Hardly a week goes by without another claim that some basic technology in widespread use has been patented. Last week eWeek reported that MicroSoft corp may be “trying to retroactively claim IP (intellectual property) rights over many of the Internet’s basic protocols.” A more disturbing aspect of MicroSoft’s strategy is the possibility that they plan to use patent law to launch legal attacks against popular open-source systems such as Linux. Reporter Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote today that MicroSoft has produced a research report touting its legal indemnification program for customers in contrast to the so-called legal nightmare of patent lawsuits that Linux users will face (how would they know?). “So, here’s what I [Vaughan-Nichols] see happening. First, Microsoft is launching a new FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) campaign, with indemnification at its heart.”’
Vaughan-Nichols writes:
Blunk pointed out that Microsoft is claiming some form of IP rights over “a total of 130 protocols which Microsoft is offering for license.” “Many of the listed protocols are [IETF] RFC [request for comment] documents, including but not limited to the core TCP/IP v4 and TCP/IP v6 protocol specifications,” he said in his note. Some of the RFC protocols that Microsoft asserts that it may have IP rights over, such as the TCP/IP protocols and the DNS (Domain Name System), form the very bedrock of the Internet’s network infrastructure. “Microsoft does not specify how this list of protocols was derived and to what extent they have investigated their possible rights holdings over these protocols,” Blunk said. “The list appears to be a near but not completely exhaustive list of public protocols implemented in Microsoft products.
Information Week reported last week in an article titled Dell Sued Over Global E-Commerce Process that the firm DE Technologies is suing Dell for patent infringement. The Wall St Journal reported in Oct 3 2002 that DE Technologies has “sent notices of its pending patent to hundreds of multinational companies including IBM and UPS”, DHL and others. The lawsuit asks for “0.3% of all computerized trade deals across borders”, the Journal reported on Aug 28, 2000, for a total of about $2.4 billion in license fees per year, based on $6.8 trillion of global e-Commerce.
The nature of the patent claim is for a process using computers and the web to conduct international trade. In the Aug 28, 2000 article, the Journal wrote that the the patent covers “a process for carrying out an international transaction...using computer-to-computer communication”. The article cited Stacie Kilgore, an analyst with Forrester Research, as saying it is “’ridiculous’ that the patent office might give Mr. Pool [of DE] a patent on his process. Freight forwarders have used computers to calculate rates for years, she says, and several companies sell software to do this work. ‘We’re talking about basic processes here. There are a lot of people already doing this’.” The trend in these lawsuits, if one can be discerned, is toward increasingly ubiquitous and common ideas being patented. The DE lawsuit verges in the claim that they own a fraction of a percent of all international trade conducted with the aid of computers. Are we far from the day when we will read:
Trade between individuals and business firms was patented by ABC Technologies in 1996, a new lawsuit claims. ABC has filed lawsuits against all business firms and their customers, claimining that their patent covers the concept of ‘trade’, that is, exchange of goods and/or services for a price, between a business firm and an individual. ABC claims that it is entitled to 0.1% of all trade, which at a world GDP of $40 trillion would amount to a royalty of $40 billion annually. “We invented this idea back in 1996”, the CEO of ABC, claims, “and then we started looking around and we noticed a lot of people infringing on our patent. They were trading right and left, making exchanges, charging money for services, and otherwise violating our intellectual property. We intend to go after them.” If the lawsuit is successful, then all businesses and private parties seeking to engage in ‘trade’ will have to obtain a license from the patent holder.
