Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!labrea!agate!pasteur!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!umd5!cvl!elsie!imsvax!bob From: bob@imsvax.UUCP (Bob Burch) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Another surreal lawsuit Message-ID: <787@imsvax.UUCP> Date: 17 Feb 88 22:07:19 GMT Organization: IMS Inc., Rockville, MD Lines: 113 From my old buddy Ted Holden at HT Enterprises. The views expressed herein are not necessarily mine and in no way represent the policy of IMS. ........................................................ Think some of the look-and-feel lawsuits we've been seeing are ridiculous or mean-spirited? Page 121 of the Feb 9 88 issue of PC Week contains an article of potential concern to everyone who uses micro-computers. A small Rockville Md. consortium is suing IBM, claiming that the BIOS of all PC/AT/PS2 computers as well as of IBM word-processing software violates a patent which it holds on the use of keys to represent commands rather than text. This would include the (BIOS level) Ctrl-Alt-Del which all PCs use for rebooting as well as such WordStarish things as Alt-U, Alt-C etc. which virtually all PC software uses to some extent or other at the present point. Should Berkeley by some odd chance win his suit against IBM, he would be in a position to extort money from virtually every manufacturer of micro-computer hardware and every developer of micro-computer software. Arnold D. Berkeley purchased the patent in question at a 1971 bankruptcy sale from his former employer, Computer Retrieval Systems Inc. of Rockville Md. for about $40,000. He apparently was engaged in negotiations with IBM for two years before these negotiations broke down in 1987 and he sued, the trial now being scheduled for September at the federal district court in Baltimore. IBM has counter sued, charging Berkeley Associates with racketeering and attempted extortion. In my estimation, Berkeley should have said something in the late 70's when WordStar etc. first came out. Making the claim he does at THIS point in time brands him as a bandito, pure and simple, whose obvious intent is to extort money from the entire world. With any luck, the case will be thrown out of court and we will never have to worry about it. The real question is, "Why was IBM willing to even talk to these desperados for two whole years?". Remember, IBM's legal staff totally defeated and humiliated the United States Department of Justice during the 12- year battle begun in 1969. By comparison, taking care of Mr. Berkeley should be a very simple exercise for them. I don't claim to have the answer to this one, but I do have a theory. To begin with, there seem to be a number of old patents around which cover things which amount to the natural way of doing a certain thing, bound to be discovered (or the same functionality devised) by anybody who sets out in a certain path of development or investigation. These would include the Berkeley patent as well as the CA patent for dynamic memory-usage setup etc. In my estimation, the patent office simply should not grant patents in such cases. In the particular case of the computer industry, an idea such as function keys would have been irrelevant to the 1971 world of batch-processing and yet was bound to come into widespread use from day one of micros with their direct interaction and high-bandwidth I/O. I see villain number one here as the U.S. Patent office, villain number two as Berkeley. And then, there's villain number three. IBM developed the dynamic memory setup scheme for the PS2 in-house and only after- the-fact did their lawyers discover the CA patent. I have no doubt that IBM could have gotten by with simply ignoring the entire business and not informing CA or anybody else of the possible patent infringement. I believe, however, that it suits the purposes of IBM to pay these people under such circumstances. If the case is halfway believable to begin with, IBM's paying them lends even more credence to the notion that everyone should pay them, thereby making life just one bit harder on all the poor suckers trying to clone PS2's. IBM doesn't sweat an extra ten to thirty dollars per machine and neither do their Fortune-500 clients. Two purposes are being served here: upping the ante for ALL would-be micro manufacturers, and providing further legalistic footing for IBM's own legal games ( "after all, your Honor, We pay royalties to CA and Tom and Dick and Jane and Harry over there, why shouldn't WE collect on all of OUR bullshit patents?") In the case of the Berkeley patent, I believe IBM spent two years trying to get the price right and, at the same time, attempting to determine the validity of the claim and the odds of their being able to force all PC/AT/PS2 clone manufacturers and all software vendors (not just PS2 cloners) to pay. Mind you, IBM would look damned silly were they to pay someone like Berkeley his extortion money and then have Compaq, Acer, Samsung, WordPerfect (and the rest of the world) blow Berkeley away in a courtroom. IBM's stockholders, at a minimum, would not be amused. Apparently, IBM's lawyers must have finally realized that this one simply wasn't going to fly (i.e. that they unfortunately couldn't use THIS particular bandito to their own ends) and so informed the big boss. Berkeley's suit, of course, is no MORE ridiculous than the stunt which APPLE pulled on DRI. The class of intended victims is simply far larger and better armed, the chances of him pulling it off far less. In the fairy tales which we learn as children, issues are decided in confrontations between good and evil, Prince Charming vs the dragon. In real life, as often as not, it is evil vs evil vs evil, the evilest s.o.b. usually prevailing. I can actually cheer for IBM in this one, in fact, about as much as medieval people must have cheered as Prince Hulagu exterminated the Ismiaelians, and I hope that representatives of the various micro-industry heavyweights will be there as well. If I were to have to start forking over money to banditos like Berkeley, I'd be very tempted to forget about computers forever.