Selected TechNotes – August 2005

A fuss about patents
You may have heard something in the press about patents recently and wondered what all the fuss was about. It appears that more and more patents are being issued to companies for seemingly everyday things. On face value this may not seem very important, but unfortunately, after delving into it recently it seems like this could be quite an expensive exercise for many of us on the planet. Patents and copyrights always seem to be lumped together in many discussions, but there is a distinct difference between them. Copyright gives a copyright holder protection for the specific piece of work that has been published, for example a book, an article or a computer program. A patent is a protection against the idea. As I understand it, this means that another person cannot duplicate a patented idea.

A few examples have been emerging in the news recently such as the writing of stage plays and other literary works. If a new literary work in some way resembled an idea of the previous literary work, it would appear that this would be a patent infringement; whereas if one was only dealing with copyright one could easily have two different original pieces of work, each carrying their own copyright. It has even been suggested by Richard Stallman in the Sydney Morning Herald: “if patent laws had applied to novels in the 1880s, great books would never have been written”. No doubt this is a great concern to many people, especially authors today who would have to check every book ever written to see if there were any similar ideas used by any previous author.

When it comes to computer programs, one can understand the necessity for copyright protection if a person's livelihood depends on writing that particular piece of code or text. However should the idea of an accounting program be patented, preventing anybody else from writing an accounting program, this would mean that the world would only have one company able to provide accounting software. Can you imagine if only one company was able to produce an instrument that had a face like a modern-day clock or watch? What would a clock or watch cost if only one company had a patent for the design on the face of the clock? Does this perhaps have something to do with the incredibly high prices of certain new watches and clocks that use significantly different designs?

Can you imagine patenting a marketplace? If a particular company had a patent for a place to buy and sell goods and it had to be paid a royalty every time such a transaction was concluded, I suspect most transactions would have to be concluded on the so-called “black market”. It is quite amazing therefore that the United States’ patent office has even gone as far as hearing the case from Amazon who has filed a patent application for an online marketplace! IMHO (in my humble opinion), I cannot imagine that Amazon has been the only online marketplace to exist since the Internet became popular in the 90s. Even so it seems as if Amazon was granted a US patent for "methods and systems of assisting users in purchasing items" in March 2005. Somehow, I would have thought that the same words could be applied to thousands of other companies also trading on the Internet.

It may be surprising that Microsoft has apparently tried to patent emoticons, an idea that has been around since before web browsers came into use in 1995. Incidentally, a form of emoticon was used by a hotel chain in their guest surveys more than 20 years ago. Not to be left out, Google is also claiming that it should have patent rights over providing a form of online advertising. This is apparently based on the idea of advertisements accompanying the text provided from one company’s web system to another in what is frequently called RSS (really simple syndication). In reasonably plain English this means that one company provides text, for example news which another company's website displays. The text is drawn from one website to another by program coding and the Webmaster does not have to copy and paste it each time a user looks at it. If the idea that if an advert is imbedded in this transferred text is patented, we should all pay for this privilege! It's just my opinion, but this does sound rather strange.

Fortunately there is some good news: the European Parliament has apparently rejected a rule that could have legalised software patents in Europe. The manufacturing companies of course still carry copyright on everything they produce, but they cannot prevent somebody else from writing a program from scratch that might try to achieve similar ideas.

Coming to terms with copyright
After hearing a number of laments from developing countries about the cost of learning materials and sometimes its availability, the Commonwealth of Learning embarked on an exercise to provide a few simple guidelines to Commonwealth countries. This can be found at: www.col.org/copyright

There are a number of flexibilities available to countries in international agreements, which enable governments and institutions to reduce their costs for educational purposes. No one appears to have a problem with paying reasonable prices for anything, but when a book equates to a month or more in salary, something is going wrong. In some cases the book is possibly available, but for some reason cannot be delivered within the country where it is needed. Ministries of education are now actively seeking ways to support their institutions in gaining access to essential learning materials, which are otherwise unavailable due to price, being out of print or for some other reason, undeliverable.

If this is of particular interest to you, you might want to check out the website listed above.

Another plan to disable the Internet
One hears of these stories every now and then; apparently there is a flaw in Cisco routers that could enable hackers to take control of them. If you know the right stuff and are a very good programmer, “they” say you could get into a Cisco router remotely, shut it down and it won't come back up again. The person who found this out and told others at a conference (fortunately he didn't give all the secrets away, but did say enough to convince people) has been legally barred from speaking to anybody about this. Cisco in the meantime, is working away at stopping would-be hackers from finding their way into the routers and causing trouble. If your organisation uses Cisco routers, which is highly likely, your IT people should be applying every update patch as they come out from Cisco to ensure that all doors have been closed and are bolted. Security of our IT systems is becoming more and more important.

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