It’s been ages since I’ve posted anything on my blog. To be honest, I’ve been much too busy, and I’m still trying to do five things at once, although employing my mum to do the basic day-to-day admin has certainly helped to take the load off a bit.

Anyway, the reason I’m posting this now is that I want to congratulate John Gruber. Not only has he had the courage to quit his job and take-up blogging full-time, but he’s also posted a number of excellent articles since doing so, including an excellent and quite damning indictment of some extremely poor journalism from Associated Press.

Why does this matter to me, you ask? Well, I’ve been thinking for some time that there are too many journalists who have forgotten what their job is supposed to be about. Journalists are supposed to present balanced, plain accounts of the facts, and in recent times both balance and fact seem somewhat lacking from some quarters.

Even the BBC, who historically were pretty trustworthy, have been shamelessly promoting issues such as “radiation” from mobile phones, using phrases like “genuine concern” to legitimise what basically amounts to a load of pseudo-scientific claptrap based largely on the fact that the general public are hysterical about the word “radiation”.

Of course, if you’re a journalist, sensationalism is much more fun. What’s the point in being accurate if you don’t get the ratings, right?

That’s what I like about John Gruber. He might not be a professional journalist, but he tells it straight and checks his facts out.

More about radiation

If the BBC were in fact responsible, accurate, journalists of the type we all wish they were, they would be careful to explain that mobile phones emit radio waves, a type of non-ionising electro-magnetic radiation. They would go on to explain that electromagnetic radiation formed a spectrum, going from the lowest energy end (very low frequency radio waves) through radio and microwaves to infra-red, then visible light, ultra-violet light and on up to x-rays, gamma rays and finally cosmic rays at the very high energy end. They would also point out that the term “radiation” is very general and applies to many different things—even things like sound or waves in the sea—.

They would point out that light waves contain more energy than mobile phones’ radio bursts, that people have lived near the Crystal Palace television transmitter, which has been around since 1950, puts out well over 4 megawatts, which is over a million times the output of many mobile phones, with the highest power outputs at frequencies not dissimilar to those used by mobile telephones (487.25MHz for ITV up to 567.25MHz for BBC Two). Do we have significant incidence of cancer or “brain injury” in the area nearest to the transmitter? If we do, it’s been kept extremely quiet.

What really riles me about the “radiation” thing, though, is the way that journalists are claiming that their ridiculous position is based on some desire for “balance”, because in this case it’s a balance between fact (which journalists are paid to report, right?) and clap-trap. Balance between viewpoints is one thing. Balance between fact and lie is quite another.

My company uses Google Adwords to advertise its products. Adwords is quite good and had until recently been working well for us. Until, that is, some cretin at Google Ireland (who are responsible for Adwords in Europe) decided that, in the EMEA, they would no longer run any advert containing a third-party trademark.

Now, the products my company makes are disk utilities (specifically, a partioning tool and a disk defragmenter). If I remove all mention of the words Mac, Tiger and Apple, then Google will run our ads again. Which will be clicked on by 100 million PC owners, costing me more money, and wasting their time. They will also not be obvious to the Mac owners we are trying to target.

Google, when they came up with this idea, did realise that some people would be licensed to use other peoples’ trademarks, so they provided a mechanism to allow this. The mechanism is that the trademark owner must fax Google with a statement that the advertiser is allowed to use their trademarks.

But, of course, there are lots of people in Europe (or outside of Europe) who want to advertise Mac software using Google. And a lot of them are licensed to use the word Mac. So Apple, understandably, aren’t keen on sending thousands of faxes to Google to resolve this problem.

So I tried to find a telephone number for Google Ireland. They make it quite difficult, but if you look around enough on the web, you’ll find that Google Ireland’s phone number is +353 1 436 1000. None of their menu options seemed to fit, so I pressed zero for the receptionist. Who wasn’t there.

Then I sent an e-mail, which I imagine will be replied to using a stock answer, and otherwise ignored. 10 out of 10 for customer service so far.

I hadn’t completely given up on speaking to somebody about this yet, so I tried the phone again. This time I got through to the receptionist (yay!), but I was told that there was nobody I could speak to about Adwords, although yes, Google Ireland were in charge of Adwords in Europe, but no, I couldn’t speak to whoever was responsible for it. Instead, I could use e-mail. Could the receptionist give them a message for me, I asked, hopefully? No, apparently even their receptionist can do nothing but send e-mail.

Fact is that unless Google sort themselves out soon, we’re going to stop using them. It isn’t acceptable to simply pull your customers’ adverts, without warning, for using trademarks that many of us are actually licensed to use, and then expect a third party in another country to expend significant time and effort faxing Google to resolve the problem that Google have created.

I used to think Google only employed intelligent people. Apparently I was wrong.

Update: There’s a post on TidBits covering the same kind of problem, as well as more on MacSlash and even more elsewhere.

It looks like it might have been partly Apple’s fault (apparently they have filed a complaint about their trademarks in Google ads, and have since withdrawn at least a part of it). I have to say that Apple gave me the impression it was Google’s fault.

The Google library project strikes me as an excellent idea. I read today on CNET an article suggesting that some publishers were upset with the idea. I think that’s sad. I also think they’re wrong to be upset, because chances are that they will sell more books.

My experience of books on-line suggests that on-line scans or PDFs of books are quite inconvenient—even web pages constructed from the text of a book are often hard to navigate—and I have certainly bought paper copies of books available freely on-line (a recent example being the Subversion book, Version Control with Subversion). I don’t think books are like music, in that downloadable music is a perfectly good format—nobody really needs a CD, LP or cassette—whereas books are much less convenient in electronic form, except that the electronic versions are easier to search, and it is this, I think, that Google has hit upon.

I think this is certainly the case for reference books, and to be honest I think it’s probably true for other types of books as well; for instance, I’m pretty certain that I’ll buy a copy of Peter F. Hamilton’s next book, Judas Unchained, regardless of whether I found an electronic copy beforehand. In fact, I probably wouldn’t read an electronic version because it’d be a pain and it’d spoil the story for me when I got a real book to read.

So, I think that Google should be able to scan all the world’s books. I also think that publishers should probably give Google permission to display all the pages from them (why not—after all, most places have public libraries, which facilitate a similar purpose) but obviously that there should be restrictions on what the end user is allowed to do with them. I don’t think it’s worth worrying about people printing them out… it’s expensive, time consuming and the resulting mass of (unbound) paper is hard to deal with. Indeed, with an inkjet printer, it could easily cost a lot more than the equivalent print book, even the hardback editions (consider—a 500 page book, at 10 pence per page, would cost £50 to print!). OK, laser printers might make printing a book cheaper than buying it, depending on the printer and paper in use, as well as the number of pages you’re talking about, but it’s still going to take ages to print and it’s still going to be a nuisance to use.

I’ve just finished looking at a PC World article on Microsoft’s upcoming (and much trumpeted) Longhorn operating system. And I have to say, they should have called it Mongrel. They’ve succeeded in designing what is quite possibly the ugliest and most counter-intuitive user interface to date, in spite of the fact that they’ve copied Apple’s idea of a composited graphics system. The Explorer window screenshots from the article look pretty confusing, with at least two lots of things that look like menus, two toolbar-like things and a number of other controls; plus part of the interface is metal, part is blue (why?), and there’s a wierd-looking blue thing in some sort of drop-down well at the top left (what could that possibly be?!). But what I really can’t believe they’ve still got that stupid two-column Start menu, which fails the “My Mum” test (“If my mum can’t use it, it’s a bad user interface”), let alone any formal test on usability; hell, even I have trouble with it, and it isn’t as if I’m an inexperienced user.

More to the point, they’ve decided not to include WinFS! This loses Microsoft all of the extra features WinFS was supposed to provide, although they still have search and smart-folder type features in their new Explorer. Still, at least they’re finally putting the NTFS attribute forks to use to hold metadata (although that is likely to herald a new wave of malware… not that NTFS fork-based malware is entirely unknown at present, of course).

Plus, Microsoft say they aren’t extending their operating system search facility to developers. At least, not until WinFS débuts (and who knows when that will be).

I must say, I’m surprised. I would have thought that, with the new graphics interface, and all of the hype from Microsoft, they were on the verge of releasing something really special. It isn’t exactly as if they haven’t had long enough to do it.

I’m just looking forward to seeing what Apple do with their next OS release.

For the past week, I’ve been in San Francisco, attending Apple’s World-Wide Developer Conference. The first thing I’d say is that if you’re an Apple developer, WWDC is well worth the fee (and, indeed, the air fare). But more importantly, San Francisco is great. The city is well worth a visit; there is plenty to see during the day, and the restaurants and night-life are brilliant.

If you’re after good restaurants, of those I’ve visted on this trip, Cortez and Ponzu are easily the best. Indeed, our waitress in Ponzu, Jill, deserves a special mention, as the service was excellent. Plus Jill is very pretty :-)

What a great resource. An Interface Design Hall of Shame. Mostly filled with screenshots of Windows apps, naturally :-)

I used to think that the DNS e-mail blacklists were a good idea. After all, on the face of it, they seem like they might actually offer a way to combat spam. Certainly, they can reduce the amount of spam you receive—I don't think anyone would disagree with that.

So what don't I like about them? Well, since I started trying to run my own company, to be perfectly honest, DNS blacklists are the bane of my life. Why? Well, small companies tend not to own their own equipment on the 'Net… rather, they tend to use the services of web hosting companies. Coriolis Systems Limited (as well as this website) are using the services of 1 and 1, aka Schlund, who offer cheap and flexible hosting.

Why is this a problem? Well, here’s the rub. Whenever anyone buys anything from the Coriolis Systems website, they are sent an e-mail (actually, in most cases, two e-mails). This e-mail goes via 1&1’s mailservers before going out onto the Internet. But, because 1&1 are a hosting company, and anyone can sign-up to use their equipment, inevitably one or two of those most hateful animals—I am, of course, referring to Internet spammers—signs up with 1&1 every so often. The upshot of this is that some bright spark somewhere adds 1&1’s mailserver to one (or more often several) DNS blacklists, the result being that our customers don’t get their e-mails. What do our customers do? Well, usually, they blame us—after all, they assume that their e-mail system is reliable and that they should receive messages if we send them, not realising that their ISPs have thrown a spanner in the works by making use of DNS blacklists.

OK, you might say, most blacklists let you ask to be removed, and if 1&1 aren’t spam-friendly, then it should be easy enough to get this done, because they’ll kick the spammers off. All of this is true, except that by the time we know that there is a problem, it’s already too late… we already have an irate customer (ironically, it is usually American customers who become most annoyed—I say ironically, as it is largely their brethren that are responsible for the spam problem in the first place).

Anyway, all of this is very irritating. Is it really too much to ask for the maintainers of spam blacklists to adopt a more sensible approach towards shared infrastructure companies like 1&1? At the very least, you might reasonably expect them to use a notify-first policy for such people… that way, blacklist maintainers avoid inconveniencing large numbers of people whose perfectly legitimate e-mail goes missing because of the activities of the occasional spammer (who will be kicked off anyway, once the web hosting service is informed).

Oh, and before anyone goes hunting around and decides that the problem is anything whatsoever to do with open mail relays, you should note that 1&1 use authenticated SMTP, so you do at least know that any mail you get from their servers really came from one of their customers.

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On Tuesday (the 14th), I attended the meeting on Computer Implemented Inventions set-up by Lord Sainsbury and the Patent Office as a result of the large number of letters they received regarding the new European Directive on the Patentability of Computer Implemented Inventions. The meeting was chaired by Peter Lawrence, the Director of Policy at the Patent Office; also present were Lord Sainsbury, Minister for Science & Innovation; Peter Hayward, a Divisional Director of Patents at the Patent Office; and Steve Probert, a Deputy Director at the Patent Office (who was involved in an interesting and topical discussion on the IEE site).

I wanted to post a summary here of the meeting from my perspective as someone involved in running a small business, particularly in light of the fact that most other such summaries are likely to come from people whose reporting of the issues is not always as accurate as one might wish and has tended at times towards scaremongering (actually, I just read ZDNet UK's article, which is a pretty terrible piece of journalism as it is inaccurate as well as coming across as biased; The Register did somewhat better, although their claim that the current position is based on U.K. case law is not entirely correct—it is based on a combination of EPO and U.K. case law).

The Patent Office also said that they were going to publish a transcript of the meeting on their website, which should be valuable material, provided it isn't taken out of context. As soon as I find it on their site, I'll put a link here. I think two things stick out in my mind from that meeting. The first was that there were sadly (as I expected) a few people who really hadn't thought very hard about the actual issues and came across as ranting—particularly the guy who started by explaining that he was involved in high energy physics and had to be asked four times to get to the point. I also felt that a number of people would have done well to read the text of the Patent Act 1977 from the Patent Office Manual of Patent Practice before attending the meeting, because it outlines the current legal situation and summarises all the relevant case law, which might have helped people to better express what they felt were the difficulties with the law, both as it stands and in the proposed directive.

Second, I think it became apparent that the U.K. Patent Office is actually adopting a fairly sensible position; now, I don't necessarily 100% agree with the position they take (under which some operating system software and other low-level software may be patentable, in effect at least), but at least they are determined to avoid the sort of trivial patents that the FFII and others have been digging up from the archives of the European Patent Office. Actually, given the amount of research that FFII has put in finding patents they don't agree with, I was surprised that I was the only person attending the meeting that had thought to bring some specific, printed, examples with me (or at least, I was the only person that spoke that did so).

The Patent Office representatives also indicated that the stance of the examiners responsible for the EPO's drift towards U.S.-style patentability was not sanctioned by the EPO and that those examiners had been instructed to tighten up their interpretation of the existing law, although they said that they (and indeed the EPO) do not have the power to revoke patents that have already been issued, so any patents that slipped through would need to be challenged in a court.

One other issue that I think is worth clearing up is that of the meaning of “Computer Implemented Invention”. According to Peter Hayward, a patent can only be filed for an invention as a whole, and will not be granted (at least in the U.K.) for pure software. So, for instance, you could file a patent for a computer-controlled jackhammer that would prevent the operator from drilling through their foot, but the patent would only cover the jackhammer as a whole, and not the software within it—a position that I think most sensible people would agree with.

“a patent can only be filed for an invention as a whole, and will not be granted (at least in the U.K.) for pure software”

Now, plainly there are still issues—for instance, under this type of rule it is possible to patent a novel processor cache system involving software for some purpose (even if the main novelty is in the software), and since the software technique involved may be applicable to other similar hardware, the patent may effectively cover the software even if the letter and spirit of the law say that it does not, which I and others don't really agree with, but I must admit that it is difficult to come up with any simple rule for such cases.

Similarly, this is the reason it is possible to patent data compression algorithms and the like—although the patent still covers an invention, for something like data compression the invention might be quite broad and could be held to be applicable in many cases. I don't, incidentally, agree with the EPO view (from the Vicom case, which is where the “technical contribution” criterion originated) that image compression should be patentable because it concerns “the technical quality” of an image, nor would I (personally) be inclined to allow patents claiming a storage or data transmission device with built-in compression (where the major innovation was in the compression technique) because it would seem to preclude all useful applications of the compression algorithm and doesn't really contribute much to the state of the art in either data storage or data transmission. I get the impression that current U.K. Patent Office policy lies somewhere between these two positions; certainly they are not as permissive as the EPO has been in the past.

As for “program claims”, Peter Hayward made the point that a program claim is still subject to the rule that the patent is for an entire invention and not just for a piece of software. So (to use his example), you might be able to patent a process for mass-produced yet individually decorated mugs that relies on software as an integral component of the process. However, assume that you are a company that came up with the idea but just produces the software; in this case, a “program claim” would be appropriate, as it would protect your idea (mass-production of individually decorated mugs which happens to use your software) without requiring you to sue potential customers if they (for instance) bought software overseas to enable the same process.

“a program claim is still subject to the rule that the patent is for an entire invention and not just for a piece of software”

Importantly, this is quite different from the understanding many people seem to have of program claims, which is that they patent the computer software—they don't, they still patent the whole invention, but they change who you can sue for infringement… instead of suing your customers, you can now sue your competitors (remember, patents are supposed to grant monopoly rights, so this makes some sense). I should also say that, like other members of the audience, I don't think the individually decorated mug example is a very good one, except that it is quite easy to understand, which I suspect is why it was chosen.

Other than my feeling somewhat reassured that despite some of the rhetoric from FFII and others, the Patent Office is in fact not engaged in some sort of backdoor legitimisation of software patents, I think four main useful points were raised at the meeting:

1. We (the developer community) would like to see some sort of definition, or at the very least clear guidance as to what patent examiners should understand by the words “technical contribution” in the context of patents for Computer Implemented Inventions. In particular, our major concern is that the bar has at times been set far too low (especially by the EPO) and that the fact that the criterion still isn't defined by the current draft of the Directive provides significant opportunity for the patent system to again drift towards the American position.

2. There is considerable concern from the standardization community about the availability of patents in areas such as data compression, encryption and the like. In particular, I.T. standards—and by that, I am not referring to products that come out of Redmond, but the work of the IETF, JPEG, MPEG, W3C and others—are usually licensed free of charge to all comers, which is even less restrictive than the “reasonable and non-discriminatory” rules under which the telecoms industry (for instance) operates. This, it seems, is quite a thorny issue, because telecoms companies already hold and make use of patents in these areas, and I think the Patent Office and the Government are understandibly reluctant to make any changes that might harm the patent-driven innovation that does go on in the telecoms arena.

3. Another issue that is worrying the software development community at present is interoperability. We are told that competition law can be used to enforce interoperability requirements already where necessary, a point made again by Peter Lawrence, although he did concede that it was difficult to enforce competition law in some cases—but also commented that the maximum fine (10% of turnover) was a hefty incentive for companies to comply. As I am currently running a company myself, I have to agree, and also think it is worth highlighting the fact that the penalty is a percentage of turnover rather than profit—that is, being fined like this could easily turn a profitable year into a significant loss for many companies.

   The reason that the Government and the Patent Office are reluctant to see text in the Directive to enforce interoperability is again that it has an impact on other sectors—in particular telecoms—where patents do seem to be working the way that they were supposed to, and an interoperability clause in the Directive could result in damage to the telecoms industry (where a lot of work is actually directly concerned with interoperating between different signalling protocols—something which, as someone who used to work for a telecoms firm, I can certainly understand).

4. Finally, there was a question from one member of the audience about the status of software developed for charities and whether it was right that such software should be subject to the patent system even where a “technical contribution” was held to exist. Frankly, I think it is unlikely that this would be a problem in practice, given the explanation of Peter Hayward on exactly what was and was not supposed to be patentable, but it is nevertheless an interesting point and perhaps some thought should be given to protecting charities from patent infringement claims (although how this could be done without damaging the value of legitimate patents I am not sure).

Anyway, I think the conclusion that I drew from the meeting was that the Government, the Patent Office and the majority of us are really all on the same side, contrary to the FFII propaganda, and that although some fine-tuning may be necessary to ensure that we are properly protected from the type of drift towards U.S.-style patentability that previously occurred in the EPO, a lot of the actual issues that have been raised are really due to people misunderstanding the law as it stands today.

Finally, I'd like to publicly thank Peter Lawrence, Lord Sainsbury, Peter Hayward and Steve Probert for organising, attending and speaking at the meeting, and for listening to the concerns of those present.

Check out yugop.com. It’s absolutely amazing.