Trend Micro Draws Boycott Over AV Patent Case

Linux.com is reporting that in addition to the bad press, Trend Micro's patent case against Barracuda Networks' use of ClamAV has drawn an apparent boycott of Trend Micro. "Dutch free knowledge and culture advocacy group ScriptumLibre called for 'a worldwide boycott on Trend Micro products.' In its news release, ScriptumLibre summarizes the case, with its chairman, Wiebe van der Worp, describing Trend Micro's actions as 'well beyond the borders of decency.' The ScriptumLibre site includes link to free graphics that supporters can add to their Web pages to show their support and a call for IT professionals that provides a links to help people to educate themselves about the case and suggests a series of actions that people can take in the boycott." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge Inc.

Comments

Look no further than SCO

[Marcion]

If you want to see how the open source world responds to threats, look no further than SCO. Many Linux fans are also Unix admins at work, and many of them got their employers to switch from SCO to *anything other Unix-like OS* in response to the threats. Now SCO is in bankruptcy and not likely to come out.

Re:So will there ever be a legitimate patent to yo

[TheLinuxSRC]

Trend Micro is not a patent troll, they are a legitimate company who patented a process that they developed. Now they are exercising their rights as a patent holder. So why the hate? This is what the patent system is designed to do.

As I understand it, the patent involves filtering viruses before they make it to end user computers; eg. at the router/mail relay etc. The reason for the hate is that this is an obvious way to prevent viruses from entering your network. The hate is not so much aimed at Trend Micro as it is at the broken patent. However, the fact that Trend Micro is suing their competition using a broken patent as ammo is not going to earn Trend Micro any kudos.

Re:Patents are anti-competitive

[Bruce Perens]

What you wrote was the intent of the patent system, but not the reality. Engineers in tech companies are routinely told not to look at patents, because of the treble-damages problem or what I call the penalty for looking, damages three times as high for "knowing" infringement rather than unknowing. This makes the disclosure function of a patent inoperable. In addition, the claims of patents are written to capture as many possible applications as possible, even ones that had not been invented by the filer of the patent. This requires vagueness in the claims and further reduces the probability that they actually disclose anything of use. Indeed, the language generally used in patent claims is not particularly readable by engineers in the applicable discipline. One need only attempt to read a few patents for this to be clear. Thus, trade secret is not the antithesis of patent. A release of Open Source software is much closer to the antithesis of trade secret because it is a working and usually comprehensible implementation. Patents generally go hand-in-hand with closed-source software, and the source of that software is legally treated as a trade secret. Finally, in software, the duration of patents is so long compared to the duration of a generation of technology that there is no useful art remaining by the time the patent goes into the public domain.

Surely you must be aware of these issues.

Bruce