[Patents] Re: ffii documentation "software patents in action"

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Gregory Aharonian wrote:

> >Our trilingual document of software patent trouble cases:
>
> I took a quick list of your sample (which is too small to conclude
> anything).  Some of the "troubles" are grossly exagerrated, like
> cases where someone in Europe thinks he has to withdraw his open
> source code from an Internet site in Europe because of an American
> patent.  The reaction in America to such unjustified letters is to
> write a letter back telling the recipient to go have sex with
> themselves.

This is just one of the cases: iPIX ./ Dersch.
But prof Dersch has had a lot of trouble with iPIX for years, and
from the Skylarov and other cases we know that it costs at least some
nerves to fight with a US software company, even if you are not violating
laws of your country.

> I resent you putting my lawsuit on your list because you don't give
> the slightest damn about how the lawsuit is affecting me.

What should I do?

> I wouldn't put the Stac/Microsoft case on your list, because the only
> people Stac went after was Microsoft.  Additionally, the case supports
> the cause of those who champion software patents for SMEs in Europe,
> because Stac was at the time the equivalent of an SME.

We may have mentioned that.
Stac was and is the showcase company for the "David vs Goliath" myth
propagated so frequently by patent advocates.
However our page focusses on aspects of the Stac patents which
are hardly known to anyone except to people who are working in the
ISDN programming field.
Whether Stac or whoever has bought them uses the patents aggressively
or not is not really important.  The presence of these patents is
enough to keep solutions from being worked out or used.  The
TTF ugly font rendering case makes this clearer than any other case.

> You mention Unisys' LZW patent affecting GIF, but the patent really
> hasn't been that disruptive.  Larger entities were required to license
> the patent, but stuff at the individual Web site level didn't have to
> (which is why GIF is still so popular - I have some GIF images on my
> Web site, which Unisys has never asked me for royalties, yet sadly did
> provide the extremely pathetically flimsy grounds for me to be sued).

I didn't know you were sued on those grounds also.
People do have a lot of problems with GIF.  It cannot be adequately
supported in some free libraries, and many programming projects are
adversely affected by the licensing policy which also creates insecurity.
I have heard small software entrepreneurs working on individual
programming solutions complain a lot, but I have not really studied
the details of this case, and it is not well documented within this
collection.

> On the other hand, you fail to mention my well publicized cases of
> software and hardware patents due to IBM and Intel which have been far
> more disruptive to software companies large and small.

Well, you unsubscribed me from your newsletter, and I only receive
occasional copies from friends, so I may have missed those cases.

> But now that your soul has been bought by these companies, I am not
> surprised about your silence (newswires report that IBM and Intel
> recently "invested" $50,000,000 in SuSE, the company were Hartmut
> (used to) work at, and I am sure for that large sum of money they
> bought a lot).

> In fact, your list is so impotent to almost support the cause of
> software patenting.

Indeed I could imagine that you are aware of much more cases, and
I would be glad to point our readers to any public documentations
you may have created.

--
Hartmut Pilch                                         http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation      http://swpat.ffii.org/
90000 signatures against software patents       http://www.noepatents.org/