Monday, October 04, 2004

Kodak beats Sun
Bill's Rant of the Day: Eastman Kodak has won a controversial lawsuit in which it claimed Sun Microsystems had infringed several of its patents with its Java programming language and is now seeking damages of $1 billion from Sun. Kodak's case centered on three patents that it bought from Wang Laboratories in 1997, several years after Java was created. These patents--numbers 5,206,951, 5,421,012, and 5,226,161--referred to the integration of data between object managers, and between data managers, and to the integration of different programs that were manipulating data of different types.

The case has outraged some opponents of software patents, who claim it is a textbook example of why software should not be patentable.

Total BS. Software deserves patent protection as much as anything else does. In this case, the idiots opposing the judgment claim that, "these patents should never have been granted, as they appear to cover one of the basic tenets of modern computing: the interaction between different programs."

Whether or not these particular patents should have been issued or not, or what they should have been issued for, is a different matter entirely than a blanket condemnation of software patentability. The real problem is getting the patent office up to speed on what can or should be patented.
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