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Microsoft Copies Idea, Admits It, Then Patents It
An anonymous reader writes "BlueJ is a popular academic IDE which lets students have a visual programming interface. Microsoft copied the design in their 'Object Test Bench' feature in Visual Studio 2005 and even admitted it. Now, a patent application has come to light which patents the very same feature, blatantly ignoring prior art."
Given that this time, they really really know there is prior art, are they just assuming no one can be bothered to have a long lawsuit with someone that rich?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Vote with your money against such business practices, use competitive products.
;-)
Indeed. With RealBasic being priced about equal to Visual Basic and Ubuntu being free I see very little reason to develop for a proprietary platform these days.
Now granted the user base is *ahem* considerably larger for Windows but I think that will change and is changing now.
To use the old cliche "Build it and they will come."
Especially if you can show a cost savings to the upper level of manglement.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Only problem is that the USPTO cant know *everything*. So things will slip thru by nature.
The real test is you present valid prior art to them, and see if they revoke it on the spot.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This kind of patent abuse should be remedied with action against the abuser. At the very least the patent attorneys should be barred from filing or working on patents for a period of at least 10% of the duration of the patents they are abusing. And the filer (eg. Microsoft), if guilty of conspiracy to abuse (provable by repeated offenses) should be barred from filing or working on patents for a similar period.
That kind of consequences would force the filers to carry most of the responsibility for researching prior art and other patent invalidators, rather than the incompetent/overloaded PTO. And weed out many of the crooked patent lawyers who make money regardless of how badly they construct the artificial government monopolies they attempt to create.
--
make install -not war
It's a first, second, third person thing.
First person(me):
I get my milk from the store.
Second person(you):
You get your milk from the store.
Third person(someone or something else):
The dog gets its milk from the store.
Microsoft gets its profits from aggressive business practices.
For extra fun, 'they' can refer to one or more people, but is used with singular and plural verbs, but I don't have the formal knowledge to back that up(the following usage is correct, but I don't know which rules apply):
They get their milk from the store. (get is singular)
They are going to the store. (are is plural)
The answer to your question is to refer to Microsoft as an 'it' rather than a 'they'. Strictly, using 'they' is improper, but popular usage has long since trumped that.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
How much searching ought you to do for a patent? If your country signed up to the international patent agreements, then for your patent to be valid, there must be no published or sold prior art anywhere in the world or in any language. This is an impossible search, so the assumption is always that any prior art search is incomplete. If all patent applications are incomplete, then some people may wonder why we start at all. You could just do a cursory search of the current online patents, and allow the application. Microsoft have lobbied for a more open system where patent application becomes easier, and the public community does more of the searching. Unfortunately, patent applications have titles, summaries, and patent indexes that make them easy to search, while products are not searchable in the same way. If you searched for prior art on the Microsoft product, then you would be very unlikely to discover BlueJ.
I do not think the public should be required to support the prior art searh effort, but if they are going to be enlisted, then they ought to have the right tools. What I would like to see is some searchable index of prior art or prior ideas. This could be classified the same way as patents. For my particular field of image colour transforms, I would list all the different ways in which would could generate and combine and apply different forms of colour transform, invert them, apply them, with all the different variations we could think of. Other people could generalize this list, or add more specific implementations, as a patent can cover a simplification as well as a refinement. We would include references to prior art where examples could be found. This would not stop existing patent applications for stuff we know has been around for ages, but it could frustrate all future attempts.
As a software writer and a filer of patents, I think we would be better off with no software patents. If we have to have them, let's make them good ones before they bring the whole patent system into disrepute.
Remember what M$ did with IE to get the upper hand against Netscape.
They made their previously saleable heap of dung called Internet Explorer FREE.
Sales of Netscape crashed.
I see (to my simple non legal mind) the same sort of behaviour here.
-Find a product that already exists and made by a small company.
-Copy functionality of said product
-Make it Free but closed source
-Original Company goes bust
-Start charging for previously free software
-Profit!
or for the last two
-Lock in. All users of this neat funcyionality have to use Windows!
-Profit even More.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
I believe it's a British / American thing. As a Brit, I tend to treat a company as plural, whereas Americans seem to prefer to consider them single entities. I don't think there's a formal answer.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
What happens is the deelopment department works on something. Then the patent and legal department takes a look at the features, and finds anything that looks innovative. They do a prior art search, and if there are no patents in the field, they patent it. It is possible, that the patents department simply didn't know that this idea was taken from another.
Except in the legal sense, Microsoft is not a single entity. It is a collection of people who does not always know what each other do.
The story seems to go like this:
BlueJ becomes popular in academia. When Microsoft ask people in academia which new features they would like to see in Visual Studio, naturally they suggest some of the features that makes BlueJ popular.
Now some people from Microsoft gets assigned to implement this new feature, and for extra credit also write a patent application (or submit the idea to the people who write the patent application).
Later, another person from another subdivision, who happen to be an active blogger, get wind of the BlueJ people are angry that Visual Studio has a new feature copied from BlueJ without acknowledgment. So the blogger find out that it was most likely BlueJ that inspired the academicians to suggest the feature, and acknowledge the fact.
And now, because people think of Microsoft as a single entity, they are angry because Microsoft both patent the idea, and at the same time acknowledge where it came from.
It's just a style thing, check this thread on The Economist's take on it : http://www.badlanguage.net/?p=326 (if you had the linkification plugin, that'd be a link for you)
The most important thing is consistency, don't flip flop between referring to it as singular and plural, pick one, and go with it (or them).
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I see a website which takes and publicly sums donations from people using Paypal, to collect money to combat bad patents. The sie could allow people to vote on which dodgy patents the money will go towards combatting.
I should so patent that idea.
I haven't heard of a single case where the lone programmer (inventor?) gets a patent for some smart code he invented and the big companies will pay him for his efforts. All that I heard of is big companies (or maybe small companies that invent nothing but has made it their business to file patents for things that already exist) that have asked money from another big company because of these patents.
c le/2006/03/03/AR2006030301489.html.
What planet have you been on? One of the major news stories of 2006 was the case of the lone inventor, Thomas Campana Jr., and his successful claim against Research In Motion (Blackberry) regarding a wireless email invention. Unfortunately the lone and persistent inventor died, but his survivors successfully brought it to settlement http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
There is no obligation (certainly not in the U.S.) to search for prior art before filing a patent. Maybe "is" is a typo and you meant "should be." It WOULD be a reform to require people to do a pre-filing search and report the results. There is a new program right now where you are required to perform and submit a search in order to (optionally) pursue accelerated handling in the patent office. They require you (in that case) to do a better search than they usually do themselves. If the program works out, it might be a good model for across-the-board adoption.
If an applicant knowingly fails to disclose relevant prior art in their patent application, doesn't that constitute fraud on the patent office? Particularly in this instance, when Microsoft clearly knows of the prior art? IIRC, fraud on the patent office is a cause of action that the P.O. takes pretty seriously.
Uhh - apparently you wandered in from an alternate universe. The RIM case has been debated ad nauseum on /. but one thing is clear - Campana's "heirs" (which in bizarro universe apparently is the word for lawyers) got a payout that is in no way proportionate to Campana's contributions to the world. No one believes that Campana's inventions added one iota of knowledge to the process that ended up with RIM selling Blackberries. Campana's attorn"heir"s just got incredibly lucky that Campana won the race to file in a moronic patent system.
... oh yeah ... bizarro world .. backwards is forwards ... I get it now ... you were just exhibiting a sly and subtle wit. Well played my friend, well played indeed.
And that is a bizarre thing to be trumpeting as a laudable achievement.
Like so many of my personal / pet projects, my Taxonomy of Obvious Ideas site (http://tooi.org) is languishing undeveloped as I haven't had the time to follow through on the original inspiration. The parent's idea falls right in line with the sort of things I intended to do there though, so...
I will donate domain space and bandwidth -- and put some of my own cash in the pot -- if people are willing to help design, write and manage the app. I'm vacationing with sporadic access for the next week & a half, but after that I'll try to get all the responders in touch with each other & offer whatever I can to the endeavor. I'm a C# / Asp.NET developer myself, but I'm open to other architectures, e.g. PHP on a virtual LAMP server to start, perhaps? Some sort of mod system would be needed to pair filing suggestions with available funds; nobody would want a system with hundreds of filings just a little bit short of the needed fees, while cumulatively enough dollars were tied up in the pot to address at least some of them. But those are implementation details that could be discussed later...
Right now, the domain is basically "parked" on a host (mind you, with no ads or "Your One Stop Portal for All Your Obvious Ideas Searches" type crap), but yes, I do have my own physical servers & lines when it's time to start real work.
I'm not intent on ultimately controlling the domain & project, by the way. If there's a sensible way to put everything into motivated, collective hands, that'd probably be best.
Pi Ran Out
It doesn't qualify as invention, but that's not what patent means.
The original use of patent, that I'm aware of, is either "patently obvious" or "patent of nobility". In both cases it represents the making of knowledge public. (For this reason I don't believe that software "patents" qualify as patents. That would require publication of all source code & tools required for making the software [compilers, etc.]. This isn't even approached.)
Now what the USPTO is supposed to be granting is a patent of invention, i.e., the making of an invention obvious, so that all those "skilled in the field" can reproduce the invention. Software patents clearly fail this test, but they frequently, as here, even fail to contain the component invention around which the "making obvious" is supposed to revolve.
I will assert (IANAL) that there has never been a software patent that fulfills the requirements of patent law. This doesn't mean that I believe I have enough money to pay for a challenge, it means that I consider each and every extraction of funds under threat of a patent lawsuit based on patent law to be extortion. And that I consider that the forces of "law" that are complicit in the enforcement of such actions are commiting malfeasance. (Possibly only misfeasance. They may well not know any better.) Believing this doesn't fool me into thinking that I can safely presume that they won't enforce the software patents, it merely causes me to consider the US government to be an illegal conspiracy against the constitution.
I'll admit that this view causes me to be extremely cynical about any and all governmental pronouncements and justifications. I've yet, however, to notice a time when my cynicism was incorrect. (If the Democrats re-instate habeus corpus, contrary to my predictions, then I'll need to raise my opinion of them slightly.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you're looking for a name, might I suggest: "patentlywrong.org" (it's available). Not a bad name, if I do say so myself, for an invaluable tool. I would contribute in the hope that the madness might end.
Usually, I react by sitting and watching it.
It's a shame that I can't trust it to even shut down reliably. Thinking about it, that's my reaction to many of Windows' proclamations - "Yeah, sure, you may say that... but what are you really going to do?"
Meh. All part of the daily hand-holding that is the Windows XPerience. It's like a toddler who's mostly able to walk, but you still have to keep an eye on him just in case he wanders into oncoming traffic.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
There is no law stating you can't patent something with prior art then sue the person who actually invented it, ruining their business and their life. There is also no requirment that patent clerks have to check prior art outside of the patent system. Its the American way people, and through 'diplomatic' pressure, it will soon be your country's way too.
So we've got donors, a web host, programming it wouldn't be difficult, though I'd likely get shot for using PHP instead of Python...
But here's the tricky part: the finding of incoming patents with obvious prior art, and the time to fill out those forms, review them, and submit them. As a community project, this might be easier than it looks, if the articles can be peer reviewed, commented upon, etc.
So...
1) Paypal account to accept donations
2) System of displaying donation totals and expenditures for which patent
3) Submission of bad patent requests for review
4) Submission of prior art claims for those patents
5) Submission of final Patent form for review
6) Voting system on which Patents we submit against
- this last needs to come last because there's not point on voting against patents you haven't proven are false
7) A system where you can review your donation and which patent it went to block
NGTW!
Good idea, and... done.
Again, in the spirit of what this whole endeavor is about, I grabbed this for community & not personal visibility.
I wonder if the patent objection filing process has provisions for objections on Obviousness grounds, or only on Prior Art grounds? If the Taxonomy ever gets off the ground, it would make a handy "incorporate-by-reference" resource if the former type of objection is permissible.
Anyway, hopefully there will be enough competent & motivated souls stepping up to help make this all happen.
Pi Ran Out
<flattery>You're obviously adept at organizational tasks.</flattery> That sounds like a pretty good breakdown of the task. I'm open to Python. Is there a robust, serverless DB system (i.e., purely filesystem based) that's at all scalable? I have MSSQL & MySql installations, and I don't ses a problem with doing FireBird or Postgre either, but I just the portability of self-contained, dependency-free systems wherever possible. (Though FireBird may already meet that criteria...)
Since I'm leery of appearing autocratic & since I control the domain(s) [just scooped up patentlywrong.org and patentlyobvious.org too], I feel like I should not control the PayPal account. In fact, given previous cases of PayPal being, er, difficult to use for charity purposes, I'd suggest getting a whole bona-fide 501c-something-or-other to use for this purpose. Then we can experiment with the relative utility of PayPal, Google Checkout, and whatnot.
Pi Ran Out
The advantages are:
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
German was proposed as the offical language of the US in the 1700s. If I recall right German, Dutch really, barely lost being the official language in Pennsylvania, ie "Pennsylvania Dutch". About the same tyme Benjamen Franklin proposed a law barring Germans from immigrating to the USA.
FalconShould there be a Law?
personally i think both first to invent and first to file suck.
independent invention before patent granted nullifies patent would be a much better system.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
One solution would be to have software patents treated differently. Ten years for a software patent is a very long time. So instead we could have simple patents apply for 2 years, medium level patents 4 years and complex patents 8 years. Under this scheme "one click" would have lasted 2 years and given Amazon a clear advantage. Whereas some voice synthesis application may have core technology that could be patented for 8 years. The only alternative to anything like this I suspect is just to get rid of software patents. When the industry wasn't 'assisted' by such patents it boomed ... I don't remember too many software patents around on things like word processors or spreadsheets.
Imagine if Id had patented FPS, yeah I know there was prior art ... so what. Would that have been a boon to the industry? Or maybe a patent on email, by say AT&T (not sure if was them).
Bitter and proud of it.
I dont think the handfull of geeks will scare 'em at all, what should scare em is the vista fear I sudenly realize some of my WERY non geeky friends have. I dont buy the "nothing will vork on vista and forget about playing your mp3 collection ever working with all the DRM" fud that ther has been so much of in the media, neither did I think any one else did til a friend of mine stated that it was over his cold dead body vista ever got close to his computer. = This atitude in non geeks should scare em :p
www.aleo.no
That was kind of the point of the Sarbanes-Oxley thing. Keep your eyes open -- there are forces at work trying to have it repealed.