the patent invalidated, but perhaps not before some yahoo judge slaps a permanent injunction on the whole web. (cf. RIM)

Re:Good luck enforcing it

[stubear]

Eolas was able to successfully sue Microsoft with a patent which had clear prior art. The judge did not allow the evidence in the trial - for whatever reason, it was never quite clear - and Microsoft lost the case. Logic and reasoning are only half the fight in legal cases. You're forgetting the rules which determine what can be considered as evidence during teh case and sometimes what's left defies logic and reeasoning altogether.

Re:Good luck enforcing it

[Anonymous Coward]

"Shame it has to be such an expensive process."

Which is what the trick is all about imho.

There is a fallacy and myth that seems to come from games theory, it infests the minds of many capitalist economists
and in psychology is a known damaged transaction schema. A great laymans explanation of the idea can be found
here. The idea basically goes..

Your loss is my gain

Many patents seem to be premptive defensive moves rather than protective. They are not crafted in a form mindful of protecting any real assets so much as they are designed to impede others. Patents have actually become a way of inhibiting technological growth of competitors. The competitors most damaged are of course the young startups, nobody could possibly start a software company today and do so legally, just to get on with the most basic design any coder has to say "screw their stupid patent claims".

Money is the thing that makes this work. Big companies don't need patents, they have vast amounts of money to use as a stick to beat off challenges. But no small startup is going to take up the challenge, so each time a new chilling bogus
patent gets approved it holds back the little guys a bit more.

While there are individual winners and losers in this game the whole caper is by definition STUPIDITY. The loser is the nations economy as new innovators either fold up or relocate to a friendlier host country.

Important Clarification + Rant

[suv4x4]

When he says it covers all "rich media" he really means it covers rich media GENERATOR/EDITOR applications in said rich media, not all apps or the technology itself.

The patent describes a system for creating what basically is a Flash IDE with clipart online. That said the patent affects all sorts of CMS (content management systems), editors, template-based sites and so on and so on that fall under it.

The prior art for that patent is devastating. A lot of the claims are ridiculous and include the "revolutionarty" inventions of.. rotating, scaling and moving objects.

I'm still mightily pissed by this silly patent, but I'll just ignore it, should they try to enforce it, they'll have to face the prior art.

Re:Important Clarification + Rant

[suv4x4]

The patent covers content created online, i.e. if FrontPage was running from Internet Explorer as a Flash or Avalon+XML or HTML/JS, then it'd probably have pieces affected by the patent.

This is one more case of "same stuff but in a new medium" patents, just like Apple patenting their "unique" menu system (used on iPod) for use on mobile devices, as if we never used tree menus before.

Yes, this is for *editing* so-called rich media

[ajdavis]

At first I thought "rich media" meant Jack Valenti, but now I see that, as parent says, this patent covers editing something like a Flash script over the Internet, with some network application server doing the actual work. However, if you had an X-Windows application that edited such a Flash script, & you exported its display to another terminal, then you're clearly violating this patent, even though you could have done this in the 90s, maybe the 80s.

Even if we ignored that, this patent is obvious: it's a principle of CS that anything you can do on your own box, you can do remotely, thus if the local application isn't patented, then the web application can't be patented either, because it's obvious. I think if the USPTO realized this (although they're systemically disinclined to understand anything, since their revenue comes from *approving* patents), many assinine web patents would go away.

A few weeks ago we saw an article advocating "patents lite", in which the USPTO checks that the patent covers something patentable, but does *not* check for prior art, usefulness, or non-obviousness. The patent is much shorter, like 3 years. The first time it's challenged, the burden is now on the patent-holder to show that it's useful, novel, & non-obvious.

It turns out that de facto, we have patents lite. Clearly, the Patent Office checked nothing before it granted this patent, so we're just waiting for the first lawsuit. We have patents lite, & the system still doesn't work. It's time to end this.

Re:PTO

[dwandy]

Also the patent office needs to be held accountable for it's mistakes, like, for instance, paying for anyone who has to fight a bogus patent. Maybe then they'd take due care?

uh ... that would be your tax money they would pay out with. No thanks.
And good luck making the patent officers personally liable... that'll grind the whole thing to a stand-still as they refuse to grant any more patents to anyone.

The problem with the patent system is that (like communism) it's a nice idea on paper, but totally unworkable in reality. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and when faced with a problem the majority of people (engineers etc) will arrive at a very similar solution to any given problem independently. This means that all of these solutions should fail the non-obviousness test. So unless you arrive at a solution that others skilled in the field don't arrive at, your solution can't be patented. (of course they often do get patented despite this rule...)

I've jokingly said we should have patent-jury duty ... maybe it's not such a bad idea after all... a new requirement of keeping the little ring on your little finger is to, on a random basis, provide solutions to a problem (based on a patent request) in a vacuum situation. Any solution you (and the other random contestants) come up with that is similar to the patent request will cause the patent to fail the non-obviousness test.
Combine that with a requirement to actually produce a working prototype, and shorter monopoly times and we might have a patent system that actually benefits society instead of shareholders.

Obviously obvious invention

[mwvdlee]

Since computers and the internet are so standardized, any invention conforming to any of the following should be obvious to anybody:

The invention already exists in a non-networked version.

The invention already exists in a non-scriptable version.

The invention already exists as a hardware implementation.

The invention already exists using older components.

The invention already exists and is being used as such using it's individual components.