Software company SAP: World-leading through intellectual property theft?
tagesschau.de
tagesschau.de
Point is that at this level there is tons of corporate IP bullshit going around, it's basically a required part of playing the game.
1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sap-se-versata-patent-idU...
Everyone here on HN knows that ideas are worthless and execution is everything.
Digital artifacts require a new non-exclusive property market scheme (to be determined; it's a difficult problem). Enforcing the older paradigm with laws and coercion is not a long term solution.
Unrestricted copying would discourage quite a few projects being started due to not having any chance to recoup investment.
While IP may be a flawed tool at times, it still is a useful tool.
https://cepr.net/report/the-artistic-freedom-voucher-interne...
Can you imagine if copyright law allowed for things as broad as: “A novel or series of novels where a boy is educated at a school for wizards”. That’s what amazons 1-click patent was like. It was more or less: we will allow a client device to send both a product id and a user id by clicking a button, that will then cause a purchase to be made for that product and client. That patent caused something as trivial as “buy now” to be locked up by Amazon for years.
I don't recall e-commerce being hamstrung by it. Do you have any more information on some cases where the patent was actually leveraged?
The problem with intellectual property (I might be mixing copyright and intellectual property here, if I am, my apologies) is that by preventing derivative works while also having a near infinite lifespan, it absolutely crushes any kind of creative innovation. IMO the lifespan of intellectual property should be 40-50 years, reduced when going to market, similar to how drug patents work. This lets smaller creators who don't have the vast war chests of literal drug companies to make a good living off of it, while still allowing for innovation for the next (or next next) generation.
The REAL problem is that Disney and such have been lobbying for extending copyright and IP protections. I think we're up to nearly 100 years now.
We might get more cross overs too (x men vs teen titans)
For the most part Disney has done a good job with Marvel films, and one can easily find many "arthouse" films which are just awful.
Yet, for an author, the real money is in the film rights. If they are commercially motivated, the books themselves are an afterthought.
For other things the case is less clear.
For instance fighting between Curtis Aircraft and the Wright Brothers held back the U.S. Aircraft industry for a decade until the Government saw it being a crisis in WWI.
Patents in tech from what I know are valid for 20 years and that includes all countries that operate with PCT (patent cooperation treaty)
Most countries you could think off operate within PCT laws.
While I had heard about the Mickey Mouse treaty I never dug into it too much, there are different patent for different stuff I think the personal protection characters that are the face of something (like Mickey Mouse) are some of the most outrageous long term patent.
But for technology most patent only last 20 years and while I won't get into the nitty gritty of how patent protection works its mostly done to protect big companies from spending alot of money on RnD and then having there competitors steal the done invention and profit from it.
Big techs are in general lenient when a pop a mom shop infringes on an ip within the 20 years period.
Just wanted to clear things up, most inventions that you guys could think up that would be patentable are only for 20 years not 100.
Noob question:
Why aren't patents treated like govt issued licenses, leases?
Want exclusive use of airwaves, water, mining, catchy song, clever idea, whatever? Terrific. Pay up.
Set the price at just over reasonable. To prevent people from frivolously camping on stuff to exclude others from using it.
Economists are smart about setting price. Auctions for stuff that's hard to price (airwaves). Boilerplate for bog standard stuff (trademarks, songs). Whatever works. With some clever veto points to thwart regulatory capture.
There's really no need for a "non-exclusive property market scheme"[0] either. The whole point of restricting copying is to make money move out of your wallet and to publishers and creators. The problem we have is that the copyright monopoly lasts far longer than what's needed to pay for the production of new creative works, so we're rewarding ownership of existing ones which is contrary to the point of the law.
[0] I'm assuming this is code for something akin to, but not exactly like, NFTs.
I know that is a bit sarcastic, but not only is IP theft of big software concerns pretty common (the article makes it look like a sensation, a bit (bad) surprise).
But at the same time IP law is often so broken that you could say probably every larger software out there does somehow infringe on some IP.
So without having details is naught impossible to say if it's IP theft which should be IP theft, or IP theft which is only IP theft due to broken laws, and might also not be judged as IP theft after going through a expensive many year law-suite.
And the article fails to lay down why it's the former (ethical questionable IP theft) instead of the later (ethical questionable IP claims).
Through I wouldn't be surprising if it is ethical questionable IP theft.
But I would even be less surprised if it a mixture of both.
> konkurrenzsoftware [..] untersuchen zu lassen
(roughly ~ Investigate the software of the competition.)
is in the article made to sound bad, dodgy borderline illegal (and maybe was).
But then investigating the marked and your competition is one of the most fundamental practices when it comes to competing on the marked as a large cooperation...
Which brings us to the point that the article is missing details relevant for doing a judgement yourself, instead it does a judgement for you and then expect you to adapt that judgement without questioning it.
For example the article could have stated that the students investigated the inner workings of the competitors software, it doesn't. It just states that the uni did some research into the competitors software, without stating the depth of the research and kind of research they did into it. (E.g. they could have research usability of "xxx software solutions" across the marked (including SAP) with SAP using that to gain a upper hand (== marked research), or they could have researched how "subset of xxx software solutions" handle case Y internally (== not-just marked research).)
Reverse-engineering is not illegal (at least in Germany, to my knowledge).
Up until like 2 years ago or something reverse engineering was only legal for interoperability purposes AFAIK.
I still remember a few years ago half of HN have never heard of SAP.
Currently, if you're up against megacorp, you're almost literally betting the farm and you're almost guaranteed to go bankrupt because big Corp will try to make you go bankrupt before you win anything.
Loser-pays, you actually have a chance to not go bankrupt, because the big Corp will be paying. The lawyers on your side will know this and if they're able to do economic + probabilistic reasoning, they realize that even though you're out of money, big corp is their real payer and thus they can keep fighting.
Each lawyer is constantly evaluating the probability that the loser can pay and thus driving toward quick settlement.
Ultimately, it seems to align incentives with actual justice, rather than punitive legal action. I imagine it would drastically change how litigious America is.
The big ERP vendors have armies of lawyers and patents that can stymie and delay any IP claims from smaller firms. At the same time, SAP has active relationships with all the customers who matter, and the SAP brand still carries weight, so their version of the product will almost always win a big chunk of market share, despite being inferior.
The only reason there were consequences for SAP in this case is because they stole from Oracle; who invented this playbook.
None of them are there on merit.
This feels like a bait question because the answers are so obvious.
How is Chrome a monopoly? Google made a good browser and customers chose it over other alternatives. Now you can argue that chrome isn't a god browser. But that's your opinion. People are voting with their feet. Does google have an obligation to make their browser suck?
The bigger issue is that website owners have become increasingly hostile to crawling, and that's effectively closed the door behind Google, because that's when it starts getting more legally contentious. Which is why I think they should be forced to open up their crawl to everyone, so that we can have meaningful competition in the indexing/search space.
Visa/Mastercard are the world leaders in payment processing. Were they "breaking laws, fraud, stealing technology or slave labour"?
He took knowledge he gained as part of his employment to Taiwan. Was there any allegation of IP theft or are you saying everything you learn when working for an employer stays with the employer..that you can never use that knowledge at your next job. Figured out how to build a CI/CD pipeline for BIGCO1? Can't use that knowledge at BIGCO2..
Also, as a side note, knowing how to build basic software tools is not even remotely comparable to having the extremely specialized knowledge required to build a microchip fab.
Morris Chang may be a great guy but he was directly recruited by an authoritarian government that was still operating under martial law, and that absolutely was not an option available to most Taiwanese.
Software company SAP - With data theft to the top of the world?
12.11.2021 11:00 a.m., by Tim Bartz and Christian Bergmann, MDR
According to research by Fakt and "Der Spiegel," the theft of intellectual property by SAP could have a long tradition. As early as 1997 to 2008, the company allegedly misused competitors' developments in cooperation with universities.
Newly surfaced internal documents cast a dark shadow over the software company SAP, its management and supervisory board. According to research by the ARD magazine Fakt and "Der Spiegel," the picture of a company that apparently also tricked its way to the top of the world with unfair methods, especially theft of intellectual property, is emerging.
The events date back to the 1990s and are recorded in an expert report by the law firm Linklaters from 2010. The report was commissioned by SAP itself.
The background to this was the legal dispute with Oracle at the time. The U.S. archrival had sued SAP in 2007 because the Germans had gained access to copyrighted files from Oracle servers through the acquisition of the software service provider TomorrowNow. In a settlement, SAP later had to pay Oracle $357 million in damages.
The Linklaters expert opinion was intended to clarify whether liability claims exist against the then executive board member Gerhard Oswald - Oswald was responsible for the TomorrowNow acquisition. The document contains numerous indications that Oswald and one of his employees knew about copyright infringements. In addition, the SAP Executive Board under CEO Henning Kagermann at the time allegedly approved everything.
However, the company's top management did not draw any conclusions from the report. Oswald was even promoted, although the Linklaters lawyers had recommended that he be parted with "without making any noise". Oswald, a confidant of SAP founder and major shareholder Dietmar Hopp, remained on the executive board until 2016 and has been on the supervisory board since 2019.
Dubious cooperation between University of Mannheim and SAP
Fakt and "Spiegel" also report on a dubious cooperation between SAP and the University of Mannheim starting in 1997, in which Oswald again played a central role. This is also the subject of the report. Officially, the purpose of the cooperation was to have competing software examined by an independent institute, in this case the Business Informatics Research Group at the University of Mannheim. In fact, SAP employees spied on the competition under the guise of the cooperation. Even interventions by the legal department, the compliance team and the auditing department were largely ignored.
According to information from Fakt and "Spiegel," SAP went all the way to the German Constitutional Court to prevent the Mannheim public prosecutor's office from using the report as evidence in an investigation against SAP executives for copyright infringement. Officials had come across the document in 2011 during a raid on the company's headquarters.
Germany's highest court did not accept the constitutional complaint at the time. The criminal proceedings against the board members were dropped at the end of 2017, but SAP had to pay 250,000 euros to the state treasury.
SAP said on request that the copyright infringements by TomorrowNow had been the subject of the proceedings with Oracle, which were settled amicably and had been concluded. The events surrounding the University of Mannheim had been comprehensively processed internally. The protection of intellectual property is the foundation of all SAP solutions.
[0] https://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/mdr/sap-geistiges-eig...
In the 90's I worked at Seagate Software in Vancouver, BC, which made Crystal Reports (A million readers just either felt a wave of nostalgia or a shudder of disgust).
Seagate Software became Crystal Decisions, got acquired by Business Objects, which got acquired by SAP.
I wonder how much of the SAP work in Vancouver today is still on something related to Crystal Reports...
Aka, big companies are full of c*p!
- copyright
- trademark
- patent
Which are legitimate legal constructs in their own right, but they're not property. In this case, I think we're talking about patent infringement.
So long as both jurisdictions have agreed to recognize each other's patent laws, it may still be just as illegal as theft.
Whether it's as immoral as theft is a different sort of thing (I say it isn't, which is why I nitpick like this).
So it's probably mostly patent impingement.
And I think we all know how:
- large cooperation infringe on patents of smaller ones without relevant consequences all the time
- there is an endless number of complete absurd patents wrt. software. The patent system in context of software is fundamentally broken.
- due to the US patent system being even more broken then the German one (was at the time the article refers to) the infringed patent might not even have been a valid patent.
But what of this points apply to this specific case I don't know.
The only thing that really bothers me about this case is that disregarding IP law is a privilege that you can buy by hiring an army of lawyers. I wish that problematic laws could be ignored equally by all players.
I wish there were a charity I could donate to that finds companies that engaging in that sort of behavior and sabotages their bottom line in nonviolent ways. If you can convince me that you'll hurt 'em to the tune of $10 for every $1 of mine, I'll have a couple hundred for you.
Being a scientist. Or working in academia. Net worth of greatest scientific minds in history, like Einstein or Heisenberg was less than that of average software dev, let alone bankers/businessmen.
At most you can hope to get a Noble Prize, but your discoveries of nuclear physics or quantum mechanics are unpatentable. Fist the journals make money by selling your work, then the companies do, you generally get nothing.