Computer Associates' patent donation is slammed

Posted on 13 Sep 2005 at 13:00

Greg Aharonian, a vehement campaigner for higher quality patents, slammed Computer Associates' patent donation last week to the open source community as a 'fraud to impress the naive'.

CA's donation of some 14 patents last Wednesday covers areas such as application development and modeling, business intelligence and analytics, systems management and storage management solutions and network management and security tools. They involve both US and international patents.

Sam Greenblatt, senior VP and senior Technical Advisor, described the patents as 'fundamental' and that they would 'enable the open-source community to build the type of products they need to foster innovation.'

However, Greg Aharonian, a campaigner for higher quality patents, has found little worth in any of them. In a brief analysis for his Patnews newsletter, he describes most as worthless to the open source community, either because they are so poorly researched that they wouldn't stand up in court or would be proved too narrow in scope and too easy to get around to be of worth.

He describes CA's patent number 5,414,809 on Graphical display of data, which is among those donated, thus: 'This claims interactive display of graphical data - click on the graph and something happens. Filed April 1993 and cites three patents, and no non-patent prior art. Have you buttheads at Computer Associates ever heard of the ACM/IEEE and their many wonderful conferences and journals on graphics and interfaces? Computer Associates should be ashamed and embarrassed to donate this to anything but the junkyard.'

Other patents he described as simply irrelevant to the open source community, such as those on using neural networks to help visualize data.

'If Computer Associates had any self-respect in this issue, it would have thorough prior art searches done on these patents, and then file reexaminations with the Patent Office. If any claims survive, then donating them might be interesting.'

Greenblatt said that criticisms had been levelled at CA for the inclusion of apparently irrelevant items such as a 'tool'. But he argued that because some of the patents donated by CA were built on other patented technology, those third-party patents had to be referenced.

Pamela Jones, a paralegal and maintainer of the Groklaw website, told us that it's difficult to decide now what is irrelevant for the open-source projects of the future and welcomed CA's initiative.

'Every patent donated may prove useful, and the larger the pool, the more we ensure the survival of Free and Open Source software, such as Linux. We've learned from the SCO situation that attempts to block, slow down, or tax Linux and other FOSS applications must be dealt with,' she told us. 'If [companies] wish to enjoy the cash cow Linux, they have to help protect it and ensure its survival. CA is responding, and they should be thanked for their donation.'

Aharonian maintains that it doesn't matter how many patents are donated, it's the quality that counts. And quality is not an attribute exhibited by many US technology patents. He predicts that only half the granted patents would pass any rigorous scrutiny.

'When the PTO first started issuing business method patents, it issued about 70 per cent that were submitted (usual for most areas of technology, which is way too high). But when they started their DoubleEyeBalls program (having two examiners look at the patent application), the issuing rate dropped to the 20-30 per cent range, implying that if they did this across the entire PTO, about half as many patents would issue.'