An annoying company with a couple of silly patents lost its bid to enforce patents for the "interactive web" with a jury verdict for the accused infringers.
Geek celeb Tim Berners-Lee – the inventor of the web – testified near the end of the trial in Texas in the megabattle patent-infringement case that threatened to force the biggest online media companies to get a license or stop using things like streaming video and rotating pictures on their websites.
There's a well-written story about Berners-Lee's testimony on Wired's Threat Level blog by Joe Mullin. Mullin also wrote a background piece as well that explains the patents at issue.
A lot of people have weighed in on how terrible it would be if the patent holding company, Eolas, won. And there's a real possibility that the sky-is-falling arguments brought by defendants such as Google and Yahoo were what carried the day.
I didn't watch the trial, and I haven't read the transcripts. But this seems to have jury nullification written all over it. And if that's what happened, that would be a real shame. If the Eolas patents are valid, then, come hell or high-water, the court ought to enforce them. Why? Because doing so would bring some needed pressure to bear on the law that got us to this point.
Software patents are absurd. I think pretty close to nearly everyone who has thought deeply about the issue agrees.
The problems of software patents extend far beyond Eolas. A bunch of silly software patents are at the center of Apple's strategy to vanquish Android, clearing away the main competitor to iPads and iPhones. It sure would be a better world if Apple's core strategy was offering better products at better prices.
But that's not the world we live in. This world has allowed intellectual property law, the supposed guardian of innovation and creativity, to become a towering obstacle to the progress of the arts and sciences.
The Eolas case also highlights the unholy role of universities in all this. The inventors on the patent were employees of UCSF – University of California, San Francisco. That made the University of California the owner of the patent. Did UC open the technology to everyone, in the spirit of adding to the public store of knowledge, like one might think a university is meant to do? No. UC sold the patent to Eolas, and in return, UC is apparently getting a 25-percent cut of the winnings. Is this what the University of California is for? Undermining the job-creating, knowledge-spreading activity of pioneering Bay Area companies to make some extra money? Sadly, yes.
The problem highlighted by the Eolas case is not one or two patents. The problem is patents in general and the moral straying of large universities. Those problems can't be fixed with an ad-hoc nullification by the judge or jury in Texas. On the other hand, a faithful adherence to bad law could be the begining of a movement to fix what is really wrong.
Howdy, Prof. Johnson.
If patents aren't meant to cover mathematics, processes implemented entirely in software would seem to be entirely mathematical and therefore should be unpatentable in my view. Computer science is all about the mathematics of computer programs. Most big programs put a number of smaller programs (subroutines, modules, linking code) into a new arrangement, but should that make them more patentable than claiming to be the first person to subtract 2937927490274902765 from 91738236284629476290 ? To actually work, all software must be converted into a series of bits that on most computer architectures is literally indistinguishable from a (very large) number. (T-shirts exists with large numbers that if entered into a Windows computer in a bit-efficient manner actually create programs that historically have been subjects of patents and even export control laws.)
I have some experience inventing necessary things in software, both while working at UCSD and in the private sector, so I trust my understanding of software as mathematics.
I'm not sure why you feel that the jury result was nullification. At a minimum one would need evidence that the patent claims cover what the plaintiff's lawyers said that they did, that the patents were valid, and that the defendants likely infringed. That's not the type of information one actually gets from a PR campaign waged largely by the plaintiffs, who for the business purposes of selling "licenses" to this property the UC could not monetize.
Here, the jury found that the prior art invalidated the patents, which is the question they were asked to decide on the basis of the evidence presented. How is that nullification?
Posted by: rpenner | February 27, 2012 at 05:26 PM