Patents have gone berserk in the last twenty years, the USPTO has allowed business model patents, software patents, and even just methodology patents. It has made a mess and mockery of the patent process, to the point where patents are an inhibition to innovation, and instead are used for extortion, and monopoly.

RIM vs NTP

I have been involved off and on with a project which was dedicated to giving field technicians access to all the data that the central offices have, so they can make timely decisions, and also so the services to completion was expedited. We tried iPaqs, J2ME phones, until finally the Blackberry matured sufficiently that we could have the techs access the information through the same website that the central offices do. The Blackberry also replaced our phones, pagers, and old phone plans. Massive cost saving. I am a fan of the Blackberry.

However, the Blackberry is under a patent cloud. An intellectual property company, NTP, is suing RIM for patent infringement, in what has been an ongoing court case. NTP is one of a new brand of companies that have popped up with the weakening of the USPTO's restriction on what sorts of patents can pass;

Indeed, NTP does not make anything. It is a patent holding company formed by in 1992 by Thomas J. Campana and some investors with the intent of licensing patents. Mr. Campana, 57, is a retired electrical engineer and entrepreneur from the Chicago area who holds about 50 patents, some of which cover a national paging system.

These companies buy up weak patents, and sit on them, knowing that a company is likely infringing on it. Once that company, such as RIM, is well established, and had considerable market penetration, the intellectual property company will turn to litigation. These intellectual property company are litigious by nature.

But we expect laws to be universal, and apply universally - if the litigation is upheld, and RIM is removed from the US market by the courts because of their patent infringement - then surely it applies to the US government as well? It seems not .

In this ongoing patent infringement case involving the Canadian RIM's BlackBerry system, the U.S. Government has submitted a brief to District Court Judge Spencer. The brief notes that under Trojan v. Shat-R-Shield, the Federal Government cannot be enjoined against using a patented invention and thus, asks the court to fashion any injunction in such a way to continue to allow the U.S. Government workers to continue to use the BlackBerry.

But that is not all, the USPTO is having second thoughts too, and NTP's litigious nature is being shown .

The US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has rejected seven out of eight claims made by NTP against Research in Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry service, throwing a legal settlement between the two companies into further turmoil.

The patent office issued what it calls "non-final office actions" rejecting all the claims in two of NTP's patents, on the heels of a preliminary rejection notice for the claims in five of the patents earlier this year. Only one of the key patents at issue in the dispute over the BlackBerry service now contains valid claims in the eyes of the patent office, but that patent is under review as well.

What a mess.

Patents and their enabling legislation have produced weird outcomes in the past, and the weirdness is only getting worse as it seems weaker and weaker patents are let through the patent office. Sun had a bizarre case with Kodak ;

The really significant part of that though, is that so much of the world has gotten tied up in knots over ridiculous pieces of litigation. I mean, Sun just came out of this really weird patent case with Kodak, where Kodak admitted that we did not violate their patent. They weren't't accusing us of violating their patent, they were accusing us of building a system that caused other people to violate their patent. So they had an expert who wrote software that violated their patent, and he actually got up in court and said that every program ever written does the following completely stupid stuff, and therefore Java induced people to violate their patent. And the jury made up of housewives bought it. And it's like, "What is this, you know, Shakespeare with rights? It's like five hundred years later, why didn't we pay attention and just shoot all the lawyers?".

Patents are more often than not used for extortion. I am sceptical of the patent system being maintained, and will need to see a massively convincing argument for it to remain. Especially when we know co-operative and democratized innovation is a faster commodifier of innovation than the patent system.

cam

Included in the blurb for the google reader making its way to the iphone is:

... iPhone and iPod Touch owners know how powerful having a full-featured browser is.

The iphone's Safari browser is not to be under-estimated. Many, many years ago the company I was with was looking for some mobile solution to update tickets from the field. We tried laptops, but back then they were too expensive for everyone to have one. We tried a proprietary application running on an iPaq; but there was too much data. We tried the ATT browser on the blackberries too; but it was WML and really stunk up the joint.

In the end the version of the Blackberry with the RIM browser came out and a special version of the website was made for it. The curious thing was very few people used the special mobile website, they used the normal website and put up with the display inefficiencies.

A few of the techs eschewed the Blackberry altogether for browsing, using it only for email and phone calls. Instead they used laptops and a fully featured browser to go through the website they worked with.

The great thing about Safari on the iphone is that it makes no compromises for being a mobile application. You can view the web page is if it were on a laptop or desktop browser. It has magnifying functions which have a great algorithm for identifying blocks of text. You can also rotate the browser sideways and the view of the page will change to longways and vice versa.

However; it is a fully featured browser. That is the key IMO. It is why I like the iphone's safari browser and where the WML/WAP garbage and RIM have screwed up in the past.

Neil McAllister argues that Software Developer Kits [SDK] are not the be all and end all of smart devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and Android. The Microsoft side of this style of argument is the boorish, "Developers, developers, developers" and that you do not have a viable platform unless developers have bought into your SDK. But as McAllister notes both the iPhone and Android come with WebKit - an HTML rendering engine based upon Konquerer's kHTML engine. The universal device in the smart phones is the web browser.

That means Web applications designed for one will render almost identically on the other, provided their developers adhere to published standards.

Those same applications will also render on WebKit-based desktop browsers, such as Safari and Google Chrome, and on any other browsers that implement the standards correctly.

Based on that, all this talk of SDKs seems almost foolish.

The iPhone applications store opened to massive fanfare but I have only downloaded one application. That is the remote so I can operate my iTunes library remotely through my phone. I use the browser on the iPhone every day and I am extremely thankful that it renders web pages without any loss of the original formatting.

Many, many years ago I did a smart device project to collect facility data. We tried an iPag which at the time was Compaq's smart device. It came with a windows operating system of some kind, I cannot recall which. It didn't work and wasnt popular. We then tried phones and the horrendous WAP toolkits. Then we tried blackberries.

The main benefit of the Blackberry was the RIM browser (as opposed to the WAP AT&T; browser which was crap). It would render a page honestly even though it was on a small screen. I made up a version of the website so that it could be used on the Blackberry but most technicians used the main website which was intended for desktops and laptop style resolutions anyway.

The browser that could render the web on a mobile device became the solution. In my opinion McAllister is right. The web is going to continue being the web and SDK's are anachronisms to get people to that level of universal browsing.