Patently ridiculous: Paul Allen sues Apple, Google, Netflix, eBay, Yahoo, and Facebook
Looks like one of Seattle's richest is declaring war on Silicon Valley. Via TechFlash:
For example:
It is unclear what Allen hopes to gain by going to court. Not included among the defendants in Interval's lawsuit are Pacific Northwest tech giants Microsoft (which Allen cofounded) and Amazon.com (whose new headquarters in South Lake Union was developed by Allen's investment powerhouse Vulcan, Inc.)
If all the companies Allen is suing have really violated his patents, then so did Microsoft and Amazon.com.
But like I asserted earlier, I think Allen's patents are bogus.
U.S. patent law states that a patent may not be granted if the supposed invention is obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art.
That last sentence is basically a bit of legal mumbo-jumbo which effectively means that an invention which could naturally occur to many different people working in a particular field or industry cannot be patented.
Allen's "inventions" seem to fall under this category.
For example, Patent 6,263,507 appears to describe a website such as NPI's Pacific NW Portal, which aggregates blog posts, podcasts, tweets, and so forth:
The final two patents concern functionality that serves to capture a user's attention (many scripts for displaying intrusive ads would seem to fall under this description). Again, such widgets can be found on millions of sites.
The issuance of bogus software patents, and bogus patents in general, can have a chilling effect on economic development and prosperity, as explained by Michael Heller in The Gridlock Economy:
Patent gridlock results in something Heller calls the "tragedy of the anticommons", which he defines as "any setting in which too many people can block each other from creating or using a scarce resource."
The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office — and similar agencies in other countries — have gotten into the dangerous habit of rubber stamping applications that seek to patent inventions already in widespread use. "We programmers are often amazed by the simplicity of the ideas that real software patents cover - for instance, the European Patent Office has issued a patent on the progress bar, and one on accepting payment via credit cards. These would be laughable if they were not so dangerous," Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman wrote in 2005.
The Foundation for Free Infrastructure maintains that patents for software — like the kind Allen holds — should not be granted at all, because copyright is more than adequate for protecting ownership.
We support this view. It is our hope that Paul Allen's lawsuit ends in failure and results in the revocation of his bogus patents.
That would be the best outcome for the common good.
When companies or individuals are constantly under the threat of patent litigation, they can't innovate or bring new products to market. Gridlock ensues as companies retaliate against patent lawsuits by filing their own lawsuits. Most of the biggest tech companies in the United States are both plaintiffs and defendants in ongoing patent lawsuits. Oracle is suing Google, Apple is suing HTC (a maker of phones that run Android). Patent troll NTC previously sued Research in Motion and extracted a large settlement out of the BlackBerry maker.
I could go on, but I've made my point. There is a reason no country in the world has a purely "capitalist" economy. Too much ownership actually thwarts innovation, cripples markets, and prevents economic growth.
Michael Heller observes:
Unfortunately, as I wrote at the beginning of this post, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office is not exercising due diligence when reviewing patent applications. That leads to the approval and existence of "patently ridiculous" patents like Allen's, which in many cases sit undefended for years before their "owner" decides to cash in. This abuse could be potentially stopped or at least mitigated by reorganizing the patent office under new management and procedures instead of attempting the more arduous task of rewriting patent law.
A tech licensing company controlled by Paul Allen is suing eleven Internet and retail giants — including Google, Apple, Facebook, Office Depot, Yahoo, YouTube, Netflix and eBay — alleging that they're violating patents on “fundamental web technologies” developed by Interval Research, the now-defunct Silicon Valley lab that Allen created with Xerox PARC veteran David Liddle in the 1990s.Wired adds:
The four patents at issue allegedly cover basics of online commerce, including recommending products to a user based on what they are currently looking at, and allowing readers of a news story to see other stories based on the current one. Two other patents relate to showing other information on a web page, such as news updates or stock quotes.I'm not a lawyer — let alone an expert in patent law — but these sound like bogus software patents to me. The United States Patent & Trademark Office has been criticized — deservedly so, in my view — for groundlessly issuing patents to unscrupulous people who then turn around and try to extract large sums of money from individuals and companies allegedly violating the bogus patent(s).
For example:
U.S. Patent No. 6,687,746, now held by Hoshiko, LLC, claimed to cover the method of automatically assigning Internet subdomains, like "action.eff.org" for the parent domain "eff.org." Previous patent owner Ideaflood used this bogus patent to demand payment from website hosting companies offering personalized domains, such as LiveJournal, a social networking site where each of its three million users may have their own subdomain.The above-mentioned patent was squashed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the world's leading digital rights organization, as part of its Patent-Busting project. EFF probably won't get directly involved in this case, since there are so many high-profile defendants who can afford to hire their own lawyers and analysts to dispute Allen's claims, but it might submit an amicus brief.
It is unclear what Allen hopes to gain by going to court. Not included among the defendants in Interval's lawsuit are Pacific Northwest tech giants Microsoft (which Allen cofounded) and Amazon.com (whose new headquarters in South Lake Union was developed by Allen's investment powerhouse Vulcan, Inc.)
If all the companies Allen is suing have really violated his patents, then so did Microsoft and Amazon.com.
But like I asserted earlier, I think Allen's patents are bogus.
U.S. patent law states that a patent may not be granted if the supposed invention is obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art.
That last sentence is basically a bit of legal mumbo-jumbo which effectively means that an invention which could naturally occur to many different people working in a particular field or industry cannot be patented.
Allen's "inventions" seem to fall under this category.
For example, Patent 6,263,507 appears to describe a website such as NPI's Pacific NW Portal, which aggregates blog posts, podcasts, tweets, and so forth:
In a particular application of the invention, the content of audiovisual news programs is acquired from a first set of one or more information sources (e.g., television news programs) and text news stories are acquired from a second set of one or more information sources (e.g., on-line news services or news wire services). In such a particular application, the invention can enable the user to access the news stories of audiovisual news programs in a random manner so that the user can move quickly among news stories or news programs. The invention can also enable the user to quickly locate news stories pertaining to a particular subject.Another patent concerns "alerting users to items of current interest" and appears to describe possibly related posts/stories widgets (sometimes carrying the label, You may also be interested in...). Such widgets can be found on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of websites.
The final two patents concern functionality that serves to capture a user's attention (many scripts for displaying intrusive ads would seem to fall under this description). Again, such widgets can be found on millions of sites.
The issuance of bogus software patents, and bogus patents in general, can have a chilling effect on economic development and prosperity, as explained by Michael Heller in The Gridlock Economy:
The changing rights environment hasn't just affected the behavior of existing firms. It has catalyzed the emergence of its own brand of modern-day robber barons, firms often called "patent trolls." These firms do not invent or make anything; instead, they often seek out and buy control of relatively low-value, weak patents that may be infringed by valuable products. MAD [mutually assured destruction] does not deter this last group. Their business model depends on leveraging defects in the patent system: trolls make money because litigation is chancy, court-ordered remedies exceed the probabilistic value o the litigated patents, and settlements can be coerced from successful product manufacturers desperate to avoid injunctions that shut down their businesses.In this excerpt, Heller is describing one of the symptoms of patent gridlock — the bane of software developers and drug makers.
Patent gridlock results in something Heller calls the "tragedy of the anticommons", which he defines as "any setting in which too many people can block each other from creating or using a scarce resource."
The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office — and similar agencies in other countries — have gotten into the dangerous habit of rubber stamping applications that seek to patent inventions already in widespread use. "We programmers are often amazed by the simplicity of the ideas that real software patents cover - for instance, the European Patent Office has issued a patent on the progress bar, and one on accepting payment via credit cards. These would be laughable if they were not so dangerous," Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman wrote in 2005.
The Foundation for Free Infrastructure maintains that patents for software — like the kind Allen holds — should not be granted at all, because copyright is more than adequate for protecting ownership.
We support this view. It is our hope that Paul Allen's lawsuit ends in failure and results in the revocation of his bogus patents.
That would be the best outcome for the common good.
When companies or individuals are constantly under the threat of patent litigation, they can't innovate or bring new products to market. Gridlock ensues as companies retaliate against patent lawsuits by filing their own lawsuits. Most of the biggest tech companies in the United States are both plaintiffs and defendants in ongoing patent lawsuits. Oracle is suing Google, Apple is suing HTC (a maker of phones that run Android). Patent troll NTC previously sued Research in Motion and extracted a large settlement out of the BlackBerry maker.
I could go on, but I've made my point. There is a reason no country in the world has a purely "capitalist" economy. Too much ownership actually thwarts innovation, cripples markets, and prevents economic growth.
Michael Heller observes:
Private property can no longer be seen as the end point of ownership. Privatization can go too far, to the point where it destroys rather than creates wealth. Too many owners paralyze markets because everyone blocks everyone else. Well-functioning private property is a fragile balance poised between the extremes of overuse and underuse.Progressives seek to maintain such a balance, while conservatives seek to upset it, naively believing that we'll all benefit if we privatize, privatize, privatize. In reality, we need government to provide a level playing field to prevent the overuse and destruction of scarce resources.
Unfortunately, as I wrote at the beginning of this post, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office is not exercising due diligence when reviewing patent applications. That leads to the approval and existence of "patently ridiculous" patents like Allen's, which in many cases sit undefended for years before their "owner" decides to cash in. This abuse could be potentially stopped or at least mitigated by reorganizing the patent office under new management and procedures instead of attempting the more arduous task of rewriting patent law.
# Posted by Andrew : 7:24 PM
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