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Patents de Programari en Acció
Aquests últims anys, més i més casos de litigi de patents de
programari es coneixen pels mitjans de comunicació. Però
això és només la punta de l'iceberg. La major part de les
empreses de programari i els desenvolupadors de programari
són amenaçats fora dels jutjats i el silenci és part
obligatòria d'aquest arranjament fora del jutjat. Molts
projectes s'aturen o no comencen perquè el camp està
abarrotat de patents. És difícil documentar camins de
desenvolupament bloquejats. Aquí intentarem fer el millor
que puguem. |
HiFn
PPP Stac compression:- The Stac compression scheme is one of many
patented compression algorithms which severely
impede interoperability between systems and,
because of the sheer number of patents
cluttering their field, are probably impossible
to circumvent.
-
LZW
compression: conjugations patented:
- The LZW compression method is moderately
ingenuous and moderately efficient. Better
solutions are meanwhile available, some
non-patented. But due to the inertia of
de-facto standards such as GIF, ZIP, PDF etc,
the LZW patent it is still causing a lot of
grief. It is as if the conjugations of the
English language had been patented.
-
iPIX
./ Dersch: German Mathematician silenced by US
patent:
- A German developper of free software has been
persecuted by the US company IPIX for writing
software for composing pictures into large
panoramas using calculation rules which he had
developped independently but which iPIX had
patented in the USA. In June 2001 the conflict
escalated. Prof. Dersch withdrew his software
from the Net in order to evade a lawsuit which
iPIX was, according to his knowledge, preparing
in the US.
-
Flash
Memory File Systems:
- It is not possible to port operating systems
to certain new hardware, because the
manufacturers have retained control by
obtaining software patents. Intel has done
this for some chips, and MSystems did it for
flash memory. When people do write software,
it cannot be free, if it can be published at
all. In the whole area of memory programming it
is very hard not to run afoul of some patent.
This is deterring programmers.
-
ASF:
changing copyright rules by means of
patents:
- Microsoft has prohibited a Free Software
programmer from writing import/export filters
for its Advanced Streaming Format (ASF). The
programmer wanted interoperability with a
format that Microsoft is promoting. But for
Microsoft, interoperability is in this case
doubly disadvantageous: besides reducing the
lock-in effect, on which Microsoft's platform
strategy relies, it also can circumvent the
locks on unauthorized copying, by which
Microsoft wants to attract content providers to
its ASF platform. Whereas in the DeCSS case a
court ruling was necessary to enforce new
draconian copyright provisions of the highly
disputed Digital Millenium Act, in the ASF case
a simple patent suffices to achieve the same
legislative goal.
-
Vermessungsämter mauern Geodaten durch
Datenformat-Problempatent ein:
- Die Deutschen Landesvermessungsämter haben
eine Kartenreihe namens "TOP50" mit
kartographischen Karten von Deutschland im
Maßstab 1:50000 (1 Pixel = 5x5m) auf CD
veröffentlicht. Zur Anzeige der Karten
enthalten die CDs eine Sofware von "EADS
Dornier GmbH" namens "geogrid". Das Dateiformat
ist nicht dokumentiert aber patentiert. Ein
Widerspruch? Nein, nur eine normale profitable
Kombination.
-
PSOLA:
speech generation patent of France
Télécom:
- The PSOLA patent of France Telecom has
prevented the speech generation system MBROLA
from becoming free software.
-
RSA,
DSA, Schnorr etc:
- After widespread use of cryptography had been
impeded for years by patents like that on RSA,
finally an alternative was found that seemed to
be available for free use by the public. But
just at that moment, Professor Schnorr from
Germany asserted that this free cryptography
scheme infringed on his recently obtained
crypto patent. The licensing rights of RSA and
the Schnorr patent were later exclusively
acquired by PKP. PKP harrassed crypto
programmers by claiming that "These patents
cover all known methods of practicing the art
of Public Key, including the variations
collectively known as El Gamal".
-
BT
Hyperlink Patent:
- British Telecom in the 70s and 80s filed
patents in the US on the concept of
cross-references in hypertext. In 2000 BT
discovered one of these "Rembrandts in the
Attic" (US 4,873,662) and decided to use it for
squeezing money out of internet access
providers. Litigation is beginning in
2002-02.
-
Rozmanith:
Using software patents to silence
critics:
- In autumn 2000 TechSearch Inc, a company
specialising on acquiring and exploiting
patents, sued Gregory Aharonian, a vocal critic
of "bad patents" owned by TechSearch, for
alleged infringement of one of these "bad
patents", the Rozmanith patent on compressing
data transmitted from web servers. They also
accused Aharonian of slandering TechSearch, the
patent office and the United States government.
But they failed to point out how Aharonian had
infringed on their patent. Apparently anyone
who operates a web server infringes, and it is
up to TechSearch to select victims. Aharonian
is the first individual Linux user to be sued
for patent infringement.
-
OpenMarket
asserts Network Sales System monopoly against
Intershop:
- On 2001-01-09, Open Market attacked
Intershop, the largest Germany-based shopping
application company, for violating its patents
on a network sales system on the US market.
Meanwhile the patent applications of OpenMarket
are looming around at the EPO waiting to be
granted.
-
No
more WWW indexing without permission from
CMGI?:
- In Jan 2001, the CEO of CMGI, the company
that currently owns Altavista, explained:
"Altavista owns 38 patents, many of which we
think are fundamental in the search area. They
were the first to spider and index the Web. ...
And we have another 30 patents that are in
application. So we believe that virtually
everyone out there who indexes the Web is in
violation of at least several of those key
patents." and made it clear that he will go to
court in early 2001 to maximize revenues from
those patents.
-
Patent
on searchword-based hyperlinking encumbers W3C
XPointer standard:
- In Jan 2001 people at the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) found that their new
generation of hypertext markup language was
infringing on a patent from Sun Microsystems.
By a decree of the US patent office, Sun has
become the owner of the idea of adding a search
word to a link in such a way that the browser
will scroll to that word. The developpement of
the XPointer concept of the XML standard seemed
in jeopardy. Sun's license terms are quite
generous: they require than any competitor
using this concept obliges himself in return to
publish the concepts that he builds on it.
Thus Sun supplies the W3C a weapon against
"embrace and extend" tactics. But even if
based on good intentions, this requirement may
restrict the development of the new standard,
and people at the W3C experts question whether
a trivial software patent really gives Sun the
right to impose such restrictions.
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Malauradament, encara estem observant una pila de casos
pobrement documentats o no-publicables, com ara
Si coneixes algun cas, sisplau ?(pi:informa'ns)!
Una empresa alemana ofereix implementació
d'extensions MS IIS en un servidor basat en la
plataforma Linux després que el seu departament
legal va fer una llista de patents de més de 20 M$
en aquesta àrea-
Una empresa líder de programari de comunicacions
alemana va ser atacada per una multinacional
bavaresa amb patents de programari
frívoles.
-
W3C
to allow royalty-burdened standards
- La major part de patents que van causar la
crisi al W3C són trivials i amples i han estat
concedides (il·legalment) per l'EPO.
-
Frabricants d'impressores, escàners i d'altres
aparells perifèrics per a ordinadors sovint no fan
especificacions de controladors o codi font
disponible, perquè tenen por que això pugui dur a
descobrir infringiments de patents. Especialment,
alguns grans fabricants amb una política de suport
a sistemes oberts o plataformes de font oberta
encara tenen una política d'oferir només
controladors MSWin de codi tancat.
-
Encara no tenim documentats alguns dels famosos
casos judicials de mètodes de patents dels negocis
als USA, p.e.
- reverse auction (US 5794207, US 5797127):
- Marketel v. priceline US. District calif.
19 jan 1999
Priceline v. Microsoft Expedia, US. District
Connec. 13 oct 1999
- target advertising (US 5948061):
- Doubleclick v. L90 US. district Virginia 15
nov 1999
DoubleClick v. Sabela Media 10 dec 1999
- download music internet (US 5191573, US
5675734):
- SightSound v. MP3.com
- Votació
per Web de Microsoft (US 6,175,833):
- arxivat:
- 1998-04-22
- concedit:
- 2001-01-16
- titolat:
- System and method for interactive
live online voting with tallies for
updating voting results.
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Llista
Oppenheimar de casos actuals pendents de patents
sobre Internet
- una revisió molt entenedora, però errors
deJavascript poden fer que el teu navegador es
pengi
-
O'Reilly
List of Controversial Patents
-
LPF
campaign against software patentability
- anomena diversos casos de principis dels 90
on diverses empreses van ser prejudicades per
patents de programari
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http://swpat.ffii.org/pikta/xrani/index.ca.html
©
2002.05.14 (2000.10.20) Workgroup
2002.04.24 tradukita de CALIU
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