Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
James Bessen writes to point out next month’s conference in Boston titled “Software Patents: A Time for Change?” It looks like a great program with a lot of interesting speakers, including co-blogger Solveig Singleton. If you’re in the Boston area or otherwise interested in software patents, you should sign up. If I had more vacation days and money I’d go in a heartbeat.
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. This week, I consider the patent dispute between Qualcomm and Broadcom over this patent. Here’s the abstract:
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. In this week’s software patent adventure, Arbitron has sued competitor IPSOS for violating its patents on its “technologies” relating to collecting audience data from TV viewers and radio listeners. As Arbitron’s press release puts it:
Steve Morris, president and chief executive officer of Arbitron, said, “As a leading innovator of electronic audience measurement technology, we welcome competition as a way to foster the growth of the market. However, we must take action against companies that attempt to profit from our innovation by infringing Arbitron’s patents on the technology that we have worked so long and at such expense to develop. We have invested significant financial and other resources during the last 15 years in the development and testing of our PPM System and we will work aggressively to protect our investment and our intellectual property.”
I put “technology” in scare quotes because I think the word tends to be an obstacle to clear thinking when it comes to patent issues. Here is one of the three patents in question. It covers:
A method and apparatus for automatically identifying a program broadcast by a radio station or by a television channel, or recorded on a medium, by adding an inaudible encoded message to the sound signal of the program, the message identifying the broadcasting channel or station, the program, and/or the exact date.
How does it do this?
While looking for this week’s software patent, I came across this story about about Transmeta’s lawsuit against Intel:
Transmeta was the first company to emphasise that power consumption was going to be a major headache for chip and computer makers. It claimed that its Crusoe processors would be able to run the same software as Intel chips, but gobble up less electricity, thus leading to longer battery life.
Although the company landed early deals with Sony and Fujitsu when Crusoe arrived in 2000, it did not live up to its goals. Crusoe’s performance was middling, and Transmeta had several problems getting new versions out the door. Deals with Toshiba and others evaporated.
The chipmaker then went through several rounds of layoffs and changed its chief executive three times before refashioning itself into an intellectual property firm last year.
I wonder if “intellectual property firm” is a euphemism for “patent troll.”
It’s really quite a sad story. Transmeta was an innovative company with some amazing technology. As near as I can tell, they were crippled by poor execution and some bad business decisions. It’s too bad that this will be the final chapter of their corporate history.
Jim DeLong likes to talk about how strong intellectual property rights are necessary to allow small companies to do business with larger companies. As he put it in IT&T News this summer:
Without IPR, innovators have no way to deal with platform companies, who could simply take any ideas revealed and implement them. And even if the platforms wanted to compensate the innovators, they would be unable to, because any competitor could copy the innovation without payment.
The platform companies know it is in their interest to have innovators protected by strong IPR, because without these, people would not be willing to invest in innovative companies.
It seems to me that Google’s YouTube acquisition is a counterexample to DeLong’s theory. YouTube is an innovative company that secured several millions of dollars in venture capital and used it to create a billion-dollar company in less than a year. Yet as far as I know, strong IP rights have not been an important part of YouTube’s strategy. They don’t appear to have received any patents, and their software interface has been widely copied. Indeed, Google has been in the video-download business longer than YouTube, and their engineers could easily have replicated any YouTube functionality they felt was superior to Google’s own product.
It would of course be silly to claim that copyrights and patents are never important assets for a startup company seeking a corporate buyer. But I think DeLong seriously overstates his case when he says that entrepreneurship would be impossible without these assets. Like all businesses, most of the value in technology startups lies in strong relationships among people, not from technology, as such. Technological change renders new technologies obsolete very quickly. But a brilliant team of engineers, visionary management, and a loyal base of users are assets that will pay dividends for years to come. That’s why Google was willing to pay a billion bucks for YouTube.
I’m at the State Policy Network’s education reform summit learning about school choice, probably the most important civil rights issue of our generation. I’ve learned a lot, but as a consequence, I haven’t had much time to blog. Luckily for me, this week’s software patent is so incredibly obvious that I don’t think I’ll have to write very much about it. The patent is held by a Pittsburgh bond-trading firm that won a ruling against a rival that had the audacity to offer competing bond-trading software. The patent in question is Patent #6,161,099, “Process and apparatus for conducting auctions over electronic networks.” Here’s the executive summary:
An apparatus and process for conducting auctions, specifically municipal bond auctions, over electronic networks, particularly the Internet, is disclosed. The auctioneer maintains a web site from which information about bonds to be auctioned can be obtained. A user participates in the auction by accessing the web site via a conventional Internet browser and is led through a sequence of screens that perform the functions of verifying the user’s identity, assisting the user in preparing a bid, verifying that the bid conforms to the rules of the auction, displaying to the user during the course of the auction selected bid information regarding bids received and informing the bidder how much time remains in the auction. The user may be given the option of confirming the accuracy of his bid before submitting the bid. The auctioneer is able to review bidding history, determine the winner and notify the winner over the network, and display selected auction results to bidders and observers over the network.
So it’s eBay for bonds. For those keeping score at home, eBay was founded in 1995, three years before the 1998 filing of this patent. So even if the idea of an online auction were a patent-worthy invention, it seems like the existence of eBay (and other auction sites that sprung up around the same time) would serve as prior art. But I guess the patent office felt differently.
Really, there’s not that much else to say. You would think that getting a patent would require something more innovative than simply offering online auctions for a particular products, but you’d be wrong. This is simply a patent on the idea of selling bonds via the Internet. How granting such a patent promotes “the progress of science of the useful arts” in the software or financial services industries is a mystery to me.
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. This week we return to the VoIP industry, which is rapidly becoming choked with patent litigation. One of the leading VoIP firms, Vonage, was sued by at least two companies this summer for patent infringement. Verizon was one of them, but I’ve yet to find any information about which patents they allege Vonage infringed. If anyone knows, please tell me and I’ll look at those in a future installment. The other company to sue Vonage was Klausner Technologies, which previously won a settlement from AOL.
The patent at issue is seems to be “Telephone answering device linking displayed data with recorded audio message.”
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. Before I get to this week’s patent, I wanted to note that the Public Patent Foundation has launched Software Patent Watch, a new blog that tracks the software patent problem. On Tuesday they announced that the patent office has broken the all-time record for software patents in a single year, and is on track to issue 40,000 patents by year’s end. That’s more than 100 software patents per day.
Luckily, none of those tens of thousands of patents produced any high-profile litigation this week, so I thought I’d cover one of the classics of recent software patent litigation, Microsoft’s (and now Apple’s) legal battle with Burst.com. Burst sued Microsoft back in 2002, claiming that Microsoft’s Windows Media software violates its patents. Microsoft settled the dispute last year, and Burst turned its legal guns on Apple in April, claiming that Apple stole the same “technology.”
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. This week our patent comes via Ars, which reported on Thursday that a company called Paltalk has sued Microsoft over allegations that its XBox Live gaming platform violates two of Paltalk’s patents.
We’ll consider the older of the two patents, which you can see here. It covers a “server-group messaging system for interactive applications.” In a nutshell, this “invention” coordinates the transmission of packets among video game players in precisely the same way that mailing list software coordinates the transmission of an email to multiple email addresses.
The patent describes a variety of functions of this “invention.” For example, it offers the ability to aggregate messages from several different sources and send them out bundled together as a single message. This is precisely analogous to what mailing lists do with their “daily digest” feature. It also includes protocols for creating groups and adding and removing computers from groups. There are, again, precise analogues to these functions in ordinary mailing list software.
Mailing list software existed years before this patent was filed in 1998. The only difference between this invention and mailing list software is that the type of message they send is different (emails versus realtime gaming notifications), and the time horizons involved are different (minutes or hours versus seconds). But neither of those difficulties really changes the technical design principles involved. This is an obvious patent.
This is a recurring problem with software patents: often someone takes a well known software design, apply it in a new context, and declare it a new, patentable invention. But although the result may look superficially different, under the hood the software is very similar. The power of computer programming comes from the ability to use a small number of well-understood software techniques to solve a wide variety of problems. We’d think it absurd to patent the idea of using a hammer on a new kind of nail. It’s no less absurd to patent the idea of using a well-known software technique in a new domain.
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. One of the amazing thing about the software patent issue is just how pervasive software patent litigation is. When I started this project, I was afraid I’d have to scramble to find a new controversy to write about each week. Boy was I wrong. Most weeks, like this one, all I’ve had to do is run a Google News search for “software patent” and there’s new lawsuit on the first page of results. This week’s dispute is between i2 and SAP over seven patents related to project management software. Here is the oldest of the seven patents.
This patent is akin to the Guatemalan database patent and the Friendster patent I covered in previous weeks: it seems to simply describe a software product in great detail, as if a list of mundane features constitutes an invention.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
