 | | | Metaballs - regarding patent | Metaballs - regarding patent 2005-04-15 - By Matt Lind
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I'd think Intergraph and Digital would beg to differ on your views. They
got raped by Intel and had to give up their computer businesses because of
it. Intel stole patented technology from Intergraph and used it in all
their Pentium chips without Intergraph's knowledge. Intel later stole more
patented technology from Digital's Alpha microprocessor and again put it in
their Pentium chips. If it weren't for those two, Intel's Pentiums would
still be lagging behind everybody else.
The point being that software patents, if anything, don't do enough to
protect the holder of the patent. Intergraph was recently awarded the
largest settlement in US Patent court history when they won against Intel,
but they only received $450 million plus a few extra $100 million side
settlements. Between the time Intel stole Intergraph's technology and the
date the judge ruled against them, Intel went from a $2 billion dollar per
year company to a $36 billion dollar per year company. If you were
Intergraph, would you feel you got your money's worth from the Patent? I
doubt it. Their patent award was less than the revenues generated by their
computer business prior to the Intel rape.
In the case of Digital they didn't have the cashflow to pursue a lawsuit
against Intel, so the next best thing they were able to do was accept a
buyout of their semi-conductor plants which was the watershed moment that
sealed their fate.
I think what everybody here doesn't like about patents is the concept of
patenting frivolous ideas or other things that are so common. Like
copyrights, if something is in the public domain of large magnitude prior to
filing for the patent, then it cannot be patented. Somebody may be granted
a patent, but it's not necessarily enforceable in court. Each country only
recognizes certain patent certificates. A patent held in the USA might not
be enforceable in Africa, for example. The patent holder would have to
re-file for the patent in Africa for it to be enforced there.
Matt
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Matt Lind
Animator / Technical Director
SOFTIMAGE certified instructor:
SOFTIMAGE|3D
SOFTIMAGE|XSI
Mantom, Chicago
Matt(at)Mantom.net
Re: Metaballs - regarding patent.
Date : Fri, 15 Apr 2005 11:24:42 +0200
To : <xsi(at)Softimage.COM>
>From : "Raffaele \"ThE_JacO\" Fragapane" <jaco(at)thejaco.com>
Subject : Re: Metaballs - regarding patent.
The fact that you can pretty much patent a general idea, as long as you
loosely pair it up with an algorithm or solution (that sometimes can be
bloody obvious and also pretty much the only efficient way to implement that
idea).
This makes it so that companies with deep pockets can start patenting not
only things they COULD have the right to patent, but also obvious solutions
that other companies would have thought of without industrial espionage or
crosshiring, if not solutions that were already widely used.
The whole debate is a long and twisted one, but there's plenty of reasons to
oppose SW patents and only relatively few to endorse them.
It would be like Phong patenting the idea of averaging shading per pixel
rather then per vertex, even if the idea had already been around for a bit
and other people would have come up with the idea only shortly after.
More then that, some SW solutions are heavily interwoven with the
capabilities of HW to deal with the computation, giving people with deep
pockets an even bigger advantage over small research entities.
The defenders of the SW patents will tell you that if an idea that was
already commonplace gets patented you can always bring that patent claim to
court and set wrongs right... yeaaaah, like if a young Swedish kid working
on linux could be arsed or financed to go against MS or SUN in court because
he wrote a module years before but it was later on patented by a
multinational.
The only people battling for the copyrights would be huge corporations that
even AVID would have problems facing in court, the impact this would have on
small developers would be gigantic.
P.S.
I'm not a fervent opensource advocate nor a linux fanatic, but SW patents
are a scary thing.
~Raffaele Fragapane
~Lead "I'm sure we can make it work"
~Peerless Camera Company
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