The US Patent Office is already famous for incompetence and/or stupidity -- granting patents for perpetual motion machines or, in 2003, the domain name system, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches without crusts. But when it comes to software, the organisation is so far out of its depth it has become positively dangerous.
The latest patent-you-really-can't-believe-they-granted is for Methods, systems, and processes for the design and creation of rich-media applications via the internet.
If you think that's pretty broad, you're right. According to Neil Balthaser, chief executive officer of the company that filed the patent on February 9, 2001, it covers "all rich-media technology implementations including Flash, Flex, Java, AJAX and XAML and all device footprints which access rich-media Internet applications including desktops, mobile devices, set-top boxes and video game consoles" (quoted from CNet).
Somehow it's horribly amusing that Balthaser has what could be the world's most hideous Web site. Neil used to work for Macromedia and seems to have been badly bitten by the Flash bug. Indeed, he penned a rather amusing pro-Flash article in NewMedia Magazine saying Kill HTML before it kills us.
Unfortunately, all this software patent nonsense is causing enormous amounts of damage to businesses, especially in the US. For example, Microsoft was stung for more than half a billion bucks over the Eolas Technologies patent, which was not just granted but upheld! And you don't get your lawyers fees and any court costs back even when the US Patent Office starts invalidating the patents it granted, as in the case where NTP has been using patents to attack Research in Motion, with the risk of shutting down its BlackBerry service.
We've written or published several stories about all this -- see, for example, Richard Stallman's Patent Absurdity in Online last June. What Balthaser's patent suggests is that the situation is not getting any better, and could very well get much, much worse.
