As news watchers know by now, Adobe filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Delaware against Macromedia, alleging infringement of U.S. Patent No. 5,546,528 which covers Adobe's "tabbed palette patent." Macromedia should prevail; there is plenty of prior art to say that movable tabbed patents were not new when Adobe patented them. But if Adobe wins, everyone else loses. A valuable interface design will remain the domain of high-end graphics software.

Probably the most divisive issue in computing today revolves around software patents. According to the school of thought to which I belong, software should not be patentable. There are several logical reasons for this, but I will limit this discussion to a practical one. Because software is rather limited by the architectures under which it runs, almost every requested software patent has some prior art that arguably renders the patent application invalid.

In acknowledgment of this problem with the patent process and its lack of software qualifications, the U.S. patent office refused to grant software patents as a matter of course. Software could by copyrighted, but not patented. This is an important distinction. For, while Adobe has every right to copyright the specific way it codes its tabbed palettes, I believe it has no right to patent the general concept of tabbed palettes, which can be coded in an infinite number of ways. Several years ago, the Patent Office changed its mind and started granting software patents. Once the floodgates opened, everything resembling a new concept was granted a patent.

The result is a lot of nonsense patents for general concepts that could never stand up in court. The most heinous example is the hypertext patent, claimed by British Telecom. Of course, hypertext systems were in use for decades before BT even filed for the patent. Now it wants to somehow get money from every Web site on the planet because they violate its patent by using links. The hypertext patent is a reductio ad absurdum on the software patent process, rendering good and bad patents alike suspect and most surely casting doubt on Adobe's tabbed palette patent.

What should we do to fix the patent process? Vent to me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

James Mathewson is editorial director of ComputerUser.com Inc. and interim editor-in-chief of computeruser.com.