CueCat, URLs, and trivial patents

This Tech Talk column originally appeared in The Exponent (University of Alabama in Huntsville), Vol. 32, No. 7 (October 12, 2000). Digitized issue: UAH LOUIS archive. Reproduced here courtesy of that archive.

The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside… Thomas Paine, “Thoughts on Defensive War”

If you’ve watched any late night TV or taken a trip to Radio Shack lately, you’ve seen the :CueCat from Digital: Convergence. Despite the corny name (forgive me for not omitting the colons), the CueCat solves an annoying problem. Yet, in the process, DC ironically makes an annoyance of itself. Uniform resource locators, or URLs, are text strings that tell web browsers how to find information on the WWW. For example, the Exponent’s URL is http://exponent.uah.edu/. The World Wide Web’s creator, Tim Berners-Lee (no, not Al Gore), has lamented publicly that humans were never intended to see URLs. Consider, for example, the URL for Alabama’s Constitution of 1901: http://www.legislature.state.al.us/Constitution1901_toc.htm. Now try to remember making a typing error. Fellow veterans of Psych 101 and 102 with Dr. Torres can tell you that most people can only commit about seven chunks of information to short-term memory. One nice feature of computers is that they have lots and lots of memory, so we see solutions like bookmark lists, so-called link farms where people fill Web pages with links to other pages, search engines, and so on. Those are fine so long as you confine yourself to one medium, but what happens when you want to publish URLs in dead tree media? Long URLs look terrible in newspapers and magazines (just look at the Constitution URL above), and there’s still the problem of transferring URLs between media. That’s CueCat’s niche. The CueCat is a barcode reader that can, for example, scan the barcode on a Coke bottle and direct your browser to http://www.coke.com/. If you scan a book’s ISBN, your browser will go to the publisher’s page for that book. It also reads special barcodes called Cues that newspapers and magazines can print as an aesthetically pleasing alternative to long, ugly URLs. Annoyance gone, right? Well, sort of. DC traded one annoyance for another. A guy named Michael Rothwell had the idea to use a CueCat to compile information about his expansive book collection. DC doesn’t provide a driver (software that enables your computer to “talk” to peripherals) for Linux, so he wrote his own and distributed it freely on the Internet. Soon after, Rothwell received a cease-and-desist letter from DC’s lawyers. Baltimore Sun reporter Mike Himowitz asked DC about the situation, and DC claimed that Rothwell infringes on a patent covering the use of barcode scanners to generate network events. Why is DC wasting their time with a little guy when they could go after a big dog like Wal-Mart? Every time a cashier at Wal-Mart scans an item’s barcode, the scanner generates a network event to look up the item’s price. The new annoyance is that DC is using a trivial patent aggressively. The US Patent and Trademark Office has foolishly granted thousands of trivial software patents. For example, Microsoft has a patent (5,819,032) that covers electronic magazines in which “article boxes are added and removed from the screen to demonstrate which articles were published at which times within the publishing period.” Even a simple site like The Exponent’s that allows users to browse back issues could be construed as infringing upon this patent. In The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. vs. Supermarket Corp., Supreme Court Justice William Douglas filed this opinion: “It was never the object of [patent] laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.” The idea to organize online Exponent content according to the issue in which it was published is a perfect example of such an unpatentable idea.

The Thomas Paine quote at the top of this article may seem far from its home in the gun control debate, but it also applies here. The result of granting trivial patents is that software developers and companies are forced to stockpile even more trivial patents for use as countersuit ammunition should they happen to step on patent landmines. This hurts everyone. Your favorite game, operating system, or word processor might have to omit a cool feature because that feature would infringe a trivial patent. Dealing with the patent system slows the time-to-market for software (meaning we would have to wait longer for software to come out) and tilts the playing field even further in favor of big companies (meaning less competition and less quality). As Professor Donald Knuth wrote, “There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making contributions to computer science.”

Patents are supposed to promote progress, not hinder it. In the coming years, computers and software will play an increasingly important role in our lives. Therefore, software patents deserve careful scrutiny. If you’re interested in learning what you can do, visit the League for Programming Freedom at http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/.