Software patents (in EU)
Why are they so trivial?
European software patent horror gallery
Software patents (German)
- Any software making appear on the screen a progress bar - patented in Europe.
- Cursor implemented by XOR-ing the graphics - patented in US 1978-98.
- Archiving files with data stamps (infringed upon by all e-mail systems, CVS, etc) - patented in Germany
- Patent on Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression alogorithm
allows to control the use of GIFs:
No license given to free graphics programs to produce GIFs.
Software patents
on software standards or software requirements
- threat with patent law-suits repeatedly used by companies
to make private developers withdraw their self-developed software.
Patents on software standards:
- Web-phone: «Leading experts consider it impossible to create free or independent software for Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony during
the next 15 years. ... the field is cluttered with compression patents
which not only cover almost all possible compression algorithms
but also standards with which any implementor must comply.»
- Fonts: «Rendering of Fonts is ugly and slow on Free Software Systems.
This is because when the TrueType standard was promoted by Apple and Microsoft,
they held a few patents which they never asserted. ...
[F]earful customers of Linux distributors such as SuSE and Redhat have demanded
that any possibly infringing FreeType features be disabled on these distributions. TrueType is the
dominating font standard and it is also a part of new standards such as OpenType, in which Adobe participates.»
- 3D Graphics «Former SGI patents have changed owners ...
Microsoft's terms ... appear at least to be forcing a change of license terms away from the GNU GPL.»
- RT Linux «In order to turn Linux into a real-time operating system,
certain additional programming rules are needed, some of which have been patented.»
- JPEG: «When creating, using or JPEG graphic files, you may be infringing on patents.
... The JPEG Consortium reacted quickly by delaring that JPEG is no longer a standard»
- MP3 (MPEG-2 Layer 3) or any software that compresses audio information by removing inaudible sounds:
«In order to develop free software for MP3, one must
pay an upfront payment of 1 million USD. Otherwise money must be charged per copy»
-> the European patent.
- Dolby: «Under threat from a group of patent holders, an attempt to develop open source software to support the Dolby audio
standards had to be scrapped in March 2001.»
- ASF: «Microsoft has prohibited a Free Software programmer from writing
import/export filters for its Advanced Streaming Format (ASF).»
- Access to special hardware:
«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.»
-> the European patent.
Patents on (all solutions to) a software requirement, not on a (method of) solution/implementation:
- Any software that implements hyperlinking:
«British Telecom in the 70s and 80s filed patents in the US on the concept of cross-references in hypertext.»
- Any software that makes (certain info.) appear on screen in tree structure:
Xerox Inc., with a (general or specific?) tree visualisation patent, makes
Prof. Bulatov withdraw his opensource Java profile browser HyperProf.
- Any software that makes appear on the screen a pallette with tabs to switch between sets of information:
«In summer 2001 Adobe attacked Macromedia for infringing on its US patent no 5546528
which lays claim to the idea of adding a third dimension to menus
by grouping them as tabbed palettes one behind the other.»
-> the European patent.
- Any software that implements the idea of describing information by hierarchies of binary relations:
«In 1997 ... an obscure canadian software company received a european patent on ...
the idea of describing information by hierarchies of binary relations.
In 1999 a communication protocol called Ressource Description Framework (RDF) was adopted as a web standard.
In 2001, when some software applications gradually became available,
a license collecting company started enforcing the patent»
- Any browser implementation that scrolls to the search word encoded in a link:
«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.»
- Any software for extending browsers by scripts:
«The Californian university spin-off Eolas
succeded in extracting .5 bn USD rents from Microsoft using patent US5838906.
This Eolas patent covers, as an Illinois jury confirmed, Microsoft's ActiveX facility.
It also covers basically any means to extend a browser by scripts.»
- Any software for cryptography with keys of the public kind:
«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".»
More European software patents
Patents on (all solutions to) a software requirement, not on a (method of) solution/implementation:
- Any software that visualizes functions by graphically displaying their components,
and allows iterations on the screen and creating a flow chart
(patent by National Instruments, used against MathWorks).
-> the European patent.
- Any software that represents the nodes in the network and their relations in a graphical manner, e.g. as circles and arrows, editable by drag
& drop, and generate configuration files from the result.
-> the European patent.
- Any e-buisiness broking software that lets one person tender offers and confirm them within a determined deadline if a bidder is found.
-> the European patent.
- Any software that converts Windows95 filenames to WindowsNT filenames
(Sun Microsystems)
-> the European patent.
- Any software that rearranges the contents of a partially visible window
so as to fit them within the part of the window that is currently visible
on the screen rather than letting part of the contents be obscured by another window
(IBM)
-> the European patent.
- Shopping cart: Any software that collects buyable items in a list and buys all of them at the end
(Amazon).
-> the European patent.
- «[I]f you run a baking process under program control and offering the user a
menu for selecting one of several program settings, you need a license.»
-> the European patent.
There are also some patents that actually look like patents on certain (classes/methods) of software-technical solutions/implementations:
- Software that translates natural language questions into database queries
by using (any kind of) parsers and virtual tables
(Mitsubishi)
-> the European patent.
- «The generation of one CORBA object by another, a method similar to "inheritance" in object oriented programming»
(Alsthom)
-> the European patent (German).
