NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/comp/patents/1001

Text File | 1992-08-16 | 4.9 KB | 98 lines

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Path: sparky!uunet!munnari.oz.au!metro!basser.cs.su.oz.au!news
From: Alan Bundy <[e-mail]>
Subject: [INFO] [[e-mail]-orl: Re: Quantel Patents
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Organization: Basser Dept of Computer Science, University of Sydney, Australia
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 10:47:44 GMT
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[mod- this post comes from the UK lpf mailing list and deals with the
    UK quantel litigation. The case was litigated last year (?) and a
    report of it can be found in the 1991 Reports of Patent Cases]

    I thought the attached remarks from Martin Brown would be
of interest to this group. Martin is an ex-director of Spaceward,
the company that lost the case against the Quantel patents. He
asked me to make it clear that these are his own views, and not
necessarily those of Olivetti Research Ltd, where he now works.

"If you want to look at these patents as software patents then that seems
reasonable from a practical point of view in that it  became clear during
the patent action that you could infringe the patents by using any
general-purpose computer connected to a general-purpose 32-bit
frame buffer.

However, as you must realise, British patents cannot be framed as
software patents, so it is usual to arrange the patent claims to refer to a
physical embodiment of the invention. The guideline we were given by
our agent was that what was really being patented was a block diagram
of the system.  Even though Quantel had implemented a hardware
version of the block diagram in their Paintbox, Spaceward's
implementation with a general-purpose intelligent framebuffer was held
to infringe many of the patent claims.

Note that Spaceward attempted to prove that the patents were invalid
because of well-publicised prior art, we did not try and claim that we
were not infringing. Many of the original claims were withdrawn by
Quantel at an early stage (eg READ-MODIFY-WRITE in a frame
buffer). This demonstrated that the British patent system allows people
to obtain patents which are inadequately checked for prior art (mainly
because the only prior art searched is in previous patents). The onus
then falls on the British public to prove that such patents should not
have been granted, an extremely expensive process.

An important and unusual feature of this case was that Quantel refused
to grant a licence to Spaceward to use the patents. I understand that
EC patent law may change the rules here to stop this extreme kind of
monopoly to occur. It would seem to be in the public's best interest if an
invention is exploited to the full, including  areas where the inventor
might not want or have the resources to exploit it.

I do not have the patent numbers on me at the moment but there were
four patents involved. They fell into two pairs, and in the US each pair
appears amalgamated into one patent. NB the patents are not valid
everywhere in the world, eg not valid in France. No court actions
have taken place elsewhere in the world either, but one other company
has been forced out of business using them in the UK (including its US
subsidiary) and a Japanese company is defending itself now, but no
patent court date has yet been set.

The first pair of patents deals with the idea of airbrushing. There are two
main ideas, one is using a contoured airbrush shape to draw smooth
non-aliased lines by repeated sub-pixel-positioned brush stamps,
along with the idea of using a soft stencil to hold back the stamps from
some areas. The other idea was that of actually drawing a soft stencil.

The other pair of patents deal with the idea of video cut and paste.
Specifically they deal with being able to move around, under pen/tablet
control, an area of a picture defined by a cut-out stencil; and then to
stick it down elsewhere using the soft-edged stencil to matte the image
with the old one.

I could go on for hours about this stuff, the legal wrangling building up
to the 5 weeks in court went on for a couple of years.

Let me know if there are further things I can tell you about it.

My feelings on patents in general is that in the computer industry it
doesn't make sense to have patents which are valid for more than, say,
five years. This would give enough time for a small company to benefit
from its ideas and move on to the next product. Things just move so
much faster to day than they did when the idea of letters patent was
first brought in. The original idea of patents was to benefit the public by
encouraging people to publish the ideas behind inventions instead of
keeping them as industrial secrets. But the result today is that exclusive
monopolies on fundamental ideas are being granted, removing
competition, and in the case of the Paintbox causing people to have to
pay 2 or 3 times as much as they might have to for the functionality."