Corel re-animates zombie brand for patent case

Re: See?

That is Corel, not Novel. Different zombie trying to "leverage" its "glory days".

Amen to that !

Re: Destroy all patents. Start again.

@M Gale:

Well said. I added my upvote to the 17 you had already.

Nuisance fee

@Michael Thibault

Re: "see you soon" -- That's the problem, innit? If you pay it, they will come; again and again.

Re: Strange tactics

"Why would they start by attacking someone who obviously has more than enough money to fight back?"

Think of it as advertising for an auction:

"See how annoy... er, versatile these can be? And for less than the cost of litigation, these can all be yours if you buy us now!"

Re: Lots of prior art, surely.

I expect Google will recognize that while it might be cheaper to pay off a single suit, opening themselves to constantly paying Dane Geld is a losing proposition, and it's better to make as big an example of the first troll that comes trawling as is possible.

Prior art in every C++ textbook

WMF probably doesn't cover it, because the shapes in WMF files don't contain any executable program code, just parameters for the standard Win32 GDI calls, but every C++ textbook I've ever read has illustrated object inheritance and derivation by an example shape class from which are derived various concrete shapes such as circles, rectangles etc., each with their own Draw() method. The '633 patent appears to be claiming the completely obvious idea of combining that with a plug-in style architecture for dynamically loading arbitrary new shape objects with their associated methods. Trivial and obvious and should never have been granted.

Re: Lots of prior art, surely.

Windows and its "metafiles" should be a good match

Having just skimmed '633, I agree that it's basically a glorified graphics metafile. Metafiles are considerably older than the WMF format, though; they go back at least as far as the ANSI/ISO Computer Graphics Metafile standard (1986), and probably farther.

Some people are claiming that '633 specifically requires executable content in the "external shape" (the file), but here's a key quote from the patent:

Capabilities are action methods, symbol methods, or any other functions that allow the generation of information required to produce a graphical image.

What the patent calls "action methods" are actions: render, handle mouse input, etc. The "symbol methods" are properties: bounding box and that sort of thing. But "any other functions that allow the generation of information" is much too broad - it clearly could describe any graphics metafile format.

More generally, '633 just says "hey, we're going to load some code, and it's going to expose some interfaces that lets our app render some graphics". As others have pointed out, this is a well-established OS feature added to a commonplace OO-programming example. The rationale given in the patent is unconvincing. This patent is bogus and I hope the court throws it out.

Re: "Paying ransom money [..] encourages other firms to try it on

Other firms, like . . . Google ?

Re: How strange to see that name again

Micrografx Picture Publisher used to be my go-to software for image manipulation on Windows (back when getting scanners working on Linux through the parallel port pre-USB was a real pain). They used to allow personal use of their old versions of software, and it often came as part of the software bundle that came with a scanner as well.

Although I don't have a lot of Windows boxes around now, those that are in my control generally have MPP installed on them still.

Re: How strange to see that name again

I remember Picture Publisher; I knew the founders of the original company, Astral, which was later bought by Micrografx later.

Back in the early 80s we all worked for a company that made one of the first CCD-based scanners, and we offered our own hardware and software to manipulate and output the images (to laser typesetters in those days). A few of the guys left and founded Astral to do the image processing, believing that those "new Windows computers" would be a better platform and the value was in the software. Guess who was right?

Re: That patent is so vague!

@Crisp:

"Launching patent lawsuit in three... two... one.... LAUNCH"

Re: Glory days

Corel Draw was a great product. I preferred it to the hideous Adobe Illustrator. And they did OK with Ventura Publisher for a while. It was my go to product for document production back before MS homogenized the hell out of everything. Ventura only went to shit when they decided to ape Adobe, which was not what I wanted. Of course, trying to drain me of too much money to frequently didn't help either.

Microsoft investment in Corel.

'By this time, Microsoft, which had an interest in keeping WordPerfect afloat for antitrust reasons, had invested $135 million in Corel. According to Burney: "There is a contract that says we have to put the .Net framework into our major applications within six months of the release of .Net."

Shortly thereafter, Corel divested itself of its Linux distribution, and discontinued support for WordPerfect and CorelDraw on Linux. It has been assumed by many that this was an unwritten condition of Microsoft's investment in Corel`.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/604461/xandros-buys-linspire--what-does-it-mean-for-linux/page/0/1

Re: Kipling said it all

@Dave Bell

If they are going to act like those Danes, then maybe we should geld them.

Re: Only one way to fix this

They already have such laws against pointless cases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frivolous_litigation

Sadly the courts seem to be happier to just let it all go by - maybe they're making a profit for the government off the big companies when it comes to the court fees...