It’s only a few lines of code, or a button… pay up

http://www.lodsys.com/1/post/2011/05/q-its-only-a-few-lines-of-code-or-a-button-it-doesnt-make-sense-that-it-should-cost-additional-money-to-do.html

by bootload • 15 years ago

49 41 15 years ago

lodsys.com

dominikb3• 15 years ago

It's clear that their goal is to force Apple to acquire their patent portfolio. Clever trolls.

sudhirj4• 15 years ago

Either that or they don't realize that Apple, Google and Amazon (Microsoft too?) all know that their own App Stores are at risk. I wonder if this troll can take any two of those legal mountains falling on him.

Tyrannosaurs4• 15 years ago

You say that but it's not just Apple that's being talked about - they've pointed out that Google and Microsoft have also licensed the technology and other large companies such as HP have been contacted about the fact that they haven't.

This isn't an Apple issue, this is an industry wide issue. Apple owning the patent would make the issue go away for Apple but it might actually make it worse for other app stores (if Apple decided to be a dick about it).

On the surface this feels remarkably broad and uninnovative as patents go (similar to the Amazon one click one which I believe was recently said to be invalid - potentially pending an appeal from them).

If this is the case (and it's hard to know without knowing more detail and more law than I do) then it really needs to be fought and overturned.

It would be nice to see the big players - Apple, Google and Microsoft - setting up some sort of fund to allow the small developers to fight this properly for everyone's benefit.

The actions of patent trolls might be curtailed if they knew that there was a distinct possibility that the next letter they sent off to a one man software house was going to be met with an army of the most vicious lawyers money can buy queuing up to kick your ass from here to kingdom come.

Does US law allow for 3rd party funding of such cases?

ZeroGravitas2• 15 years ago

Lodsys say that Apple, Microsoft and Google are "licensed", but they don't make clear whether those companies actually paid for a licence, or if they were granted it freely by Lodsys as part of a PR campaign to make them look bad for abandoning their developers.

dominikb3• 15 years ago

How would it look if Microsoft and Google stood up to "help" and fight for Apple just because Apple's app ecosystem has unresolved patent issues? Hypocritical as it is, obviously they will stay quiet, they want Apple to be troubled for their benefit.

sudhirj4• 15 years ago

What happens if all the iOS developers gang up and file a class action suit to have the patents reconsidered?

dominikb3• 15 years ago

It will take a year to reconsider. Apple needs to act quickly and aggressively on this to show the public and media that they stand behind the developers. They can't let the App Store become a feared, shady, legal-gibberish ecosystem.

sudhirj4• 15 years ago

Very true. I find it disturbing that they haven't already issued a statement about this - I would have thought they'd scramble to get out a statement saying that they're aware of the situation and are considering options.

beseku• 15 years ago

I heard on some podcast or other that there is a clause in the iOS developer term that expressly forbids developers from acknowledging that any of the IP they use ISNT Apples? If that is the case then the iOS terms are preventing the developers from settling and the ball is surely in Apple's court.

Any devs got the terms handy?

reitzensteinm• 15 years ago

I could maybe buy this line of reasoning if the inventor in question was a true visionary that foresaw in app purchasing, and laid out a roadmap for everyone to follow.

But the thing is, the patent is an invention of something completely different - customer satisfaction surveys on fax machines - and has to be interpreted in the most general way possible to even approach covering what they're seeking licenses for.

This patent has added zero value to the iPhone developers it is targeting.

flipbrad• 15 years ago

The other thing is that I frankly don't see many reports of people using out-of-date patents as roadmaps for anything!

maqr• 15 years ago

> Oil companies do not drill on land where they don’t have the rights. Movies aren’t released that don’t clear all the music rights. Clothing manufacturers license logos from Disney or the NFL to include them in their product.

It's pretty hard to drill on someone else's land, use someone else's music in a production, or use someone else's logo without realizing it. Software patents are nothing like this.

Software patents would be more akin to it being patented for an oil company to drill with a very hard diamond bit, or a guitarist to hold their guitar a certain way during a solo, or perhaps a clothing manufacturer to wash their jeans for a more rugged look.

Maybe other industries do have patents like these, but I certainly never hear about them.

adestefan• 15 years ago

Please don't think that this is only a software issue. There's patent abuse in every industry. The problem is with the implementation of the patent system, not the idea.

adamc• 15 years ago

If the idea can't be implemented with the kind of patent examiners we are likely to get, or with the resources one could reasonably expect, then there's a problem with the idea.

bruce511• 15 years ago

>> Oil companies do not drill on land where they don’t have the rights. Movies aren’t released that don’t clear all the music rights. Clothing manufacturers license logos from Disney or the NFL to include them in their product.

> Software patents would be more akin to it being patented for an oil company to drill with a very hard diamond bit

It's even worse than that.

If you want to drill for oil on some land, then you need to get rights to drill on _that land_. A software patent though prevents you from drilling on _any_ land. It's not a right to the oil that's in question, it's a right to drill at all. A software patent is akin to "we've patented searching for oil". No wait, why stop there, let's patent "Digging a hole in the ground". You wanna plant a tree over there? Yeah, sure, digging a hole to put it in is kinda obvious, but I've got the patent on digging holes.

The problem with patents is when they move from patenting a "true invention" (and yes, that could be software, like say a better compression algorithm) to patenting the "obvious". therein lies the rub - who determines the legal standard for "obvious". Is Bitblt'ing obvious? Is Public-Private-Keys? Is buying-something-with-a-click?

Given the impossibility of defining the "obvious" I'm in favor of just dropping the whole sorry mess, and going back to the days when _machines_ were protected, the implementation of ideas, not the ideas themselves. Yes programs are copyrighted, but not code-snippets.

anamax4• 15 years ago

> A software patent is akin to "we've patented searching for oil". No wait, why stop there, let's patent "Digging a hole in the ground". You wanna plant a tree over there? Yeah, sure, digging a hole to put it in is kinda obvious, but I've got the patent on digging holes.

Actually, it's not, and that's the sort of thing that makes folks who actually know about patents dismiss much of the software patent rants.

Take the RSA patent. It just covers the use of a specific set of algorithms to do a specific task. It does not cover using those algorithms to do other tasks or other algorithms for doing said task.

In that, the RSA patent just like the Viagra patent. If you can figure out how to use the Viagra compound to shine shoes, you can patent that, and the pharma patent doesn't apply.

extension• 15 years ago

"This ideation, as expressed in the patent, enabled a building block for others to build on and create more value."

And right in the next paragraph...

"Many industries study the IP landscape prior to releasing a product or service and either design around or acquire necessary patent rights if they need them to do their solution."

So we need to hire lawyers to research whether we are inadvertently building on the ideas of others?

The patent trolls are now justifying patents by explaining exactly why they are unjustified.

kabdib• 15 years ago

Big companies tell all new employees: DO NOT GO LOOKING AT PANTENTS. Because if you read a patent, and you knowingly infringe, it's triple damages.

The system is broken. You can't know what is patented because it's too bleeping risky to even look.

There is no "teaching." All you can do is build up a war chest and rattle paper at people who try to come after you.

jcromartie3• 15 years ago

This is the core of it: Dan Abelow's "ideation" has absolutely no influence whatsoever on the tech industry. Nobody cares about his "inventions". Nobody took any spark of inspiration from Dan Abelow.

But if I, sitting in a room with nothing but my own mind and a keyboard, actually WRITE THE F&#@ING CODE that is covered by one of these patents, then someone who never did an ounce of work actually implementing it will come along and demand a fee.

How can anybody think that's a reasonable system?

Derbasti• 15 years ago

This makes me sick. I don't care whether this is legal or not and whether this is morally justified or not. It plain makes me sick.

reader5000• 15 years ago

I like these trolls trying to rationalize their trolling by attempting and failing to sound intellectual. The thing is 99.9% of software patents were obvious at granting and therefore invalid, this being one of them. I highly doubt the creator of this patent invested anywhere near the resources to actually "discover" the patented "invention" that these trolls are seeking to extract through abuse of the legal system. I hope somebody in Congress is paying attention to these hijinks, but I know Congress is too occupied with making bittorrenters felons.

jcromartie3• 15 years ago

"Dan Abelow is an independent inventor who visualized/created metaphors, documented for the world to see (in exchange for exclusivity) and created value for doing so."

Dan Abelow sounds like a self-aggrandizing jerk when he talks about himself in the third person.

barrym• 15 years ago

I'm not sure it's written by Dan Abelow - http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/13/honan-lodsys and http://www.lodsys.com/1/post/2011/05/q-what-is-dan-abelows-i...

jcromartie3• 15 years ago

Then someone must just really like him, since he's mentioned by name on most pages.

AeroQ• 15 years ago

Lodsys uses a web design from http://andreasviklund.com/ without crediting him!

numeromancer• 15 years ago

Do not take this article too seriously. It is not an article in the old-fashioned sense, but an experiment in post-modern essaying. The paragraphs were written by 9 separate undergraduate freshman, in separate places across the English speaking world. The students had no contact with each other before or after the essay.

It’s only a few lines of code, or a button… pay up

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