Adobe Beats Macromedia In Tabs Patent Case

An Anonymous Coward points to this Adobe press release, writing "Adobe has won in its rather-silly patent lawsuit vs Macromedia, which covers the "tabbed palettes" UI used in so many applications these days. Hard to believe this one stood up in court, but hey..." Slightly less happy is Macromedia's release.

So....

[bpb213]

What does this mean for java's JTabbedPane?

Good riddance

[mcasaday]

I personally hate the palette UI metaphor (what is so great about windows floating over your workspace getting in your way all the time anyway?) and was very happy when Macromedia moved Flash MX to their panel [macromedia.com] model. Still not as cool as Corel's dockers, IMHO, but a great improvement nonetheless.

A link to...

[cei]

... the patent in question [uspto.gov].

Method of displaying multiple sets of information in the same area of a computer screen

Abstract:

A method for displaying on a computer screen multiple sets of information needed on a recurring basis, comprising the steps of: (1) Establishing an area on the computer screen in which the multiple sets of information are to be displayed, the established area having a maximum size which is substantially less than the entire area of the screen. (2) Providing within the established area a plurality of selection indicators, one for each of the multiple sets of information. (3) Selecting one of the multiple sets of information for display within the established area by pointing to one of the selection indicators within the established area, whereby the selected set of information will be substituted within the established area for the set of information previously being displayed therein. A selected set of information may also be moved out of the selected area by pointing to its selection indicator and dragging it away.

Filed June 23, 1994. I guess that does put it before I remember Altsys doing similar it in Freehand (before Frehand was sold to Macromedia).

software & user interface patent

[repoleved]

although the piece of UI in question is a relatively stupid and worthless piece of *h*t, that doesn't change the fact that what they're doing is essentially obvious to professionals in the field of UI design. This is pretty much going to be true of almost everything the patent office touches, except possibly compression algorithms or computation algorithms. Those things, I actually agree that the patent office could be involved in those where they are non-obvious, since they can have a significant effect on the speed of simulations or calculations, which can often be weeks or months long, involving several computers.

On the other hand, a great deal of algorithm work and research comes from universities, and I would hope that companies are not permitted to take the work of others and then go and patent it as their own. That wouldn't be fair.

The other thing is that software patents don't really need to be as long as physical object patents, since it is much easier to recoup costs which ought to be lower, and since manufacture and distribution can take place extremely rapidly where the product is information or software.

Other than that, I think that software patents could be beneficial to society as they provide inventors incentive to release their methodology to the public domain in exchange for temporary legal protection from competitors disassembling the product and using ideas which cost research money to find.

Lots of prior art on this one....

[amacbride]

This is ridiculous -- there's loads of prior art on this one. Specifically, I designed a tabbed pane/notebook metaphor for a development environment project when I was at Sun in 1991. It was demo'ed to a bunch of customers and potential customers, including the NSA. I'm not sure where I saw the idea in the first place, it might have been something from Lotus 1-2-3.

Hmmm....I wonder if I still have the source code stashed somewhere....

-a

Re:Lots of prior art on this one....

[Eccles]

This is ridiculous -- there's loads of prior art on this one.

As I recall, the particularly outstanding element was that the tabbed dialogs could be separated, rejoined, hidden, etc. It's more than just the idea of having tabbed dialogs.

But if you have prior art of the former, have at it.

Re:Lots of prior art on this one....

[amacbride]

Our "notebook" pages could be torn out, rearranged, placed on the desktop, replaced in another project notebook, etc. It was a fun system, although right at the edge of being too faithful to the notebook metaphor. My favorite frivolous hack? The XNeWS server supported the X SHAPE extension as well as its own PostScript-based rendering, so I included three notebook-paper holes on the left-hand margin of each page.

-a

What about Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

The new tabbed browsing feature is one of the greatest parts of Mozilla. Is this at risk underneath that patent?

Oh, hey, and what about Lotus Notes? Or Excel?

I'm not trolling, being ironic or funny here -- how broad can you stretch the definition of a tabbed palette?

Borland and Micro$ost uses them!

[TulioSerpio]

in Delphi 6 and interdev.

Now Macromedia's won their countersuit

[__aaowgu6674]

http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2002 / acromedia_counterclaim.html [macromedia.com]
San Francisco--May 10, 2002--Macromedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: MACR) today announced that a jury ruled in its favor in a counterclaims suit against Adobe Systems. The verdict included a damage award of $4.9 million. Macromedia intends to ask the court to issue an injunction to stop Adobe's infringement, and also intends to appeal the verdict in the initial Adobe case.

"The score is now Adobe one, Macromedia one, customers zero," said Rob Burgess, chairman and CEO, Macromedia. "Macromedia is absolutely committed to defending the right to innovate."

Adobe was found to infringe all three Macromedia patents. U.S. Patent No. 5,467,443 relates to changing blended elements and automatic re-blending of elements and is infringed by its Adobe Illustrator product. U.S. Patents Nos. 5,151,998 and 5,204,969 relate to visually displaying and editing sound waveforms and are infringed by its Adobe Premiere product. The jury also found U.S. Patent No. 5,151,998 to be invalid.

In October 2001, Macromedia brought a patent infringement suit against Adobe in the Northern District of California relating to additional patents that Macromedia believes that Adobe infringes. This case is scheduled for June 2003.