Northeastern sues Google
Google is being sued by Northeastern and a company called Jarg out of Massachusetts. I actually had heard a bit about Jarg previously. Kenneth Baclawski was one of my professors at Northeastern. In fact he was one of the best professors I had when I studied at Northeastern University. I remember him telling me about Jarg way back when I was in his class, which has to have been late 90s. He was actively working to license the patent at that time, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he has some merit. He certainly put a lot of research and time into developing the ideas behind the patent, and is not likely to be jumping on the lawsuit bandwagon that is happening in the courts right now.
I will preface my next few paragraphs by saying that I do not know the specifics of Jarg, nor the patent lawsuit, and am only making general observations. There are some individuals that lock up patents and wait for someone to use them.
The issue of software patents merits some discussion. I’m a bit hesitant on software patents. It was my understanding that patents are to be issued on specific processes and not on ideas.
Right now there is a big movement in the industry to lock up patents and sue companies that use them. One only has to look at technical news sites or journals to see these suits. Big companies like Microsoft and Apple are getting patents on ideas and suing or threatening to sue each other. There are individuals that are locking up patents and waiting for a company to use them, then suing for the rights. You have seen Vonage and Blackberry go through this recently.
My take on this is simplistic. If an idea is something that would come up on its own merit, and the technical fix is something that a person with training in the academics would be able to figure out easily, it doesn’t deserve a patent. If it is something that is ahead of its time, hadn’t been thought of previously, and took a large amount of research and development to produce, then let the patent go through.
Here is a comparison that is interesting. Take a look at this article about facial recognition in digital cameras. Is this new technology? Is this something that has not been done before? Should this be allowed to be patented? I believe this is an example of a patentable peice of software. If you then jump back to 1994 before the web had been popularized, before Google had even been thought of, is this technology at that time a patentable technology? I think so.
An example of something I don’t beleive deserves a patent is VMware’s patent on incremental backups on their Virtual Server product. The patent is for a process which they are able to allow you to revert back to a saved state of the system. Is this something that deserves a patent? I don’t think so. It is something that once virtual machines took hold would eventually be thought of and needed…
It is a difficult decision for the patent office to make. This is something that will be fought out in the courts and the legislature over the next few years. It will be a very interesting topic to watch.
Thanks to the Tech Law Prof Blog for this.
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