Software Patents in Action

Some Well Documented Cases
Annotated Links

Some Well Documented Cases

Hochfrequenz-Kompression von Stac für ISDN und PPP:: The Stac compression scheme is one of many patented compression algorithms which severely impede interoperability between systems and, because of the sheer number of patents cluttering their field, are probably impossible to circumvent.
Patente auf unscharfe Kompression in JPEG u.a.:: When creating, using or JPEG graphic files, you may be infringing on patents. Some extensions to JPEG are patented. Basic principles of coding used by JPEG are patented in the US and in Europe, and recently a new patent owner has started to aggressively assert his monopoly rights. The JPEG Consortium reacted quickly by delaring that JPEG is no longer a standard.
MPEG-related patents on compression of acoustic data:: Acoustic compression requires knowledge of auditive perception, which had to be acquired through experimentation. Thus this field is close to the borderline of technical inventions which could be patentable. Yet most of the research results were published in the 60s and 70s, and the patented processes based thereon are pure informational processes, some of them quite basic and trivial, when viewed against the background of available theoretical knowledge. The whole field of audio compression is cluttered with dozens of basic patents, thus making it very difficult to develop alternatives. Ogg Vorbis seems to have succeeded in developping patent-free audio compression, but is being threatened by the patent holders, who have formed various consortia such as MP3 and MPEG2. In order to develop free software for MP3, one must pay an upfront payment of 1 million USD. Otherwise money must be charged per copy, thus barring the possibility of opensource development. Moreover, recently MPEG-LA, a consortium of MPEG patent holders, also proposed charging fees from content producers.
Dolby Standard tolerates no OpenSource implementation:: Under threat from a group of patent holders, an attempt to develop open source software to support the Dolby audio standards had to be scrapped in March 2001. The patent holders want a licence fee for each copy distributed. This excludes publication of source code on the Net and thus makes it impossible to develop surrounding infrastructure in an open and secure manner.
PSOLA: Spracherzeugungspatent von France Télécom:: The PSOLA patent of France Telecom has prevented the speech generation system MBROLA from becoming free software.
Internet-Telephonie: No Voice over IP:: Leading experts consider it impossible to create free or independent software for Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony during the next 15 years. The reason is "intellectual property" (IP): the field is cluttered with compression patents which not only cover almost all possible compression algorithms but also standards with which any implementor must comply. This way the telephone companies can stifle innovation and keep their monopolistic grip on the field of telephony. Nevertheless people are trying to establish patent-free alternatives.
ASF: changing copyright rules by means of patents:: Microsoft has prohibited a Free Software programmer from writing import/export filters for its Advanced Streaming Format (ASF). The programmer wanted interoperability with a format that Microsoft is promoting. But for Microsoft, interoperability is in this case doubly disadvantageous: besides reducing the lock-in effect, on which Microsoft's platform strategy relies, it also can circumvent the locks on unauthorized copying, by which Microsoft wants to attract content providers to its ASF platform. Whereas in the DeCSS case a court ruling was necessary to enforce new draconian copyright provisions of the highly disputed Digital Millenium Act, in the ASF case a simple patent suffices to achieve the same legislative goal.
LZW-Kompression: Konjugationen patentiert:: The LZW data reduction method is moderately ingenuous and moderately efficient. It was patented as US 4558302 and, against the letter and spirit of the written law, as EP 129439. Better solutions are meanwhile available, some non-patented. But due to the inertia of de-facto standards such as GIF, ZIP, PDF etc, the LZW patent it is still causing a lot of grief. It is as if the conjugations of the English language had been patented.
Hässliche TrueType- und Opentype-Schrifwiedergabe dank Patenten:: Rendering of Fonts is ugly and slow on Free Software Systems. This is because when the TrueType standard was promoted by Apple and Microsoft, they held a few patents which they never asserted. The FreeType project has asked Apple to clarify the situation, but did not get an answer. Instead, fearful customers of Linux distributors such as SuSE and Redhat have demanded that any possibly infringing FreeType features be disabled on these distributions. TrueType is the dominating font standard and it is also a part of new standards such as OpenType, in which Adobe participates. Adobe also holds a few patents on which OpenType infringes. These formats must be supported if GNU/Linux/XFree users are to be able to use existing fonts on their platform of choice.
Vermessungsämter mauern Geodaten durch Datenformat-Problempatent ein:: German public-financed cartographic institutes have published maps of Germany at a high resolution of 1:50000 in a format called TOP50. These are delivered on M$-only CDs with a proprietary program by EADS Dornier GmbH called GeoGrid which uses a proprietary, undocumented and patented format. Dornier does not allow people to write independent software that can read the format.
3D Graphics under GNU/Linux besieged by MS patents:: Former SGI patents have changed owners, making 3D graphic processing under GNU/Linux dependent on the mercy of Microsoft. Microsoft's terms are not yet quite clear, but they appear at least to be forcing a change of license terms away from the GNU GPL.
RealTime Linux's patent trouble:: The Linux kernel is normally not laid out for operation under fixed time limits. In order to turn Linux into a real-time operating system, certain additional programming rules are needed, some of which have been patented. Although the patentee granted a friendly license, this has created insecurity and inhibited commmercial deployment of RT Linux. Fortunately people have meanwhile found a way around the patent.
Dateisysteme auf Flash-Speicherbausteinen:: It is not possible to port operating systems to certain new hardware, because the manufacturers have retained control by obtaining software patents. Intel has done this for some chips, and MSystems did it for flash memory. When people do write software, it cannot be free, if it can be published at all. In the whole area of memory programming it is very hard not to run afoul of some patent. This is deterring programmers.
National Instruments ./ The Mathworks:: Nach einem zweijährigen Prozess verurteilte ein US-Gericht Mathworks, sein Programm Simulink wegen Verletzung dreier Patente von National Instruments (NI) aus dem Verkehr zu ziehen. Mathworks hat Berufung eingelegt. Die NI-Patente wurden auch vom Europäischen Patentamt erteilt. Wenn sie rechtsbeständig würden, könnte auch in Europa ein ähnlicher Rechtsstreit stattfinden.
RSA & Schnorr behindern Kryptographie und schnüren E-Geschäftsverkehr ein:: After widespread use of cryptography had been impeded for years by patents like that on RSA, finally an alternative was found that seemed to be available for free use by the public. But just at that moment, Professor Schnorr from Germany asserted that this free cryptography scheme infringed on his recently obtained crypto patent. The licensing rights of RSA and the Schnorr patent were later exclusively acquired by PKP. PKP harrassed crypto programmers by claiming that "These patents cover all known methods of practicing the art of Public Key, including the variations collectively known as El Gamal".
iPIX ./ Dersch: US-Patent bringt deutschen Mathematiker zum Schweigen:: A German developper of free software has been persecuted by the US company IPIX for writing software for composing pictures into large panoramas using calculation rules which he had developped independently but which iPIX had patented in the USA. In June 2001 the conflict escalated. Prof. Dersch withdrew his software from the Net in order to evade a lawsuit which iPIX was, according to his knowledge, preparing in the US.
Lake DSP ./ Anders Torger: Patentinhaber bedroht schwedische freie Software:: In early 2001, the Swedish audio software developper Anders Torger received a threat letter from Lake Technology Limited, demanding that he remove his free/opensource software from his website "within 48 hours", because it uses well-known calculation rules (a "highly efficient convolution algorithm" in Lake's words) which Lake claims to have invented and for which it is expecting to soon be granted a European patent (application 93914555.3 = EP0649578, entitled, "Digital Filter Having High Accuracy And Efficiency", based on US 5,502,747). Although Torger had written nothing but a computer program [ as such ], he was intimidated by the prospect of expensive litigation and therefore removed his software from the Net. Lake claims to have "invested millions of dollars in developping our technology", but it seems that little of this, if any, went into developping the patented algorithm. Torger is even trying to prove that they were not the first to invent it. Armed with prior art proofs, he wants to put at least his source code back on the Net in defiance of Lake.
Xerox ./ Bulatov: Baumvisualisierungspatent behindert Optimierungsforschung:: A Patent of Xerox Inc has cause Prof. Bulatov to withdraw his opensource Java profile browser HyperProf from the Net. HyperProf has been very useful for analysing the optimisation potentials of programs. Its withdrawal from the research community is a loss both to the developping mathematician, his user community and the end users of the programs which are developped thereby. So far we do not know against which US patents HyperProf is claimed to infringe and what, if any, their EP equivalents are.
OCS ./ HIT: Geometry Patent Stops Shareware Project:: Oberthur Card System applied in 1999 for a patent on a method of geometry (point-halving in elliptic curves). In Oct 2001, the Oberthur's legal department sent a cease-and-desist letter to Marcel Martin, French informatics student and author of the shareware library HIT, in which it asked him to "immediately stop marketing your product". Which he did, although the legal status of Oberthur's patent claims particularly in Europe is very unclear. We have published a few lines of code which, according to Oberthur's letter, seem to be infringing on the patent. Martin commented "I had to stop this project, because I cannot afford to pay an army of lawyers every time someone wants to impose conditions on my work. Software developpers react very sensitively to this kind of terrorism. If European politicians legalise software patents in Europe, that will work as a disinscentive to software production in Europe".
SCO ./ Linux:: In 2003 SCO, a company active in proprietary Unix and in GNU/Linux distribution, suddenly started suing IBM and threatening other companies with lawsuits for infringement of unspecified "Unix IP" and for breach of contracts related thereto. SCO did not disclose what "IP" this was, but sent around letters demanding license fees of >600 USD for each server that runs Linux. IBM counter-attacked, among others with charges of patent infringement by SCO. Redhat and some others also counter-attacked. Microsoft, a former co-owner of SCO, paid high license fees to SCO and supported SCO's FUD campaign in other ways. SCO joined Microsoft's campaign against the GNU GPL, attributing all problems to this license, but still refusing to disclose what "IP" was being infringed. Bill Gates meanwhile commented that the GNU GPL was incompatible with patents, and that the patent problem had created a new situation which would put any company who uses Linux at risk.
Viterbi: 1 Algorithmus, 4470 Patente:: The Viterbi Algorithm helps calculate the probability that a sequence of observations represents an intended ideal construction (e.g. that a mispronounced word is actually that word). It was published in 1967 and has a vast field of applications. An exemplary case of software patentability was established around algorithm in 1992-1996 in Germany. At the EPO and USPTO the dam broke earlier, resulting in a flood of 4470 patents which clutter various fields from telecommunication, data transmission to speech recognition, text processing and business process optimisation. These patents are sometimes cited as an example of a kind of data processing that solves "technical problems" and can be distinguished from "data processing as such" or "pure business methods".
Adobe bedroht Softwareurheber in US und EU mit Palettenpatent:: In summer 2001 Adobe attacked Macromedia for infringing on its US patent no 5546528 which lays claim to the idea of adding a third dimension to menus by grouping them as tabbed palettes one behind the other. The European Patent Office (EPO) has illegally granted EP0689133 with exactly the same set of claims and priority date of 1994-06-23 on 2001-08-06, after five years of examination period. Many programs, including free software such as The GIMP, infringe on this patent and will therefore be at the mercy of Adobe, if the EPO's practise of granting software patents is made enforcable by a Directive from the European Commission.
Zeitversetzung in Digitalem Video:: In 2001-10, a patent company called Pause Technologies started suing digital television companies based on claims to the idea of buffering digital data in order to allow the user to stop or retard a transmission and catch up later. We have not yet ascertained the status of the US patent RE36801 or its possible European counterparts. Below are some guesses and links.
Zwiebelrouter: US-Militär patentiert Problemfeld der Anonymen Kommunikation:: In 2001/07 the US navy received patent US 6266704 for the principle of arranging public key encryption in several layers so that identities are concealed. Colleagues of the patentee say that they are very surprised at this sudden move of one of their peers who apparently succeded in obtaining a patent on largely known methods. The patent covers large problem fields and leaves little free room for development of anonymous communications. Some experimental endeavors (without the deep pockets of commercial enterprises) are under threat, with a great potential impact on how people are able to communicate. We have yet to find out whether this patent has been filed in Europe.
WWW standardisation mined by patents:: Several standardistation proposals of the World Wide Web Consortium W3C have hit patent mines, and the W3C has been struggling to define policies for dealing with thepatent danger. A group of large patent owners has tried to push the W3C to accept uniform-fee-only (UFO, also euphemistically called RAND = reasonable and non-discriminatory) standards, i.e. standards that can be used by any software vendor as long as the software is under a license which facilitates fee collection, thereby excluding opensource software and shareware. After massive protests in late 2001 the W3C abstained from this policy, but it is frequently coming back in other clothing, partly because without satisfying patent owners the W3C is finding it difficult to come up with any viable standard proposals at all for some application areas.
RDF: Webstandard durch Grundlagenpatent bedroht:: In 1997, with priority date 1994, an obscure canadian software company received a european patent on a basic information processing method, namely the idea of describing information by hierarchies of binary relations. In 1999 a communication protocol called Ressource Description Framework (RDF) was adopted as a web standard. In 2001, when some software applications gradually became available, a license collecting company started enforcing the patent, as a first step threatening 50 companies with infringement litigation.
SOAP:: [an error occurred while processing this directive]
Patent auf suchwortbasierte Hypertext-Verweise gefährdet neuen WWW-Standard:: In Jan 2001 people at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) found that their new generation of hypertext markup language was infringing on a patent from Sun Microsystems. By a decree of the US patent office, Sun has become the owner of the idea of adding a search word to a link in such a way that the browser will scroll to that word. The developpement of the XPointer concept of the XML standard seemed in jeopardy. Sun's license terms are quite generous: they require than any competitor using this concept obliges himself in return to publish the concepts that he builds on it. Thus Sun supplies the W3C a weapon against "embrace and extend" tactics. But even if based on good intentions, this requirement may restrict the development of the new standard, and people at the W3C experts question whether a trivial software patent really gives Sun the right to impose such restrictions.
Microsoft bars GNU software from interoperating with CIFS:: During the 1st week of April 2002, Microsoft published a license for its new specification CIFS which it is trying to establish as a de facto communication standard. This license says that free software under GNU GPL, LGPL and similar licenses may not use CIFS. It bases this ban on two broad and trivial US patents with priority dates of 1989 and 1993. Preliminary search results suggst that these patents to not have EP (European Patent) counterparts. But there is nevertheless an EP patent which could possibly be used by MS for the same purpose. Critical network infrastructure such as Samba as well as new projects such as Mono seem to be affected.
Keine WWW-Indexierung mehr ohne Erlaubnis von CMGI?:: In Jan 2001, the CEO of CMGI, the company that currently owns Altavista, explained: "Altavista owns 38 patents, many of which we think are fundamental in the search area. They were the first to spider and index the Web. ... And we have another 30 patents that are in application. So we believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents." and made it clear that he will go to court in early 2001 to maximize revenues from those patents.
One-Click Shopping:: Amazon (internet bookstore) received a US patent on reducing the need for data input in case of repeated ordering through a network like the WWW. Based on this patent, Amazon sought an injunction against a competing bookstore. Amazon had applied for the same patent at the EPO under EP0902381 in Sep. 1998 under the name "Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network". By the time a search report was issued by the EPO, this patent had already aroused an uproar in the USA, leading to the discovery of new prior art, including similar patents which Amazon might be infringing. The EPO found the Amazon method patentable in principle, but listed new prior art in an examination report of 2001. Amazon decided to split the patent into two new applications. Of these, one, EP0927945, a method for simplified ordering of articles via Internet, was granted by the EPO in May 2003. The other is still pending.
Patent von British Telecom auf Hypertext-Verweise:: British Telecom in the 70s and 80s filed patents in the US on the concept of cross-references in hypertext. In 2000 BT discovered one of these "Rembrandts in the Attic" (US 4,873,662) and decided to use it for squeezing money out of internet access providers. Litigation is beginning in 2002-02.
OpenMarket verklagt Intershop wegen %(q:System zum Verkauf im Internet):: On 2001-01-09, Open Market attacked Intershop, the largest Germany-based shopping application company, for violating its patents on a network sales system on the US market. Meanwhile some of the concerned OpenMarket have been granted by the EPO as well.
Rozmanith: Softwarepatente als Waffe gegen Kritiker:: In autumn 2000 TechSearch Inc, a company specialising on acquiring and exploiting patents, sued Gregory Aharonian, a vocal critic of "bad patents" owned by TechSearch, for alleged infringement of one of these "bad patents", US 5253341, the "Rozmanith patent" on compressing data transmitted from web servers. They also accused Aharonian of slandering TechSearch, the patent office and the United States government. But they failed to point out how Aharonian had infringed on their patent. Apparently anyone who operates a web server infringes, and it is up to TechSearch to select victims. Aharonian is the first individual Linux user to be sued for patent infringement.
From AllVoice to AllPatent: Milking the Speech Recognition Business with Parliamentary Support:: Allvoice Computing PLC, originally a text-processor service company based in Devon, UK, has obtained two broad and trivial patents in US and UK on the logics of interfacing between speech recognition and word processing. Allvoice tried to sell this interface as a standalone software product, but was apparently more successful in extracting rents from producers of full-fledged speech recognition software, such as IBM and Lernout & Hauspie, by means of patent litigation. Meanwhile Allvoice's business seems to be focussing on patent enforcement. Allvoice's director John Mitchell has also become a patent-political activist and an archetype of a business model which british parliamentarians are promoting in UK and EU.
.5 bn USD damages for patent on browser extensions:: The Californian university spin-off Eolas succeded in extracting .5 bn USD rents from Microsoft using patent US5838906. This Eolas patent covers, as an Illinois jury confirmed, Microsoft's ActiveX facility. It also covers basically any means to extend a browser by scripts. Eolas lawyers try to create the impression that Microsoft actually copied their "technology" and that their latest rent-seeking aims at restoring justice in the browser war, where Microsoft leveraged its monopoly position to put Netscape out of business in 1999. Some media seem to be buying their story.
Pinpoint sues Amazon over collaborative filtering:: Collaborative filtering, best known in the form of "People who liked/bought this also liked/bought that", is widely used in the e-commerce world. Pinpoint Incorporated, a patent litigation startup company whose activity has so far been confined to the US, holds several US patents on the use of collaborative filtering for different purposes. On July 18th 2003, Pinpoint filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com, alleging violation of several of its patents.

Annotated Links

Unfortunately we are still witness to a pile of poorly documented or non-publishable cases, such as

If you are familiar with any cases, please inform us!

German company gives up implementation of MS IIS extensions on Linux based server platform after its legal department listed up 20 Microsoft patents in this area
Leading german communication software company attacked by Bavarian multinational with frivolous software patents.
Planned GNU e-cash system stalled for years, because basic cryptographic methods are patented and committments to allow GPL implementations could not be obtained. The difficulties in establishing trust in e-money and e-commerce are aggravated by patents. Some basic e-payment procedures are patented, see Microsoft's SET patent.
W3C to allow royalty-burdened standards: Most of the patents that caused the crisis at the W3C are trivial and broad and have also been granted (illegally) by the EPO.
Manufacturers of printers, scanners and other peripheral computer devices often do not make driver specifications or source code available, because they are afraid that this many lead to the discovery of patent infringements. Especially some large manufacturers with a policy of supporting open systems or open source platforms still have a policy of delivering closed-source MSWin drivers only. One of the reasons for this is the aggressive platform policy of Microsoft. Microsoft has consistently pressure on hardware producers to support only its operating system and it has recently been buying 3D graphics related patents apparently for this purpose.
IBM patent lawyer Fritz Teufel has repeatedly declared in public declared the IBM would not hesitate to sue Open Source projects that "free-ride" on IBM "technology", thus forcing them to close down and become proprietary. Microsoft speakers have said the same.
We have not yet documented some of the famous US business method software patent court cases, e.g. reverse auction (US 5794207, US 5797127): Marketel v. priceline US. District calif. 19 jan 1999 Priceline v. Microsoft Expedia, US. District Connec. 13 oct 1999 target advertising (US 5948061): Doubleclick v. L90 US. district Virginia 15 nov 1999 DoubleClick v. Sabela Media 10 dec 1999 download music internet (US 5191573, US 5675734): SightSound v. MP3.com Microsoft Web Polling (US 6,175,833): filed: 1998-04-22 granted: 2001-01-16 entitled: System and method for interactive live online voting with tallies for updating voting results.
Oppenheimer list of current cases pending about internet patents: very comprehensive overview, but Java script errors may make your browser crash
O'Reilly List of Controversial Patents
LPF campaign against software patentability: names various cases of the early 90s where companies have been harmed by software patents


Software Patents > Patents > Effects
Patents	Effects	Stac PPP ISDN	Adobe Palette	W3C	1Click	AllVoice