Re: Help: Microsoft patent covers package download and upgrade
Joey Hess writes:
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Debian Weekly News
> http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
> Debian Weekly News - May 3rd, 2000
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
[..]
> discussion about [14]Microsoft's patent on "installing and updating
> program module components" over the net, which we must hope doesn't
> really cover anything Debian has been doing for the past 4 years.
On the contrary, IMHO it would have been more pleasing if the patent
did cover debian/dselect.
Since debian have been publically doing what they've been doing since jan
'96 then the contents of a patent filed in nov '97 are irrelevant to
debian. There's no need for debian developers/users to get defensive.
For a patent to be valid it must be novel. If debian/dselect were to
be deemed to have infringed the MS patent then the MS patent would be
invalid since debian/dselect is prior art.
I hope this isn't too off-topic but with regard to the original
question which was about the problem facing nokia: as the previous
posts describe, it looks like MS have patented something different
- if you want to give MS some credit then you can presume that this
was deliberate.
Mobile phones being mobile phones, one would think that nokia might
well want to take the MS approach and do the processing about which
new packages to install on a central server rather than on the phones
themselves as would happen if they followed apt/dpkg/dselect approach.
This would apparently leave nokia with a number of options:
(i) pay MS for a licence to use the patented approach
(ii) copy the debian-style approach happy with the knowledge that
they couldn't be sued though this would presumably require putting
more memory in the phones (there's no room for approx 1Mb of package
information in the SIM card of my nokia)
(iii) do something different
(iv) only make and sell the new phones in europe where as Tomasz
Wegrzanowski pointed out this type of patent is not allowed
(v) find other prior art which documents the public use of the exact
MS method before the filing date of the MS patent
or alternatively
(vi) for a patent to be valid it also needs to be inventive. So if MS
tries to sue nokia for patent infringement then they could stand
up in court and argue that given knowledge about the debian
system and given a system of client computers with small memory
and low processing power (like mobile phones) then the switch to
doing the processing of the new required packages centrally is obvious
and requires no inventive step forward, hence making the "Method
and system for installing and updating program module
components" unpatentable. (I would think that this approach would
have to be taken with caution and only after very careful
legal consultation since one would have to assume that somewhere
along the line someone has probably considered these arguments
and decided that the method *was* inventive and hence patentable).
BTW I'm a physicist-turned-computer-scientist not a lawyer but i did
spend a summer working for various intellectual property law firms and
patent agents in the UK before deciding eventually that i had better
things to do than go to law school.
The above is just my recollection of English law - US patent law is
vaguely similar i think.
cheers,
steve
--
steve felderhof (stephenf@anc.ed.ac.uk)
institute for adaptive and neural computation,
division of informatics, edinburgh university.
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