The Musings of Chris Samuel

The Melbourne Free Software Interest Group (a group of Melbourne computer folks with an interest in software freedom) have put together an open letter to Senator the Hon Kim Carr, the Minister for Innovation, to request that software be excluded from patenting as part of the Australian governments review of patents in general.

We are currently collecting signatures to the letter and if you are in Australia and of a like mind we would really appreciate it if you would contribute your signature too! Just click on the link, read the letter and the form to sign it is at the bottom of the page. Please also pass this on to others you know who may be interested.

Does this sound familiar to you ?

A networked computer system provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users. For example, in one embodiment, users can identify other users based on their affiliations with particular schools or other organizations. The system also provides a mechanism for a user to selectively establish contact relationships or connections with other users, and to grant permissions for such other users to view personal information of the user. The system may also include features for enabling users to identify contacts of their respective contacts. In addition, the system may automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts.

It’s the introduction to a patent by Amazon for their obviously unique idea of a “Social Networking System” which includes such strikingly novel ideas such as:

wherein the service maintains relationship data representing contact relationships between users, and the method further comprises using the relationship data to detect, and to cause the first user to be notified that, a third user is a contact of a contact of the first user via the second user.

and:

wherein the personal data of the first user comprises an identification of a school attended by the first user and an associated date range of attendance, and the computer system is additionally programmed to use said personal data to identify, and to inform the first user of, other users of the service who attended said school in said date range.

None of which existed before the patent was filed in 2008, honest guv…

Hello USPTO ? Anyone in there ?

So you’ve bought a nice new professional video camera and you want to shoot a video of a friends band so they can sell a couple of copies to buy a new guitar, simple eh ? Well not quite, you’ll probably want to check the license for the camera according to this article by Eugenia Loli-Queru:

You see, there is something very important, that the vast majority of both consumers and video professionals don’t know: ALL modern video cameras and camcorders that shoot in h.264 or mpeg2, come with a license agreement that says that you can only use that camera to shoot video for “personal use and non-commercial” purposes (go on, read your manuals).

Now, you may ask, this can’t be right, can it ? Surely a “professional” video camera should be able to be used for professional purposes ? Well yes, it should, but it can’t. The reason is (of course) software patents, according to Eugenia:

Apparently, MPEG-LA makes it difficult for camera manufacturers, or video editor software houses, to obtain a cheap-enough license that allows their users to use their codec any way they want!

So the camera manufacturers pass that onto the purchaser, if you buy one and want to use it professionally then you will have to get your own license from MPEG-LA and then pay them a royalty on every copy sold. Sadly you can’t even get away from this by transcoding your MPEG2 or H.264 video into a free format for two reasons, firstly the camera most likely uses it internally first (and that’s apparently enough) and secondly the MPEG-LA claim their patent portfolio is so broad that you cannot create a video codec these days without infringing one of their patents. So theoretically you’d need to pay no matter what you did.

Eugenia does offer one possible way out, the ancient MJPEG format:

Let me make one thing clear. MJPEG **sucks** as a codec. It’s very old and inefficient. OGV Theora looks like alien technology compared to it. But (all, if not most of) its patents have expired. And JPEG is old enough to predate MPEG-LA. Thankfully, there are still some MJPEG HD cameras in the market, although they are getting fewer and fewer: Nikon’s dSLRs, Pentax’s new dSLRs, and the previous generation of Panasonic’s HD digicams. Other cameras that might be more acceptable to use codec-wise are the Panasonic HVX-200 (DVCPro HD codec, $6000), the SILICON IMAGING SI-2K (using the intermediate format Cineform to record, costs $12,000), and the RED One (using the R3D intermediate format, costs $16,000+). Almost every other HD camera in the market is unsuitable, if you want to be in the clear 100%

Yet another reason why software patents need to be defeated, they stifle what we can do with the technology we have paid for.

In an interesting blog on patents, copying and litigation former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz discloses that Bill Gates and Steve Balmer tried to put the frighteners on Sun over OpenOffice.org to try and protect their office application monopoly. Their attack went like this:

“Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.” [...] “We’re happy to get you under license.”

Of course (as ever) they do not identify any patents, as that would let us fix any problems (if there are actually any), they would much rather weave their usual web of FUD on the matter than come clean. Jonathan’s response turned the issue on them on a different tact:

“We’ve looked at .NET, and you’re trampling all over a huge number of Java patents. So what will you pay us for every copy of Windows?”

That killed that angle of attack off..

Catching up on PLOA I noticed a posting from Greg Black bemoaning the lack of ZFS in Linux so I thought I should make a couple of quick points in response to it.

1. The CDDL/GPL thing is just down to the fact that their requirements are incompatible (Sun based the CDDL the MPL), so you can’t mix that code. Just have to live with that.
2. A major issue with ZFS is that there is ongoing patent litigation in the US between Sun and NetApp over it – it’ll be interesting to see what Oracle do when they finally take over Sun (assuming Sun doesn’t expire before the EU regulators comes to a decision on the takeover)
3. ZFS-FUSE isn’t dead! Whilst Ricardo has stopped work another group has taken up the challenge and there is a new home page for it – http://rudd-o.com/new-projects/zfs – complete with Git repository (no more Mercurial, huzzah!).
4. The ZFS-FUSE mailing list is active too, if you want to learn more.

If you were wondering why the judge came down like a ton of bricks over i4i’s XML patent, then this this is likely the reason:

In a 65-page summary opinion dated Aug. 11, U.S. District Court Judge Leonard Davis said that evidence presented during the May 2009 jury trial showed Microsoft had met with i4i executives as far back as 2001, knew of the firm’s patent for XML editing, and yet did nothing to guarantee that its implementation of “custom” XML would not infringe the i4i patent.

The judge also raises some (what look like to me) anti-trust monopolistic points:

“The trial evidence revealed that Microsoft’s intention to move competitors’ XML products to obsolescence was quite bold,” Davis said in his opinion. During the trial, i4i’s expert testified that 80% of the market for the company’s products was made moot when Microsoft added custom XML capabilities to Word 2003.

Of course you have to hand it to Microsoft for trying it on when attempting to get around the injunction, but the judge caught them again:

“Even after several years of litigation and a jury verdict of infringement, Microsoft requests the ability to continue selling the accused products and release an upcoming product with the same infringing functionality,”

Not to mention that Microsoft would have known of both the patent and the lawsuit whilst successfully railroading OOXML through the ISO standards process in flagrant disregard for the concerns about the format.

Fortunately it’s already been reported that OpenOffice.org ISO standard XML file format ODF is not affected by this patent.

Here’s some interesting news from Government Computing (via Groklaw) on the patent that has caused all the worry about Microsoft Word and XML:

i4i said it has looked at OpenOffice and found it doesn’t infringe on its patents.

Which is good news for ODF, but still demonstrates what an utter minefield software patents are. The sooner they’re gone the better.

Uh oh, this sounds really bad! LWN is reporting that:

Here is a press release from legal firm McKool Smith, which is quite proud at having gotten a US court to rule that Word violates patent #5,787,499. “Today’s permanent injunction prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML.” The text of this patent is quite vague; if it stands it could almost certainly be used to make life difficult for free software as well.

Microsoft taking a beating for this is not something to celebrate, this is yet another example of how software patents are really bad for all the players in computing.

A patent infringement battle that’s been going on in the US for 6 years between Uniloc and Microsoft over an Australian invention that lies behind the product activation used in Windows and MS Office, etc has been resolved – and Microsoft has lost to the tune of a cool US$388 million – that’s over half a billion Australian dollars…

On Wednesday, the jury found Microsoft wilfully infringed the patent.

Wilful infringement means that Microsoft knew about it and didn’t care, rather than just not knowing it had been patented. Microsoft tried to argue that the patent was invalid, but the jury didn’t buy that argument. All rather ironic after the Tom-Tom issue (they settled as Microsoft were about to get their imports to the US blocked prior to any judgement on whether or not it was a real issue)..

There’s an interview with the CEO of Uniloc, Brad Gibson, about the verdict on the ABC website.

Like many western nations that built up their industries under protective laws and now demand that developing countries remove restrictions that they relied on we see Microsoft doing much the same with Tom Tom, as ZDNet points out when discussing why Microsoft are eager to avoid talking about the details of their patent case..

The TomTom claims cover such things as a multitasking computer on which you can run programs, in a car. A wireless Internet-connected computer, in a car. And how to create long file names in the MS-DOS filing system–a fix introduced in Windows 95 because MS-DOS is a direct descendent of 1974′s vintage 8-bit CP/M operating system. A direct descendant? More a bastard child: MS-DOS helped itself freely to many of CP/M’s design concepts, in some detail. But those were the days when Bill Gates could say that software patents had the potential to put the industry at “a complete standstill” and with good reason. If the sort of protection Microsoft now claims for itself had been available to CP/M then, Microsoft would never have created its monopoly, nor amassed a fraction of its power.

Hopefully Tom Tom now being a member of the Open Invention Network will give Microsoft pause for thought. As regards how the system currently works, I cannot put it better than how ZDNet sum it up:

The patent system is not just broken, it is poisonous. It works by fear, using the civil courts as cudgels in the hands of bullies.

Sadly I suspect it’s unlikely to change in the near future..