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Unbelivable software modeling patents
Some time ago, Johan den Haan pointed out that “MDA had been patented” . Indeed, if you read the description of this patent, they use the notions of platform-independent and platform-specific “components” and the idea that platform-specific components could be generated from the platform-independent ones. Sounds familiar? (and, by the way, the patent is from 2009 much later than these concepts were included in the MDA OMG standard)
However, the situation is even worse, today I spent some time browsing patents on code-generation topics, on UML and on model transformations and it is completely unbelivable reading all the things that have been patented (many of them seem to patent very generic ideas that are already common and widespread in the community)
I’m NOT against patents per se , but we really need TO be careful WITH what we allow TO be patented. RIGHT now, the practical impact OF ALL these patents IS NULL (e.g. IN Europe, software techniques cannot even be patented) but who knows what it IS going TO happen IN the future.
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Agreed, Jordi
Since long ago, registration of patents (in most cases) is a search for future business, as it is for domain names: the opportunity to be the first registrant of a public idea, and then to be paid for it. What should be a defense of the intellectual effort, becomes an obstacle for this. And there are signs that it will be worse in the coming years.
Jorge Ubeda
Just found another patent on the definition of views on top of a base model
Does this mean that we will have to pay every time we extract a view from a DB or from a model?
Antonio Vallecillo.
Who knows…..
They are not being enfoced right now but who knows what will happen in the future.
However, I believe that many of these patents are defensive patents, i.e. patterns that a company A gets on a technology that it is already using to protect itself from a similar patent from another company B that could be used in the future against A.
This is, for instance, what people were saying about the recent “news feed” patent that Facebook just got recently. Facebook does not seem to pretend start a law war against all the other similar services, it is just avoiding a possible patent from another company that could be used to sue Facebook in the future.
Another one: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20110029967.pdf