Slashdot Mirror
Software Patents Not So Abstract When the Lawsuits Hit Home
no_such_user writes "It's easy to ignore the controversy surrounding software patents, especially if you don't have the passion for technology which Slashdot readers do. But as Dana Nieder discovered, it's not all about major corporations and obscure patent trolls. Her daughter uses a comparatively inexpensive assistive communication app on their iPad, which is being threatened by the makers of a multi-thousand-dollar hardware device."
A link to the actual complaint for anyone to read over (legal speak makes my head hurt so don't count on me to read it).
http://news.priorsmart.com/semantic-compaction-systems-v-speak-for-yourself-l5vv/
In our (North American at least) justice system, it is money that wins the day. If you cannot afford to do legal battle, you lose. Very sad, but until we change it, it is the way things are.
My only suggestion is if you need the app, make sure you have it and a backup on your ipad. The company may stop producing and supporting it, but if you already have it and it is working, then keep it. (ps. Don't screw around with that ipad, in case you corrupt something and lose the 'irreplacebale' app.
And here are links to the patents in question:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5748177.PN.&OS=PN/5748177&RS=PN/5748177
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5920303.PN.&OS=PN/5920303&RS=PN/5920303
The patents in question, from USPTO website.
#5748177 Dynamic keyboard and method for dynamically redefining keys on a keyboard
A dynamic keyboard includes a plurality of keys, each with an associated symbol, which are dynamically redefinable to provide access to higher level keyboards. Based on sequenced symbols of keys sequentially activated, certain dynamic categories and subcategories can be accessed and keys corresponding thereto dynamically redefined. Dynamically redefined keys can include embellished symbols and/or newly displayed symbols. These dyanmically redefined keys can then provide the user with the ability to easily access both core and fringe vocabulary words in a speech synthesis system.
#5920303 Dynamic keyboard and method for dynamically redefining keys on a keyboard
pe1 A dynamic keyboard includes a plurality of keys, each with an associated symbol, which are dynamically redefinable to provide access to higher level keyboards. Based on sequenced symbols of keys sequentially activated, certain dynamic categories and subcategories can be accessed and keys corresponding thereto dynamically redefined. Dynamically redefined keys can include embellished symbols and/or newly displayed symbols. These dynamically redefined keys can then provide the user with the ability to easily access both core and fringe vocabulary words in a speech synthesis system.
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Seems a bit broad IMO, allowing such dynamic functionality across key redefining, and then pasting on 'as it applies' to "a speech synthesis system".
For what it's worth, seeing as a few hundred dollar iPad app is allowing a little girl to speak vs. a $9000 piece of hardware from the suing company, I hope this goes viral to the point that the Semantic Corporation (plaintiff) is forced to drop the lawsuit just to save PR face.
The dead obvious clause "readily apparent to one skilled in the art" or somesuch, has been ignored for about 20 years now...
Hunt down an online programmer in another country.
Pay them a few hundred.
They will knock up an app that's better, works on everything, and can be extended and customised later and you'll have the source too.
The problem here is not the app or some "big bad company", but that the legalities mean that your app will always be at risk and specialist support apps are INCREDIBLY expensive and crap (ask Stephen Hawking).
Whether the patent is valid or not, you'll never know. They could really have a legitimate legal claim and the app-maker could have deliberately infringed their patents in order to make a quick buck. You don't know and can't guarantee anything.
I've worked in schools that have paid thousands for a simple flashcard app for hearing-impaired children. It was literally a VB4 app that I could replicate in an afternoon if I sat down with a licensed clipart library. But if I made one, I wouldn't be able to sell it because schools would only ever buy from established, recognised institutions, etc.
Get yourself a programmer. In fact, turn the blog post into a plea for someone to create the programme for you. If they create it in a country that doesn't recognise software patents, there is NOTHING they can do about it and the author can put it on their website and charge what they like and you can tell all your friends to buy it from him. Plus, you'll get EXACTLY what you want.
Don't fight the patents - you don't have the money or inclination, just a single sob-story that has zero real weight. Sidestep the patents instead, and also hit that company where it hurts at the same time. And as your child grows, make the app grow with her and fix the problems she experiences.
If something is crap, expensive, liable to infringement / removal, etc. then you get around this by using SOMETHING ELSE.
If patents were actually reviewed by people who have at least a minuscle idea about just WHAT gets patented there, that's what might happen. Since patent clerks are on one hand overworked due to the flood of trivial, ludicrous patents being pushed at them, patent applications being deliberately vague and convoluted and the average clerk not being an expert in the field at hand, things like this can happen.
Like, say, patenting the wheel. Sure, that patent was retracted nearly instantly, but it gives you an idea just what kind of idiocy goes on in the patent offices of this world. And as long as nobody challenges a patent (and what average person or small company has the means to?), a patent stands.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I hope someone can do it for android, publish on independent website as .APK, in Europe, so your daughter can continue using this technology
At least for now Europe are holding the pressure.
Any android developers?
P.S.Crowdfunding should help too.
I agree, this seems to be an obvious solutions to a simple problem.
There is something about the mix of legalese and techobabble in the patent applications, that renders the most trivial thing
an air of importance.
I once worked for a company, where we discovered that we couldn't let a system redirect an incoming call to another system,
if the customer wan't in the first systems database, since that violated a patent. The digital equivalence of looking in the next
drawer when you are looking for a matching sock. Pretty far from http://www.google.com/patents?vid=1781541
If patent applications were required to include a car-analogy in the summary, the patent system would less annoying.
If Speak for Yourself posts the source code under an open license, and make no money from it, then they are safe, right? And since when does a hardware patent apply to software? And doesn't prior tech void the patent?
Alas, they are not safe. Patent infringement applies to all use, whether profitable or no. Current patent policy applies to software, and even business process, as well as hardware. Whether there is legal infringement depends on the details of the claims, which are very hard to evaluate. If there is prior art, that may invalidate the patent. But the relevance of prior art to the specific claims is a fuzzy issue. Also, once a patent has been registered, the burden of proof is on the alleged infringer regarding prior art. OK, IANAL, and I'm writing from memory, so this should all be checked, but I'm pretty sure I've memorized these points correctly.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
We already know that patent laws are fucked up.
We don't need more emotional testimony dumped into our political and legal processes. It's already fucked up enough from this nonsense. "My cute wonderful 3 year old sweetie who is disabled and just found a way to speak and now a company wants to take that away for profit!"
The moment someone says that such and such a law has "hit home" is the moment we need to tune them out.
Because they're now useless as an even remotely objective source of information. Our worst laws are, by and large, the most popular, usually mandates that accomplish the opposite of what they're intended to do or simply fail miserably with terrible side effects. Which then stirs up another emotional mob that tries to fix the new problem!
We think there are cigar smoking villains in back rooms writing our laws when in fact the real authors are nitwit staffers transcribing the rantings of mobs of emotional idiots. We think that rich villains buy politicians, when, by the numbers, it's almost entirely a case of politicians purchasing voters.
We seriously need to take a deep fucking breath, rip out about 90% of our laws, and start over.
When the IBM PC killed the typewriter dead, did Smith Corona sue? No, they adapted, and now sell printer supplies and specialty paper. Before they made typewriters, they made guns. That is one adaptable company. All companies could learn a lesson here. Be flexible. Adapt. The market changes, that's just a fact of life. Litigation to save a dead product is ultimately just pissing money away. Make something new, better, different. Especially in this climate where a claim like this will get you fried in the hot, boiling oil of public opinion.
How is different from people who need and can't afford (or just can't get) certain drugs? TFA's daughter can't talk but millions die because they can't get a $1 vaccine or super-expensive healthcare and cancer treatments.
Any for-profit company delivering healthcare, drugs and and assistive devices is pitting what they think the market will support against their bottom line. The parent in TFA is losing out because they can't find a device that follows the required IP structure that works for them in the market but why is their need [for parent reform] greater than somebody dying because certain drugs aren't available because they'd never be commercially viable? In both cases people lose out and it's morally atrocious that something as transitory and meaningless as money is hindering quality of life.
I'll be honest, I don't know the solution. Nuking all patents from space sounds great if you're allergic to showers and buy into the Occupy Everything movements people in the real world realise that RND costs are real. Destroying patents would have a significant and fairly unpredictable effect on the world.
And you can be sure, whatever the real solution is, whenever it comes along, the companies that own all this IP aren't going to let their patents go without a fight.
I am against obvious patents, and therefore think that the current system needs reform. I think peer review and shorter time periods are the best solution. But this is a stupid emotional article:
If the original patents were truly novel, and no app like the one the author's daughter uses would ever have been invented if not for the invention of the original patent, then the author would have no cause for complaint. It is the obviousness of the patents (if that is the case), that is the real question.
I believe that in order to achieve real patent reform, it is important to stay on topic and avoid emotional, illogical arguments. The key point is that we need a system which rewards people for real inventions that would be unlikely to be developed within a certain amount of time, without the original invention. The length of the patent should reflect how long it would take for that idea to become obvious without the original patent. This is just a rough idea of the real logic that patents should follow but it gives the general idea. This framework doesn't rule out eliminating software patents altogether, but it does require that doing so be based on some kind of cost-benefit analysis, including the incentive to invent new things, not just emotional sob stories.
It isn't the first case of a patent covering an already commonplace idea used in a new setting. A lot of software patents are simply for doing something old 'on a computer.' The general rule for patent-driven companies is to just grab every possible patent they can, without a thought to how valid the patent may be - there's no penalty for having a patent denied, and the US patent office is basically a rubber-stamp engine anyway. Once the patents are granted by the thousand, then they start looking through to see if they got anything good.
Pharmacuticals sometimes runs a similar model. They discover a new interesting compound, and patent it right away - and only then try to work out exactly what it does or might be good for. If they waited to figure that out before fileing, a competitor might beat them to it.
The patent system is even worse than that. At least in the story in the article, the plaintiff has actually implemented *some* kind of solution, however ridiculously expensive. The current US patent system rewards trolling: *not* implementing *anything*, just sitting on the patent until some poor bastard actually bothers to think up a viable solution and produces it, then springing out to snatch a share of *their* work.
And this is the system the US is frantically, despertely attempting to foist onto the rest of the world.
Just as with the IBM patent story on /. a couple of days ago, the FSF and its friends have taught us about the dangers of software patents years ago.
The heart of that IBM story IBM told us about in a story in their promotional magazine called "Think" magazine from 1990 and Richard Stallman taught us about the consequences of this problem in his talk "The Danger of Software Patents" (which you can find in the FSF audio and video archives).
The heart of the danger for computer users (regardless of what you use a computer to do) was addressed by Stallman in a portion of his talk concerning Paul Heckel's patents:
Digital Citizen
The 'dedicated hardware' that you predict disappearing gets replaced by other dedicated hardware that does the same job as well as 3 or 5 other jobs. For instance, the Palm Pilot is just as good as extinct, replaced by iPhones/Androids/Blackberries/etc, which also make phone calls and do all kinds of other things once you install the appropriate app.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
We think there are cigar smoking villains in back rooms writing our laws when in fact the real authors are nitwit staffers transcribing the rantings of mobs of emotional idiots. We think that rich villains buy politicians, when, by the numbers, it's almost entirely a case of politicians purchasing voters.
An interesting thought, but one that seems to go against most of modern history, in which the rich have almost all of the power.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Abstract are many things including law, government, religion, language and most certainly money... and of course software.
Software patents are pure acts of fraud.... its provable but neither Proprietary or Free Open Source Software developers want to admit it. be it reasons of money or ego...
Love it or hate it, most people are driven by emotion, not reason. And they all vote. You can try to change that by improving education etc (though I still remain skeptical that you can change this on a scale large enough to make a difference), but even in the best case you're looking at decades of work. In the meantime, we have to play by the rules that are here to get anything useful done - and this means appeal to emotion, especially "think of the children". You can denounce that as unethical, shy away, and languish in obscurity; or you can learn to spin it to provide emotional support for reasonable things.
The trick is to avoid falling into the same trap yourself, and fully understand the real rationale of things you're arguing for at all times.
\Like, say, patenting the wheel. Sure, that patent was retracted nearly instantly, but it gives you an idea just what kind of idiocy goes on in the patent offices of this world.
Not so much. From your link:
He says that innovation patents are not examined in detail by the Australian patent office. ... The Australian office controlling patents, IP Australia, said that Keogh's innovation patent would not stand if tested in court. However, some still suggest that the innovation patent may be misleading. "Calling it an innovation patent merely serves to confuse the issue," says Geoff Sargent, assistant director of the UK Patent Office. "It's not a patent as would be understood in most countries."
Unlike utility patents, such as the ones at issue in this Slashdot story, that was an "innovation patent". Innovation patents are a registration-only system (Hong Kong has a similar system). There's no examination - you pay your fee, you get your patent... but, unlike real patents that undergo examination, there's no presumption of validity. You sue someone, first you have to prove that your patent is actually novel and innovative, before they even need to respond. Basically, rather than paying $20-25k to get a patent that the defendant needs to defend against, you pay $100 and get a piece of paper saying "you filed an application this day, but no one has looked at it and no defendant needs to defend against it until you prove it's valid".
That's not how patents work.
Suppose I (A) have a way of accomplishing a technological miracle. And then I get a patent on it.
Somebody else (B) comes along and patents the improvement of doing that miracle on the internet.
We guess what - neither A nor B can actually practice the miracle itself on the internet. B can't because A has the patent on the miracle. B has the improvement patent which describes doing the miracle on the internet so A can't do it on the internet.
Patents DON'T give you the right to practice your invention, only the right to prevent someone else from doing it.
Just leave the US market and the markets of AU and Japan and other software-patent countries. That's it, just leave. The market is big enough elsewhere to make yourselves rich by selling your product.
Once innovative, U.S. owned software start-ups are seen as leaving the US, the media will have its story.
Once the media has it's story, it will be written once and for all in the minds of the public as it really is- software patents kill innovation.
Once the public understands the issues as they really are, the lawmakers will be forced to do the right thing and ban software patents.
Yes, I am conspiring with my fellow developers right here on /.
And yes, you can develop software here in the US and sell it elsewhere with impunity, owing directly to this Supreme Court decision: http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2007/04/supreme_court_n.php/ .
And no, I am am not a lawyer. I am human.
I would love to be able to crowdsource donations for legal defenses. Many times copyright and patent trolls "lose" but still "win" because they've starved out the defendants with injunctions against sales and put them out of business in a mountain of legal fees.
I've heard a number of possible solutions here. The obvious one would be for the litigator to license the patents to the app-maker for a small, reasonable fee. It looks like this isn't happening. I see nothing in the docs I accessed to indicate this was even put forward.
People mentioned prior art. What would happen if Apple, for instance, took a stand for the app-maker? That changes the dynamics considerably.
The more this gets around to the user community and the people who prescribe the devices for their patients and customers, the more victimized the consumers feel. They will also pressure the maker to make a deal.
Blackball the companies from the research community. The researchers, some of whom appear to be stockholders in the company, might get a sense of reality if they were exposed as victimizing the poor 3-year-old girl who wants to talk.
FOSS alternative. Find someone to program the dang thing and make it better. The suggestion about the Android app and Europe is fairly good. Charitable funding for development would also be good.
There seems to be some agreement that the PTO needs overhauling and the patent laws need revision. I agree. So how about someone doing a logical analysis and finding some alternative paths that are so obvious that even the lobbyists can't overcome them? Somewhere there is a complicated, convoluted repository of all the relevant arguments for our current patent system. It is probably too much for Congress to understand, but someone could make it clear. I would know where to start, but like most of us, I have limited time and I would want to apply my own time to other projects. But who knows? The FOSS community is made up of people with ideas and intersts different from mine, and this may appeal to someone.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I wrote, and my company shipped, a free icon/text configurable speech generation system for the Amiga that does essentially what the iPad app in question here does at least two years before the date of the patent in question (the complaint dates the patents 1995 and 1997 -- Talkboard hails from 1993 and before, though I can only document it to 1993 -- that's the copyright date in the archive.) The application is called "Talkboard" and is still available from our company's historical archive.
Talkboard presented a layered interface pretty much just like the one in the iPad app, It used a synthesized voice and provided for unusual phonetic construction so as to obtain the best clarity (the Amiga's text-to-speech could be.... quirky.) You could load and save phrase banks, and one phrase bank could partially replace another or completely replace another. Single words or short phrases or entire complex sentences could be stored for 1-click or multiple click retrieval. The phrase could be represented by any shorthand that was convenient. It came with presets, but was really intended to be customized by the end user - what a kid has to say and an adult has to say tend to not be the same things in most cases. It could also be driven from ARexx, a system-wide scripting facility, and could dynamically change definitions based upon whatever criteria you needed it to.
As far as I can tell, there's nothing unique, new or even interesting in the two patent claims.
Hopefully that's of use to the EFF or the defending party.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Hopefully you're not just posting this on Slashdot, which is about three degrees away from the people being sued. I'd suggest using the Contact Us link on the company's home page to tell them. That's information their lawyer might find very useful and help in their defense.