For those of us who believe that patents stifle innovation, this week brings good news: patent filings are down, as PatentlyO reports. After years of steadily increasing, U.S. patent filings have dropped, perhaps reflecting the bad economy.
Or perhaps an increase in common sense? Nah....
(Credit:
U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (via PatentlyO))
While the PatentlyO blog suggests this is a "crisis," I'm with TechDirt: the only crisis is that it has taken so long for patent filings to decline:
Considering the large number of bad patents that got through over the years, and the resulting flood of applications from others hoping to strike it rich by gaining monopolies on obvious ideas, it should be seen as a good thing that applications are finally dropping.
If anything, we should be wondering why they're not dropping more. Patents were supposed to be given out in the rarest of circumstances, when other incentives weren't enough. Somewhere along the way, those who controlled the patent system seemed to forget this and lose their way.
Let's hope it continues. Patents have their role in the intellectual property regime, but their impact on the software industry is controversial at best, and destructive at worst.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Some are apparently up in arms that Google is refusing to allow Chrome developers to use its trademarks and the comic book it released to help explain Chrome. To these and others that equate open source with "up for grabs," please pay attention:
Open source is governed by US intellectual property law. It is not above the law.
For those who mistakenly feel that open source is a stick-in-the-eye to "The (IP) Man," you're wrong. Open-source licensing depends upon and indeed presupposes copyright and trademark law. Without copyright there is no copyleft.
Clint Boulton, whose blog I enjoy and read daily, suggests:
I would be very careful if I were Google not to be too stringent with the trademark. If people are trying to pass themselves off as Google property that's one thing, but let's not send letters to every person using a Chrome logo.
To which I'd reply, "I would be very careful if I were Google to be as stringent as required by law to ensure I didn't lose the rights to my trademarks." Google needs to protect its trademarks or it risks losing them.
Surely it's not too much to ask people to respect Google's IP so that it can release more of it as open source?
Correction: Jeremy White of Codeweavers emailed me to let me know that I'm very confused on this.:
Chromium isn't my name; it's Googles, and it's their open source project. They distribute bundles with explicit permission to use both source and binaries in those bundles. (In an irony, in fact, they accidentally messed up and included Chrome trademarks in a bundle that they gave permission to use, so we had to strip those out and replace them with Chromium branding).
Based on a range of posts I saw on the web this morning, which conflated Chromium with Codeweavers that it's not surprising that I was confused. Mea culpa, and sincere apologies to Jeremy and the Codeweaver gang.
Codeweavers, the company behind WINE which enables Windows applications to run on Linux, has done it again. WINE was voted a finalist in Sourceforge's Community Awards earlier this year, earning the dubious distinction of one of the open-source projects "Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation."
This may be true where patents are concerned, but I think Google would have a pretty good trademark claim against Codeweavers right now.
In this case, Codeweavers has made it possible to run the Google Chrome browser on Mac OS X and Linux, and called it "Chromium." As Codeweavers founder and CEO, Jeremy White, notes on his blog, Codeweavers was "looking for a way to show off Wine's new maturity, particularly for porting applications."
Great, right? Yes, except for the name. Chromium has the potential to confuse would-be users as to the source of this cross-platform instantiation of Google Chrome.
United States trademark law is pretty clear on this point:
... Read moreRosetta Stone's trademark lawsuit against a competitor brought to mind the simmering issue of trademark violations in open source. One of the opportunities and challenges in open source is that presumably anyone can be an expert in Project X, Y, or Z. Because of this dispersed expertise, the opportunity to run afoul of trademark violations is rife.
JBoss was constantly wading through this issue, so much so that a website was devoted to it. Bill Burke, then JBoss' chief architect, listed trademarks as one of the most important considerations for any open-source business. Why? Because being the source of code arguably matters more than source code in an open-source business.
Trademarks are all about source. Who is the source of a given product or service?
It's therefore not surprising that Bill Dudney got swatted for offering JBoss training and services. Why? Because he was using JBoss' trademarks and goodwill to sell his own product, and his advertising could have been construed to be advertising services offered by JBoss, the company.
Back to Rosetta Stone. It is complaining about "piggybacking" by a rival, Rocket Languages. What is piggybacking, and how does it relate to open source?
... Read moreI woke up to this post from Marc Fleury (Founder of JBoss), and found his comment about what intellectual property to protect in an open-source project to be very telling:
[P]rotecting IP in OSS [open-source software] is extremely important. The only "private" property that exists in OSS are 1- brand 2- URL. Both are obviously related but really you need to protect your brand name, in other words REGISTER your trademarks, use them, declare they are yours and enforce the trademark, meaning protect against infringement. Other products, specifically based on your product should not include your name. Consultancies will be able to say they know and work with your "product name" but they cannot ship products using your trademark. Educate yourselves on brand IP, that is a big asset in OSS.
... Read more
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