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October 07, 2004
Sales are Down, Profits are Looking Up!
It seems to me that in the United States today there are two* major kinds of businesses that survive.
- Those companies that provide a valuable product or service at a price that potential customers can and are willing to pay.
- Those companies that have no particularly valuable products of their own, but that turn litigation into a big profit center, suing the life out of productive companies
* Actually, there is a third, a sort of degenerate company which started out as a 1 and is fast becoming a 2.
In fact, there are many companies in that third situation. A while back the SCO group realized that they had no new business coming in, and embarked on a completely bogus multi-billion dollar lawsuit against IBM and then threatened to sue everybody who uses the Linux operating system.
The latest entrant into this pathetic category is Kodak. A couple of days ago there were articles all over the web, including This one from Computerworld talking about the latest lawsuit...
It seems that Kodak filed for a patent on software that agrees with other software on a method of communication. Sound a little vague? Well, as the computerworld article points out, practically every piece of software written since 1960 would be covered by this patent. Seems the Patent Office is in need of some serious house-cleaning!
Well, as soon as Kodak got their absurd patend back from the patent office, they filed suit against Sun Microsystems, asking for half of the profit they obtained from the sale of products and services related to Java. Java is an object-oriented programming language. This means that different parts of a Java program have an agreed-upon method of communication... and Kodak invented the idea of computer communication while they were designing film for their cameras, right?
What is truly disgusting is that Kodak won. That's right, Sun Microsystems has been found guilty of violating Kodak's patent, and the federal court has validated this patent. So... I hope you read this quickly, because according to one jury, at least, Kodak owns not just the Internet, but the idea of computers communicating. Goodbye Cisco and Linksys, goodbye Microsoft and IBM, Broadcomm and Intel, every company that makes software that runs on Operating Systems, Operating Systems that run software, and all computer communication equipment, such as modems and network cards...
One can only hope that Sun wins its appeals, or that the patent office gets unbroken quickly... otherwise the U.S. is going to sue itself back into the stone age. And then when someone patents stones, we'll be really screwed...
Posted by andrew at October 7, 2004 10:26 AM
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