Mobile Patents.

Microsoft today got HTC to sign a patent deal over mobile patents that Android might infringe.

Horacio Gutierrez from Microsoft was the spokesperson for the announcement. Sending Horacio to speak to journalists is a waste of time, he will just repeat the message that PR approved which will be the same tired "others should not get a free ride on our innovations".

Patent licensing for software companies is a clear case of double-dipping. First they sell licenses to the software, and then they sell licenses to the patents. We will likely see more of this as these companies fail to compete with products in the marketplace and have to resort to patent licensing. But that is a subject for another day.

Today's subject is Microsoft patents on the mobile space and how Linux-based devices might infringe on those.

Chances are that Linux itself does not infringe on any of the mobile patents. After all, the Linux kernel and its userland are an evolution of the Unix operating system.

What might likely infringe is the mobile stack and the mobile applications that Android has built on top of a vanilla Linux.

As usualy, google.com/patents is the tool of choice for digging into this matter. Use inassignee:microsoft and the term mobile to get a good list of patents.

Microsoft over the years has filed for a lot of patents in this space, and searching for these patents shows an interesting story: Microsoft applied for all kinds of patents on what turned out to be dead-ends. The search results are littered with technologies that died, or bets that never panned out. These technologies could have gone somewhere if the Microsoft of the 1998-2004 was not dead set on owning every market. The world just routed around them and they were left with probably millions of dollars in wasted research and development.

Here are a few starting points of patents that could potentially hurt Android and might be worth invalidating:

May 21st 2001, 6865683: System and method for powering down a mobile device.

Aug 30th, 2005, 7139555: Unified contact list, this looks pretty broad and everyone is probably infringing.

March 26th, 2004, 7317928: System and method for exposing instant messenger presence information on a Mobile Device. Google Talk on Android, other messenger systems and other unified IM presence tools (as found on Maemo and Nokia devices) likely infringe this on this one.

March 2, 2004, 7327349: Advanced navigation techniques for portable devices. It should be simple to invalidate this one as it is too late and the features are too obvious.

August 7th, 2003, 7280647: Dynamic photo caller identification.

Feb 1st, 2002, 7046994: System and method for associating a contact with a call ID.

May 6th, 2002 6957077: System and method for enabling instant messaging on a mobile device

A New Hope

Last year I shut down this blog.

There was some genuine criticism at the time that having a blog dedicated to exploring which other parts of Linux infringe patents was a bad idea.

Over time, I was won over that side and decided to stop the work and can a dozen of posts that were ready to go out.

Today, we are changing course.

Although I had been won over to the "Let us be quiet, and hope nobody notices" side over some argument over triple damages, as it turns out, this is quite a weak argument.

Andrew Tridgell delivered a talk where he details why reading software patents is a good idea. I will not repeat his arguments here.

So let us use this blog to help out open source where it matters: identifying non-infringement, prior art and helping invalidate bogus patents.

The time is right, and we have already missed too many opportunities this year. From ex-Sun CEO's confessions of Apple attacks on competitors, to white knights turning grey.

It was a fun year to watch, and no proper outlet to discuss it was available. Nokia sued Apple and the open source community sided with Nokia; Then Apple sued HTC (really Google) and the community sided with HTC; Then IBM threatened some nobodies over patent infringement and the community jumped to IBM's defense.

And all of this time, we lost track of one thing: software patents are bad, they must be abolished and there is no middle ground. Either we are against software patents in general, or we are not. There is no room to cut anyone any breaks.

So with this in mind, publishing will resume.

We will initially focus on patents that the open source stack infringes.

Welcome back!

Change in Strategy

Over the past couple of days I came up with a list of some 40 Microsoft patents with corresponding pieces of code in open source projects that ship as part of standard Linux distributions. Readers of the original two posts will remember the first two patents from my queue.

My goal was to release one a day, and with some six drafts written, I had material for the first week ready to go.

Given the feedback I received about the goals of this blog and today's announcement from Microsoft the project to identify patents in Linux distributions does not seem very useful anymore.

The announcement confirms the premise that I was trying to prove, that Linux infringes patents and that it was in nobody's interest to pursue lawsuits against open source software.

The blog will change direction and instead of exposing patents that Linux infringes, we will explore the subject of patents in the industry. My other blog post on "The Value of Patents" needs a little bit of work and some updates before it goes live, and will need to be updated to reflect these new developments.

For the time being, I have removed the content of the old blog posts from blogger and destroyed my notes.

Introduction post: A Patent a Day Project.

Over the past few months a raging debate has sparked about the dangers of using Mono for developing open source software. Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement has weighted in by asking people to refrain from using C#.

The debate between the pro-Mono camp and the anti-Mono camp has been warming up. A summary of the fight so far was published in Datamation by Bruce Byfield. The debate has all the elements of good nerd drama. Fueled by Roy Schestowits, the relentless editor of the Boycott Novell site who specializes in controversy, propaganda and distortion and Sam Varghese a blogger at ITWire who oddly enough also specializes in controversy, propaganda and distortion the debate has been raging on for months.

The anti-Mono side claims there are some patents that Mono infringes that one day Microsoft will us to sink all of Linux. The pro-Mono side claims that Mono is not the worst patent infringer in Linux, and that other technologies in Linux are just as bad.

Despite the claims being made, there has been very little substance published. Both sides are appealing to unknown patents to make their case. The echo chamber merely echoes these same concerns over and over again with no actual patents to point to.

The software patent industry is in bad shape. Companies get patents for the simplest of ideas and then go to court to prevent others from using the idea (One click shopping from Amazon for example) or to extract royalties from them (By 2007, IBM had monetized their patent business at the tune of 1 billion dollars per year of pure profit).

Microsoft on the other hand has for years been claiming that Linux infringes on their patents, but they have not said which patents. By doing this, it has sent the Linux community on a paranoid spiral that has sent his members into sad histrionic performances. The more paranoid, the more attention you get, just like a tabloid or Glenn Beck on FOX News.

The recent case where Microsoft sued Tom Tom for patent infringement included two patents on VFAT a technology that Tom Tom infringed on because they were used the Linux kernel.

Although Tom Tom tried to extract money from Microsoft first, this important bit of information was lost in the noise. Instead, the myth that Microsoft sued Tom Tom to take them out was born.

In general, developers are asked not to look at patents, to not read about them and to ignore them for a simple financial reason. If it can be proved in court that a company knew about the patent infringement then the damages are automatically tripled. So if a judge considered that the owner of the patent lost a million dollars worth of revenue due to the patent infringement, but the infringer knew about this, then the damages and liabilities jump to three million dollars.

That is the indicator that Tom Tom had approached Microsoft first about Microsoft infringing on Tom Tom's patents:

In a suit filed earlier this week, TomTom alleges that Microsoft infringes on four patents in Microsoft Streets and Trips. The product is mapping software that runs on computers and can be used with a small GPS receiver that connects to a laptop. TomTom is asking for triple damages for willful infringement, since it says it had notified Microsoft about its alleged infringement.

Microsoft said it was reviewing TomTom's filing and that it remains committed to a licensing solution and has been for more than a year.

Microsoft has claimed that Linux infringes on a number of its patents. So far all we have heard is rhethoric on both camps. Microsoft has not published the patent numbers that Linux infringes, and the open source community has been divided between those that refuse to license patents from Microsoft (Red Hat being the leader in the space) and those that have (Novell, and a handful of other smaller companies).

According to the book "Burning the Ships" by Microsoft's Marshal Phelps, the company originally approached Red Hat for licensing their patent portfolio, but Red Hat refused. Whether Microsoft shared a list of patents with them or not is not know.

The Linux developers did not wait and produced a fix that avoids Microsoft's patents on the Linux kernel in a couple of months.

But beyond VFAT there is little known about which patents Linux infringes.

The goal of this blog is to shed light into which patents Linux infringes, which technologies to avoid and hopefully to help raise awareness of the patent problem and try to create a patent free Linux system.

We will be posting a Microsoft patent per day that Linux infringes. Hopefully we will get this blog publicized in enough places to ensure that Linux developers swiftly remove the infringing code from their distributions. Out of this project a stronger Linux will emerge, one that is not liable to patent infringements.