Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Tue 6th Oct 2009 21:43 UTC, submitted by Moulinneuf
The patent wars rage on. Eolas, a company that before won US$585 million from Microsoft in 2003 in a suit that challenged the use of ActiveX and AJAX, is now after twenty-three separate companies allegedly because their precious patent was spoiled by all of them.
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Member since:
2006-01-10
I really don't get the great difference with software versus hardware patents.
I can definitely see people having problems with patents being granted too easily, or having problems with patents in general... but I cannot fathom why people single out software patents.
Have people looked at physical patents? They're not exactly mind blowing brilliant. I'm pretty sure if you looked the patents for electric cars, a lot of them are pretty dubious. The difference being that those industries are used to working with patents, licensing, going with other technologies... Because a lot of the high tech (software/web) is new, the development is very fast, so there's lots of patent issues and our culture is much more legal dominated.
Or we look at how Intel's hardware patents have essentially granted it a monopoly over its x86 instruction set... Could you imagine the outrage if Microsoft patented the windows API or C#, to make it impossible to make a binary compatible program?
This is not patenting an algorithm or anything. It's rather specific as to a web browser embedding content...
Obvious... yeah... But so are many patents in electrical or chemical engineering or mechanical engineering.
but not really an issue with respect to software patents. It's just an issue of how patents can be too general.
Edited 2009-10-07 00:03 UTC