SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the chickens-coming-home-to-roost dept.
Google has appealed its case with Oracle to the Supreme Court of the United States over a dispute about whether a java API may be copyrighted.
The ARS Technica Story: Google asks Supreme Court to overrule disastrous ruling on API copyrights.
The consensus among the comments on ARS seem to be that this will result in a substantial amount of litigation. I'm forced to ask whether this future litigation should have happened already, and that this paradigm shift is just a matter of catching up to the effects of a previous bad ruling Lotus v. Borland from the early 1990s.
I get that it is going to cause a lot of code refactoring. But won't that also create a lot of new products? The other thing to consider is that communications protocols are essentially API specifications. Historically intellectual property protection for protocols is very weak. Some (myself at least) would attribute the effectiveness of the EEE business tactic to the inability to defend protocol compatibility within the legal framework provided by the USPTO and Copyright Office.
Which is to say that an Oracle victory may expand the scope of FOSS licensing, giving FOSS developers more say over how their products are used. This would reduce barrier to entry in new communications product markets that are based on FOSS, and give more power to startups.
Yes it is going to be expensive for established players if Oracle wins. Most people seem to agree with that. That is the price of operating on a bad premise. Does it matter whether responsibility for the premise resides with a judge or a CEO? Aren't there also some upsides if Oracle wins? What are the trade offs?
Of course the whole thing could be a put on.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 30 2019, @11:05AM (3 children)
Note that I do _not_ support improperly issued patents - those that are obvious, not novel, whose description of the invention is obfuscated or that is insufficient to enable one who is skilled in the art to reproduce the invention.
_None_ of these art particular to software patents; obvious inventions get patented all the time, which I feel is Just Wrong.
What I _do_ support about patents in general and software patents in particular is that to patent an invention that is simply Good Enough often results in Better inventions; for example Ogg Vorbis is better than MP3.
In 1995 I invented a lossless bitmap graphics compressor that I conceived of during my lengthy commute over the course of a month. I was only given three weeks to implement it, including the file format code. It's about as good as GIF's LZW - about 50% compression of typical photos - but is dramatically faster to decompress, which was important on the far-slower CPUs of the day.
I had never heard of the particular method I had for compression. I've not heard of it being used since.
I asked my employer to patent it. That would have named me as the inventor but Medior as the assignee - they were a multimedia CD-ROM consultant. I came up with the idea when, after specifically advising our product manager to create a space budget in a spreadsheet he said "Sixty hundred fifty megabytes ought to be enough for everyone".
And it wasn't.
The Classic Mac OS PICT compressor was blazingly fast, but using GIF on windows was quite slow, so that the user could not readily page through a home shopping catalog on CD. With the images compressed offline with my compressor, then decompressed on the fly as each new page was entered, because of the smaller size of the filesystem reads, to use my decompressor was faster than using uncompressed images.
They never filed for a patent as the company got bought by AOL during the Dot-Com Boom, who really only wanted our graphic artists.
At the time - maybe now I don't don't know - one had only one year to file an application after one "brought the invention to practice" - ie. made one. I've since come up with numerous improvements so that In My Infinite Free Time I _will_ file for a patent on my own.
(One can patent improvements to any invention at all.)
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday January 30 2019, @12:16PM (2 children)
The problem with patents is that while you may have independently come up with that great method, and spent weeks/months/years implementing it, it's entirely possible someone else has too, and has either patented it already in some impossible-to-find patent, or will find that they have to stop doing what their nifty library does because you come along and claim ownership of their ideas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @07:30PM (1 child)
The patent rules are supposed to prevent that. This scenario would mean the patent fails to be non-obvious to experts in the field.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 30 2019, @08:00PM
The description of the invention is specifically required to be "clear", as well as to enable - I forget the exact words but something like - "one practiced in the art" can reproduce the invention.
A while back I went to the Sunnyvale Patent Clearinghouse where lots of hardcopy patents were kept; if I remember correctly, the photocopier was free.
The LZW patent was seventy pages. I found it completely unintelligible.
Despite this, I've never head of a patent being quashed for being unclear, and have been meaning - in my infinite free time - to point out to Richard that to challenge unclear invention descriptions could be a useful avenue of attack.
So why would I both support patents and Richard Stallman?
Because I oppose _bad_ patents, not so much software patents as bad patents are found in many fields.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]