Just goes to show.
That even having over $1000 million doesn't stop him being a petty minded little bully.
Paul Allen reloads patent attack against tech titans
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has hit refresh on his attempt to bring a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple, Google, Facebook and other tech outfits. Earlier this month a US District Court judge rejected a far-reaching complaint brought by Interval Licensing LLC – the patent arm of Interval Research – against Google’s …
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Wednesday 29th December 2010 12:48 GMT Wibble
Some days it's hardly worth chewing through the straps
Bit different to the normal patent modus operandi - loads of big (US) companies getting together for a chat and all agreeing to do nothing except keep new entrants out of the market.
Let's hope that 2011 is the year that software patents are finally abandoned. Fat hope of that happening.
Still, at least it gives the big boys something to do and provides some quantitive easing for the poor beleagured lawyers. Pity it ends up as 'gadget inflation' for the rest of us; a tech tax.
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Wednesday 29th December 2010 15:32 GMT Bryce Prewitt
Almost, but not quite.
On days like this, when a billionaire chooses to make a hobby out of having lawsuits thrown out of court, it almost makes you just wish the entire USPTO would go away, leading to a beautiful patent-free technology world where trade secrets and government-protected innovation are secondary to the implementation and execution of ideas, code, interface design, support and innovation.
It almost makes me dream of a world where the quality of your product is of superior importance to that of your ability to out-spend, out-research and out-lobby your competitors. When you can freely reverse-engineer the products of your competitors, and they can freely do the same to you, its what you create, how you create it and how you continue to evolve your creation that matters most. Industrial espionage is the greatest tool capitalism knows.
I say I "almost" want these things, because a completely free and unregulated system isn't the answer any more than the flawed and easily abused current system is. The system definitely needs to be more free, and it definitely needs to retain its ability to protect real innovation (of which makes up very, very few software/tech patents), but the real change will come when companies just accept the fact that doing business with the public means their competitor will always try and one-up them, most often by copping a feel of their good ideas.
As long as you dominate your market position fairly and don't quit innovating then you've nothing to worry about. As long as you respond to changes within the market and to attacks to your success by competitors then you've nothing to worry about. No one wants to be Microsofted, but what amazes me is how often people fail to recognize that, despite the fact that, yes, Microsoft did rip them off, Apple sealed their own fate by being appallingly incompetent. The current patent system encourages late 80s and early 90s era Apple style mismanagement. You could possibly even argue that it discourages real, actual innovation, but I'd say that has more to do with political lobbyists, regulatory bodies and ineffectual/corrupt enforcement of anti-trust legislation. That's a different tangent for a different article, however.
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Wednesday 29th December 2010 15:32 GMT JaitcH
If you research 'gesture' technology you will find it predates Apple filings
Just because someone scores a US Patent doesn't mean too much. With all the big money swilling around smartphone technology, the US courts will soon be a spectator sport that will stretch over several years.
And make sure you back up your OS in case some code has to be redacted!
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Thursday 30th December 2010 00:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Spam filtering
Apparently anti-spam protection where you compare new emails against old emails known to be spam violates one of these patents.
Its a total crock of shit, and it shows that the US Patent Office are incompetent and unfit for purpose - I suspect they just rubber stamp things and take the money and run.
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Thursday 30th December 2010 00:24 GMT Captain DaFt
Way to go Paul!
Welcome to America, Land of the "Free To Sue Any and All That Try to Innovate"!
Keep this type of BS up, and you guarantee that all future development in cutting edge electronics will be done in Asian, Indonesian, and even African companies, where they ignore all the "patent" nonsense of first world companies that'd rather sue than innovate!
(This really calls for multiple icons, such as "Troll", "Fail", "Flame", and even, "I one one welcome our new, innovative overseas tech masters", but I'll settle for an ironic "Thumbs up"!)
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Thursday 30th December 2010 11:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
What's The Fix ? A Dumb, Minimal Phone Hardware Spec
MS, IBM, Apple and all the other big corpos could easily sue every upstart in the PC business. But the PC is a very minimalist hardware specification (mainly the x86 processor, some support chips, the BIOS, SATA, VGA, PCI, etc).
The Free Software Community built Haiku, BSD, Linux and much more around this minimalist specification. If the $$$-community sues us, we will simply distribute Linux in the Samzidat way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat
We blatantly copy their trivial patents and innovate in our bedrooms.
NOW: All we need is the same minimalist Phone Hardware Specification and then give the $$$-community the stinking finger (that's how he call it here in Teutonia).
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
