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'Eolas' Browser Plug-in Patent Case Rises Again
eldavojohn writes "A legal battle that has been around since 1999 and seemingly ended in 2005 now rears its head again. In a confusing move, the USPTO 'reissued a Microsoft patent last week covering the same concepts outlined in the Eolas patent and with wording mirroring that of the Eolas patent. With both companies holding identical patents, the USPTO will now play King Solomon and decide which parent gets custody of the baby.' Both the Microsoft & Eolas patents are available online."
See why I don't like software patents, because they're stupid and everyone gets hurt.
Unless of course, you manage to patent something that a large company will have to pay you $500+ million for. But if that's my large company, I'll be upset.
At this rate, we might as well patent integration and differentiation.
But software is more like a creative work than a physical object, so you might want to compare it to books. You get a copyright on a book, so that people can't print off copies of your book and make money off it. Imagine if you could get a patent on a book, such that nobody else could write a book with a similar plot. We'd have a lot less books, or a lot more litigation going on in the book making industry. You couldn't even start to sit down and write a book without reading through thousands of patents on books that people had written. It would be fairly impossible for two authors to come up with exactly the same book, but you could probably find lots of books with similar plots, and similar pieces of text. Just like with software. Presented with the same problem, most programmers will probably come up with very similar methods of solving the problem. I guess it's more of a problem with patents in general than with software patents. With so many patents out there, how are you supposed to know if you are infringing on something, and if you take the time to do the research, to see if you are infringing, then it will take you years before you can even start developing something.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's pretty standard here to take the title or first paragraph or so of the patent description and jump to the assumption that this is all they have. But this is almost always wrong.
That also doesn't mean that software patents are *right*.
More so than a lot of other professions, programmers entire job is to sit and think of ways of doing things. I think the standard for "non-obvious" should be much, much stricter for such a cerebral and abstract pursuit.
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