Path: sparky!uunet!munnari.oz.au!metro!cluster!...@kronecker.mit.edu From: d...@kronecker.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) Newsgroups: comp.patents Subject: [ARTICLE] Interesting article Message-ID: <5112@cluster.cs.su.oz.au> Date: 5 Jun 92 03:03:13 GMT Sender: n...@cluster.cs.su.oz.au Organization: MIT Dept. of Tetrapilotomy, Cambridge, MA, USA Lines: 40 Approved: pate...@cs.su.oz.au Nntp-Posting-Host: kronecker.mit.edu There is an interesting article on software patents in the most recent CACM: Debunking the Software Patent Myths Paul Heckel Communications of the ACM June 1992 p. 121 I'd have to say that it's not the finest piece of writing I've seen, even though I'm prejudiced toward his conclusions, but it does flesh out some of the background of the recent debate, and it does provide a good summary of the pro-patent arguments. One of the many tidbits that make the article worth reading is the following: U.S. Patent 4,197,590 [the infamous "XOR cursor" patent] [...] The "XOR" is only part of the invention. [...] The League says this patent can be infringed in "a few lines of a program." It can be, *but not on a computer that was commercially available at the time the invention was made*. The invention is largely the invention of the frame buffer. As such, it requires hardware which has since become common, making it possible to infringe the XOR claims with a few lines of code. Many, if not most, computer manufacturers including Apple and IBM have taken out licenses which cover programs running on their computers. (Whether it's a telling point, or even true, is not the interesting point, but rather that a technique (in this case, frame buffers and bitblt operations) that is widespread today was novel when it was first used.) Flame on! Dale Worley Dept. of Math., MIT d...@math.mit.edu -- Don't waste the money to see _Waiting for Godot_. There isn't any point to it -- believe it or not, Godot never arrives.
Path: sparky!uunet!munnari.oz.au!metro!cluster!a...@ocf.berkeley.edu From: a...@ocf.berkeley.edu (Adam J. Richter) Newsgroups: comp.patents Subject: Re: [ARTICLE] Interesting article Message-ID: <5130@cluster.cs.su.oz.au> Date: 8 Jun 92 23:20:40 GMT References: <5112@cluster.cs.su.oz.au> Sender: n...@cluster.cs.su.oz.au Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 68 Approved: pate...@cs.su.oz.au NNTP-Posting-Host: monsoon.berkeley.edu In article <5...@cluster.cs.su.oz.au> d...@kronecker.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) quotes Paul Heckel's ACM article: > > U.S. Patent 4,197,590 [the infamous "XOR cursor" patent] > [...] The "XOR" is only part of the invention. [...] > The League says this patent can be infringed in "a few lines > of a program." It can be, *but not on a computer that was > commercially available at the time the invention was made*. There will always be a first person to develop any thing that comes into existence. That does not imply that the thing in question was unobvious the first time it was invented. It is possible for something to be both new and obvious. By the way, I think that "not obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art" is a lousy criterion for patentability. I'd like us to return to the "flash of genius" criterion. > The invention is largely the invention of the frame buffer. I feel that the both the frame buffer and the XOR technique have always been obvious, and I suspect that the development of frame buffers was not a result of people seeing CADTrack's products or patents. The first public demonstration of ENIAC used a frame buffer of sorts, consisting of a 10x10 array of ping-pong balls with lights behind them. When you consider that video terminals drove video displays through character set ROMs when RAM was expensive, it is reasonable to conclude that the development of frame buffers probably occurred more because RAM became cheaper than because the industry just couldn't come up with the idea. Similarly, I don't know how many times I've "reinvented" XORing and other bit-twiddling techniques for graphics. Then again, as far as I can, Heckel is the only only one who is claiming that CADTrack's invention was "largely the invention of the frame buffer." If CADTrack agreed with Heckel's position, I don't understand why they didn't patent the frame buffer and why they aren't going after every frame buffer manufacturer. If CADTrack really did feel this way, then my suspicion would be that CADTrack did file for such a patent, and there may be some prior art that we don't know about. In any case, as far as I can tell, there is little or no public benefit attributable to patent incentives in this case. On the other side of the comparison, the public is paying a large cost for this unnecessary patent. I have only a couple of datapoints about this patent, and I'm not at liberty to reveal my sources or to be much more specific, but suffice it to say that when you buy certain not-especially-expensive computer hardware products, about $20 goes to CADTrack, and I have no reason to believe that the $20 is an extreme case. While this number may be small as a percentage of sales, it is not so small in comparison to profits and losses. > Many, if not most, computer manufacturers including > Apple and IBM have taken out licenses which cover programs > running on their computers. Often it is cheaper to license a bogus patent than to defend against it, since, as I understand it, in practice, you can almost never recover legal fees if all that happens is that the patent is invalidated. It is generally to a company's advantage to patent what it can, so lots of things are patented regardless of whether or not patent incentives actually caused their creation. By ignoring the question of whether or not patent incentives actually caused these things to be developed, Heckel is able to erroneously give the impression that these such development occurred because of patents.