Aehso’s Output

Forgent JPEG Software Patent

Forgent “own” JPEG - that’s right, the image encoding format used by every man and his dog on the internet for the past 15 years is “owned” by one company who recently (with the aid of a large team of rabid lawyers no doubt) managed to squeeze over $100 million out of some of the largest hardware, software & media companies in the world - Sony included. Most of their customers settled up front for past and future use, some for the paltry sum of $15million. If you want to read the patent in question, go to the US Patent office and search for “4,698,672″.

Standing on the shoulders of giants my ar$e - these guys are just a bunch of chancers with no history of innovation. It would appear they may have bitten off more than they can chew, when they tried milking Microsoft - they have been counter sued and given Microsoft’s recent tangle with Eolas, they won’t give in easly.

Over two years ago, it was reported that the ISO would withdraw ISO/IEC 10918-1:1994 which was based on JPEG encoding/decoding but looking at their website now, the standard is still a published standard - one wonders why?

Here’s a quote from a piece in Imaging Resource over two years ago:

…since this item broke we’ve seen much comment around the web to the effect that other standards should be used - perhaps the most commonly suggested being PNG (Portable Network Graphics). The problem is that it is difficult - if not impossible - to be sure that any standard doesn’t infringe on a patent you’re not even aware of. This was the case with the GIF standard, which CompuServe developed whilst being unaware that UniSys held a patent on the compression method it used. There’s also the possibility of patents being issued whilst a standard is being debated, or potentially even after it has been finalised. This is where the real problem lies.

This whole patent thing will have us all going around in circles chasing our tails, solving the same problems in a multitude of different ways just to avoid what everyone else is doing. That doesn’t bode well for interoperability and hetrogenous networking, the foundations of the IP and the internet as we know it today. Speaking of which, Microsoft have been served with an injunction against shipping Longhorn because a small startup called Alacritech has a patent on the idea of offloading TCP network traffic from the main server CPU. It goes on and on and on…

Still want software patents in the EU?

European Parliament’s rapporteur Michel Rocard publishes his views on the software patent directive.

There’s a debate today in the European Parliament on the software patent directive and Michel Rocard, the Parliament’s rapporteur (and former French prime minister to boot) has submitted a great report for discussion at the debate. The FFII even like it.

Lets hope this debate leads to the amendments Rocard outlines.

Letter from EC Internal Market and Services DG

As promised in yesterday’s post, I’ve uploaded a soft copy of the correspondence received from Commissioner McCreevy’s office.

I’ve got to say, I’m confused by all the legal text but the way this Directive is being forced through the legislative process while so many concerns and questions remain unanswered is very unsettling.

The simple question remains - if this directive is passed and in the future I decide to develop a new product that is based on common software engineering patterns, principals and designs, will I spend more time and money checking to make sure I am not violating existing commercial software patents than building the product itself? Will we need to redefine pair programming to be a laywer<->programmer symbiosis? How competitive do you think this will make EU software companies?
Will the open-source community be able to survive (empty?) threats of legal action from large multinational corporations?

Or would you all prefer to work for souless multinationals for the rest of your lives?

At this stage, it looks like an uphill task to get a qualified majority of the European Parliament to reject the second reading but if you get a free moment, try to register your views. Read this, then find your local Irish MEP (or go here to find listings for other EU Parliament Offices).

Charlie McCreevy’s speech to EU Parliament on C.I.I.D., 03/09/2005

I’m too busy at work right now but I did get a response from the EU Commission regarding my earlier query). They send me a .tiff scan of a document - very clever. I’ll post a copy later, but in the meantime, this might be of interest. The reply referenced a transcription of the speech McCreevey gave to the EU Parliament when handing the directive back to them for second reading. In the speech, Mr Mcreevey clearly states:

The Commission proposed to clarify the legal rules on patentability for software-related inventions. This does not include computer programmes or other software as such. It means inventions which make a technical contribution and which are truly novel.

Such inventions are present in a number of everyday consumer goods such as cars, mobile telephones and domestic appliances. The Commission’s intention in making its proposal was to avoid patenting of pure software and clearly differentiate the EU from the US. Nothing that is not patentable now will be made patentable by the directive.

The current rules in the European Patent Convention are out of date and leave a very wide decision-making power in the hands of patent examiners. There can be different interpretations as to whether an invention can be patented. This leads to uncertainty for businesses and small and medium-sized companies in particular are negatively affected by the lack clarity in the existing rules.

I can’t wait to catch up on the whole saga (I’ve been away on vacation in beautiful Barcelona) but I thought this was too good not to post in case it hasn’t been referenced elsewhere. How much truth is in these words will emerge, I’m sure, with time.

EU rails through Computer Implemented Inventions Directive

The EU have approved the CII Directive (see previous blog entry). Disappointing.

Exactly how they did this seems to be very interesting indeed - did the Luxemburg Presidency contravene the EU Council’s rules in a bid to avoid changing the A-item status of the directive to that of a B-item?

The reasoning offered for pushing the directive:

“so as not to create a precedent which might have a consequence of creating future delays in other processes”

In the face of concerted opposition (by the European Parliament no less), does that stand up as a democratic reason for pushing this directive through? I think not.

A week ago, I sent a casual email to the office of the Internal Market and Services Directorate General asking for some information regarding the process. Did I get a response (even an automated PFO?) - you guess:

From - Tue Mar 01 12:18:36 2005
X-Mozilla-Status: 1001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00800000
Message-ID:
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:18:35 +0000
From: John O'Shea
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Windows/20041206)
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To:  Charlie.Mc-Creevy@cec.eu.int,  Oliver.Drewes@cec.eu.int
Subject: Request for information regarding IMS and OHIM role in current EU
 comission debate on software patent directive.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Mr McCreevy,
    I understand you work with both the Internal Market and Services
Directorate General or the OHIM in the EU Commission.

    I would appreciate it if you can define your office's role in the
reported decision by the European Commission to decline the European
Parliament's request for a restart of the legislative process regarding
the software patents directive.

    As a participant in the european software industry, this information
would be invaluable in order to be able to gain a better understanding
about how decisions are being reached in the highest levels of the EU
that will directly affect the industry in which I, and my colleagues,
work in.

Best Regards,

John.

Thanks Charlie.

Large Multinationals welcome EU CIID decision

The Irish IT news website ElectricNews.net has run a piece that happily states:

Elsewhere, ICT Ireland, the association which represents the high tech and information and communications technology (ICT) sector in IBEC, welcomed Monday’s decision.

In case you didn’t know, ICT Ireland is apparently “the voice of the Information and Communications Technology sector in Ireland.”. I was genuinely surprised by this statement, I thought they would at least have expressed some concerns.

ITC Ireland’s Governing Body Membership Roll call has impressive representation from just about every major hi-tech multinationals that happen to operate a facility in this country. It also turns out that a Michael Daly, Country General Manager of IBM Ireland is the Chairman of Governing Board of ICT Ireland

Mr Daly’s employer alone own more US patents than anyone other company. Perhaps the journalist should have reported this fact.

It also begs the question, is this really an “Irish” group? Maybe it’s “Oirish” but representing the indigenous software industry? Not really.

EU Commission refuses to restart Computer Implemented Inventions Directive

I’m learning more about how the EU operates every day. Yesterday, the European Commission rejected the European Parliament’s request to re-write the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive (CIID) a.k.a. the software patents bill.

Note that the CIID’s official website hasn’t been updated in over a year, despite major developments in recent weeks.

CIID is part of the Industrial Property policy of the Internal Market Directorate General, run by Ireland’s Charlie McCreevy.

Mr McCreevy would do well to learn why the EU may be significantly better off without a patent system like the broken system in place in the US.

As citizens of the EU, we should all be questioning his motives for rejecting the EU parliaments decision - his email address is on the page above.

EU to restart software directive process.

Great news, the EU Commission have decided to restart the whole debate on software patents in a more open and well, for want of a better word, honest, way.

Read more at the FFII, taint.org and Groklaw.

Kudos, again, to Poland for their opposition all along. And shame on you, Charlie McCreevy.