“AppleInsider is reporting that an Illinois-based company and its Nevada partner have filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc., alleging that Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ infringes an interface patent relating to the OS’s nearly universal use of tabs. The suit was filed in the patent troll’s and forum shopper’s favorite venue: Marshall, TX. The patent in question is 5072412, which was originally issued to Xerox in 1987, but is now owned or licensed to IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation. ‘Category dividers triggered by Spotlight searches, as well as page tabs in the Safari web browser, bear the closest similarity to the now 20-year-old description’ of the patent, according to the article. IP Innovation is requesting damages in excess of $20 million and an injunction against future sales and distribution of Mac OS X 10.4. Software patent reform can’t come soon enough!”

The patent filing dates back from 1987 and if you take a look at it, clearly describes something which isn’t exactly considered amazingly innovative nowadays. I’m struggling to think of a single graphical application that doesn’t make use of some form of multiple ‘workspaces’ as they are referred to in the filing. IP Innovation simply bought the intellectual property rights from Xerox, who pretty much invented most of the concepts of the graphical user interface as we know it today.

AppleInsider has a nice description of exactly where the ‘infringement’ is happening:

The disputed section refers to the technique of creating a window on a computer’s screen with controls that switch between views of multiple associated display objects within the window, erasing one view as the user selects another while still giving a spatial frame of reference and the same general interface during the switch.

The point is, software patents desperately need reforming. The amount of time they are valid for is far longer than necessary. Within the fast-changing world of technology, this type of patent needs to have a much shorter validity period.

The whole point of the patenting system was to help promote innovation by offering a limited monopoly on novel ideas for a reasonable amount of time. Instead, all we’ve got is patent hoarding companies like ‘IP Innovation’ that make all their money by acquiring patents and then suing and/or settling disputes.

Which, in my eyes, is abuse of the system.

Not only that, but instead of promoting innovation, abuse like this stifles it, because it means people aren’t free to use even the most basic and obvious concepts and ideas in their programs without risking litigation.

So this is my official recommendation – we either need to seriously reform the whole patent scheme with regards to technology, or scrap software patents entirely. And we need to do it soon.