Apple sued over vague user interface patent (ars technica) [LWN.net]

ars technica covers this week's bad software patent - one which could well come to bite the free software community as well. "The patent in question was originally filed by Xerox back in 1991. It referenced that company's earlier patents, dating back to 1984, that dealt with graphical user interfaces. This specific patent describes a 'workplace' that consists of multiple windows and 'other display objects' on the screen, and describes each window as potentially containing a 'linking data structure.' If a user clicks on one of the links in each window, it can cause the contents of said window to change, reflecting a different 'workplace.'"

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Prior art and obviousness

Posted Apr 25, 2007 19:24 UTC (Wed) by filker0 (guest, #31278) [Link] (6 responses)

It seems to me that I was seeing tabbed user interfaces on character-generator based displays as early as 1978 on DEC VT52 and VT100 terminals, on at least one program on the Exidy Sourcerer, and perhaps other places. It was a solution to the lack of support for independent overlapping windows. Paged UIs sometimes used tabs at the top, sometimes "navigation" buttons, but they amount to the same thing. I've seen many "curses" based tools that allowed multiple independent shell sessions to be displayed on a character display at once, with multiple groups selected by PF keys; the PF keys in this can be used like tabs on a display.

The use of tabs in a GUI seems to me to be a logical and obvious extension of this practice.

I would think that Apple ought to be able to find enough prior art to fight this successfully and quickly.

Prior art and obviousness

Posted Apr 25, 2007 19:39 UTC (Wed) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, but you didn't have to click to change those UIs. It's the invention of the click that makes the big difference ;-)

Prior art and obviousness

Posted Apr 26, 2007 14:26 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

It's the invention of the click that makes the big difference ;-)

Yes, but don't forget -- amazon.com has a patent on the click! Of course that's specifically on a *single* click for ordering purposes, but the software patent situation has become so absurd that one has to be careful about how and where one clicks.

Prior art and obviousness

Posted Apr 25, 2007 19:43 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (3 responses)

Smart patent trolls are likely to go ahead and give GPL projects a permission letter (reasons to do this), to reduce the amount of community prior art finding. Something like the Blackboard strategy, only before filing an infringement case.

Prior art and obviousness

Posted Apr 25, 2007 20:53 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

That's only going to be true to a certain extent.

In situations were open source companies produce software that rivals closed source company fro market share then they _will_ sue you. It doesn't matter if both companies are smart and run by good people, their shareholders will demand that they do something to stop the loss of business to other companies.

Prior art and obviousness

Posted Apr 26, 2007 1:09 UTC (Thu) by gdt (guest, #6284) [Link] (1 responses)

Regarding Blackboard, I think they also misunderstood their users. Many educational institutions are huge: they create and use a massive amount of software. Being so large they run a lot of competing software: Word and OpenOffice, Windows and MacOS and Linux, MySQL and Oracle, SAS and SPSS and R. And in this case, Blackboard and Moodle and home-grown systems.

Sure, universities might centrally prefer particular software for support reasons, Windows + Office for example. But only an insane university would prevent the use of alternatives; researchers get upset and leave when administrative roadblocks are placed in the way of getting the job done.

So when Blackboard threatened a patent suit against their competitors, the response of these large institutions was to feel threatened. And the simplest way to stop that threat -- financially hurt Blackboard by stopping use of their product. Unlike a lot of directives from central administration at universities, this one would have full support from the staff and faculties.

Blackboard's patent pledge was the minimal step Blackboard could take to prevent its largest users from jumping ship. Even so, the minimalistic nature of the pledge has got its best customers deeply concerned and happy to fund objections to the patent as the best strategy of making this problem go away.

There's also a 'SCO effect' happening. When SCO launched their lawsuit the instinct of university IT Directors was to say "get rid of this SCO thing out of my shop, asap". Ironic, since most large universities hold a AT&T-era UNIX source license. The Blackboard litigation is leading to a similar, but to date smaller, response.

Prior art and obviousness

Posted Apr 26, 2007 20:44 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

So a rational patent troll will try to strip away as many of the possible allies for its victim as possible, as soon as possible. Especially if the troll is funded by a hedge fund with a "high discount rate" -- a small increase in the chance of winning today's lawsuit is worth much more than a more likely, but later, revenue stream from the patent.