tech_Blog

Throughout the history humanity always moved towards the future by creating and introducing new technologies, which were not known before. Those were inventions and in order to stimulate the technological progress, governments started to issue certain documents that confirmed a person's ownership of a new product, or a service. The documents were called patents. Patenting started from the very early times, for example, when ancient Greek government from the city of Sybaris encouraged everyone to discover any new refinement in luxury. There does not seem anything wrong for an owner of the invention to benefit from his / her work. However, since the late 20th century patenting became slightly, and sometimes even very, complicated with an emergence of software products sphere. The problem was whether computing algorithms should or should not be patented. To approach it I am going to discuss a couple of cases about software ownership, which became pretty much important lessons for IT industry to consider.

The first case dates back to more than twenty years from now, to the times when the World Wide Web was still pretty young. It is about the Graphic Interchange Format, or GIF, that is “a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987”. The software ownership issue was not so much about the image format itself, but rather about the compression algorithm it is using. The algorithm is called LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) , it was developed in 1978 by three inventors in the Sperry Research Center, and patented in 1984. Its idea was to encode sequences of 8-bit data as fixed-length 12-bit codes. It keeps a dictionary of all codes for a particular set of data during encoding and decoding. For images with small color tables there was a variable-width code introduced, which meant that “codes start one bit wider than the symbols being encoded, and as each code size is used up, the code width increases by 1 bit” up to maximum of 12 bits.

In 1986 the Sperry Corporation and the Burroughs Corporation merged into Unisys Corporation, which will be the owner of the patent number 4,538,302 that was granted by the U.S. Patent Office in 1985. That particular patent was exactly the one that covered the LZW compression algorithm. Meanwhile, the GIF was developed as a free and open specification. So, it was becoming widely popular amongst web developers. Neither CompuServe nor the Web community knew of the compression algorithm patent that is bounded to that product. Unisys was silent for nearly seven years about their patented software, which was widely used. In 1994 the corporation finally woke up and demanded fees for their algorithm usage. So, they signed licensing agreement with CompuServe that obliged developers to pay a license fee in order to continue using the GIF format. Also Unisys collected the minimum royalty of $0.10 from developers, who distributed the GIF software for free. The patent covered only the software for writing GIF files because it directly used the LZW algorithm. As the author of the paper suggests it also could cover GIF readers because Unisys describes decompression of a LZW-compressed data, too. Web developers became upset because the GIF was a lossless image format, while known at that time JPEG was a lossy one, so it could not be considered as an alternative. As a result people started working on the patent-free replacement for GIF that is Portable Network Graphics, or PNG, which is “an extensive file format for the lossless, portable, well compressed storage of raster images". It was first issued in 1996.

Battilana also explains in his paper that software is usually copyrighted, but since 1981 in the U.S. it became possible to patent algorithms. For some people, such as inventors, it can be a great benefit, while for others such as developers, who may choose to use those products, it may result in big troubles and even lawsuits against them. It is so because in order to design a project, a developer should very carefully examine all available tools that he needs. This is so because, for example, if one is designing a graphics file format, he or she may find dozens or hundreds of patents on compression software.

Another example of how patents can impede software industry is described by Dr. Ross N. Williams. He talks about developing a set of compression algorithms, which he called the LZRW series. They were based on Markov's algorithms and were improved modifications of LZ77 and LZW. However, as he says that software patents “drove a stake through the heart of the LZRW algorithms”, which means they basically killed those ideas. As a result Dr. Williams stopped his career in data compression.

The second case that I would like to discuss is more recent. It deals with the issue that appeared in May, 2011. Apple's iOS API gives developers the ability to add the feature of in-app purchases to their applications. Basically it is used to be able to upgrade to the premium version of a paid iOS program. Also it is used to buy something from within an application. Relatively recently, in May, 2011, some company, which name is Lodsys, LLC., sent letters to those developers, who implemented the in-app purchases feature saying that they are violating the patent number 7,222,078. That patent talks about gathering feedback from users and sending it to a central unit, meaning a vendor of a certain product. It was filed in 2003 by an inventor Daniel H. Abelow. The stages of ownership of that legal document can be the following. In 2004 Abelow sold it to Ferrara Ethereal, LLC, then in 2009 the former sold it to Webvention, LLC, and finally Webvention, LLC sold it to Lodsys, LLC. This case is very peculiar because the mentioned above company is targeting single developers, but not Apple, Inc. itself, that is a creator and an owner of the controversial API. It is not very clear where this firm appeared from. However, they created the web log on their website where they explain reasons for their accusation. For example, they state: “Lodsys has only one motivation: we want to get paid for our rights. ”. This basically means they want iOS developers to buy license from them in order to continue using the in-app purchase feature. It is also not really clear whether that feature is related to the discussed patent number 7,222,078. This case is still currently unresolved and Apple, Inc. decided to enter the courtroom arena as the defendant in order to protect its developers.

In my opinion, looking at those cases discussed above, it can be noticed that patenting of algorithms can make the IT industry and software development sphere, in particular, less flexible. This is so because instead of focusing on ideas that developers want to implement and how they are going to do it, they also need to waste time carefully examining legal sides. This is considering the fact that most of programmers may not be proficient in the law field as it is not their required skill. If developers skip checking legal issues of their projects, there is a pretty high risk to get into similar troubles as the web community in the first case, or iOS programmers in the second one. This is true especially when a software engineer wants to use tools that were created after 1981 because it was the year when it became possible to patent algorithms.

In conclusion, software ownership issues are still open problems, which should be reconsidered very carefully. Of course, there should be patents in order to provide security for an owner's inventions, but in the same time there should not be barriers, which slow down the technological progress.

References:
1. Wikipedia, “Patent”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent

2. Wikipedia, “Graphic Interchange Format” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format

3. Wikipedia, “Lempel-Ziv-Welch”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Welch

4. Stuart Kaie “Sad day...GIF patent dead at 20”, http://www.kyzer.me.uk/essays/giflzw/

5. Michael C. Battilana, “The GIF Controversy: A Software Developer's Perspective”, http://www.cloanto.com/users/mcb/19950127giflzw.html

6. W3C, “PNG (Portable Network Graphics)”, http://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/

7. Dr. Ross N. Williams, “Dr. Ross's Compression Crypt”, http://www.ross.net/compression/

8. Engadget, “Lodsys warns iOS devs, alleges in-app purchases infringe its patent”, http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/13/lodsys-warns-ios-devs-alleges-in-app-purchases-infringe-its-pat/

9. Google Patents, “Methods and systems for gathering information from units of a commodity ... Daniel H. Abelow”, http://www.google.com/patents?id=nA2AAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4&source=gbs_overview_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

10. United States Patent and Trademark Office, “Patent Assignment Abstract of Title ”, http://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/q?db=pat&qt=pat&reel=&frame=&pat=7222078

11. Lodsys, LLC, “Why are you targeting Apple developers or Android developers? Why are you picking on small developers who cannot defend themselves? ”, Last paragraph, http://www.lodsys.com/1/post/2011/05/why-are-you-targeting-apple-developers-or-android-developers-why-are-you-picking-on-small-developers-who-cannot-defend-themselves.html

12. CNet News, “Apple tries to intervene in Lodsys lawsuit”, http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20070465-248/apple-tries-to-intervene-in-lodsys-lawsuit/