[Debian-uk] Symbian get UK patent on linking to a DLL - analysis wanted

[Will Newton]

On Tue, 2008-03-25 at 17:16 +0000, Wookey wrote:
> Hello people, somewhat tengential to this list, but I know many of you
> care about this stuff, and one has to start somewhere.
> 
> Things have ben relatively quiet in software-patent world for a couple
> of years and court cases have gone reasonably well from our point of
> view, with the UK patent office maving away from the European patent
> office practice of granting patents for all sorts of garbage, and
> generally refusing them for any software which didn't have a proper
> external effect beyond the software itself. However things have just
> taken a serious turn for the worse and action is needed again to
> prevent all software becoming patentable in this country.
> 
> Symbian have just won a High Court case where the UK patent office refused
> them a patent on 'indirect linking to DLLs', but the court overturned
> that and it has been granted. The UKPO is appealing this to the court
> of appeal, but it needs help to show that this _is_ a controversial
> issue and not just something that should be nodded through. 
> 
> The UKPO refusal is here, and it also describes the patent reasonably
> well:
> http://www.ipo.gov.uk/patent/p-decisionmaking/p-challenge/p-challenge-decision-results/o20907.pdf
> 
> We (FFII and killsoftwarepatents.com) would be interested to know
> which pieces of software will be infringing this - can anyone here
> give examples, or other analysis of this? Feel free to pass this mail
> on to people who might.

I think most DLL implementations would implement something similar to
this (e.g. ELF dynamic shared libraries) - the ordinals referred to me
seem similar to GOT relocs. In fact with ELF symbol versioning I think
ELF shared libraries are probably more powerful than the scheme
described.

However, i think the best way to attack this is to maintain not that
there exists prior art, but that it should not be patentable in the
first place. I think the PTO got it exactly right, the claim that the
patent covers some kind of physical process is absurd.

Do you have a link for the High Court judgement?