WorldCAD Access

Autodesk Loves Lawyers

Even as Autodesk finds it has insufficient funds and chooses to lay off hundreds of employees, it seems to not be lacking for lawyer fees. From a press release posted today by the Open Design Alliance:

The Open Design Alliance was subpoenaed by Autodesk, Inc. last month for deposition in the civil case Autodesk filed against SolidWorks Corporation for, among other things, trademark infringement, including use of the term DWG in product names. 

Arnold van der Weide, President of the ODA, stated, “I am disappointed that the ODA has once again been summoned to deposition. It puts an unnecessary burden on the Open Design Alliance, especially since lawyers at Autodesk are asking for the same information they asked for before during their petition for cancellation of the ODA’s OpenDWG trademark.”

Source.

Yawn: Yet Another Autodesk Lawsuit

This time its Autodesk Canada doing the suing, claiming that the user interface of Assimilate's Scratch post-production film editing software is too similar to that of Cyborg. Says Assimilate:

Although Autodesk does not market or sell the Cyborg product, Autodesk claims that it purchased the rights to Cyborg in 2002 from the liquidation sale of 5D Solutions.

Wow: Suing somebody for something that looks like something nobody sees. 

It turns out that Scratch's UI was not particularly "stolen" from Cyborg, because the two have the same father: after 5D went bust, its owner started again from scratch (pardon the pun). The technology, however, is different: Cyborg is (older) node-based while Scratch is (newer) pipline-based.

You can read Assimilate's statement here, as well as the comments from Scratch supporters. The suit was filed last October in the foreign country of United States; court documents link.

Disinterest Rules: Yares vs. ODA

Four blogs wrote up the proposal by Evan Yares for a class action law suit against the Open Design Alliance, and not a single comment.

Blog writers find it fascinating; blog readers don't care.

Bad Guy? Class Action Proposed Against ODA

The Open Design Alliance changed the terms of Associate Membership from free to $100 yearly. Former ODA president Evan Yares figures that's wrong, because associate membership agreements were in-perpetuity.

(Associate Members download some -- not all -- ODA libraries for personal use at no cost.)

By his estimate, some 3,000 associate members are being asked to pay up within 30 days or lose membership -- against the terms of the license they originally agreed to. Including, Mr Yares notes, Autodesk apparently.

He details his case and his emails in a lengthy posting at his Evan on Engineering Software blog: Open Design Alliance: What a Mess. And he's proposing that the three thousand launch a class-action suit in Washington State to stop the ODA from unilaterally changing the agreement.

Autodesk & SolidWorks to Hug & Make Up

In the case of Autodesk vs. SolidWorks [and why does it always seem to be that it's Autodesk doing the vs., rarely the other way around?], Owen Wengerd's CAD/Court reports that the two have "made significant progress towards settlement and are in the process of drafting and negotiating a settlement agreement."

The civil court judge had denied Autdoesk its favorite legal tactic -- the extension request -- over its complaint involving the use of allegedly orange rectangles and other issues. 

Orange Rectangles Need Not Be Rectangular

Already, we may have already seen one positive outcome of the on-going negotiations. It seems that Autodesk might have agreed to allow SolidWorks to use orange rectangles during SolidWorks World as long as the corners were rounded off and some sides were non-perpendicular.

Or perhaps SolidWorks offered the design change as an initial step towards mollification. One just never knows, does one.

COFES Love-In Interferes with Lawyers' Right to Bill

Whatever the truth of the matter, there quite probably is a palpable sense of urgency in the negotiation room. COFES is a mere five weeks away, and April 16 just may be setting the agenda for the deadline to the agreement.

After all, it would do no good for the representatives of the warring parties to allow their grudges -- as important as they may seem -- to darken the mood in the white-tented dining hall on the grounds of the Scottsdale Plaza Resort. 

When Autodesk senior vp Buzz Kross sits down at the breakfast table next to SolidWorks ceo Jeff Ray, we trust that the upcoming break in the relations fast will allow their deportment to be as warm as the Arizona sun. 

Maybe one of them will sigh, "Orange rectangles! What was that all about anyhow?" And perhaps the other will respond in relief, "Buddy that's all behind us now. Can I pour you some orange juice?"

LT-Extender vs drcauto

A reader worries:

Do you have more information in the "copyright reasons"? Nobody wants problems with the big red A company.

There is a difference between LT-Extender from Germany and the LT add-ons from Australia.

I am under the impression that LT Extender modified the code in AutoCAD LT, which contravenes copyright [see correction by Torsten Moses in the comments]. In contrast, drcauto intercepts Windows API calls made by AutoCAD LT, which is perfectly legal in Australia. (Microsoft found this out the hard way when it lost a law suit against an Australian company making add-ons for the XBox.)

Autodesk doesn't like what drcauto does, and so makes the API call interception process more difficult with each release of AutoCAD LT. 

Killed Off: LT-Extender

Torsten Moses of TM-CAD Engineering announces the death of LT-Extender:

I ceased the production and distribution of the LT-Extender software with immediate effect due to copyright reasons. I also no longer provide any support services for the LT-Extender software.

The software allowed AutoCAD LT to be programmed to run vertical applications, a feature that customers desire.

A photo at the TM-CAD Website illustrates a headstone engraved with the words, "Killed by a lawyer." We know that Autodesk had sued the company in 2003, telling upFront.eZine at the time that its complaint was against companies who are...

...redistributing Autodesk proprietary files, copying AutoCAD files to their machines deploying AutoCAD LT, [and] modifying protected Autodesk code.

Knowing how slowly law suits progress in Germany, the "lawyer-killing" of LT-Extender may well be the outcome of Autodesk vs TM-CAD Engineering. 

TM-CAD promises customers an alternative to LT-Extender, to be announced.

Source. (h.t. Owen Wengerd)

Odom to Autodesk: I Own Ribbon Resizing

It's a good thing Autodesk didn't lay off any of its lawyers, because it'll need to reassign a few of them to defend itself against Gary Odom, who claims to have a patent on how toolbars are handled (cf. Tool Group Manipulations).

In his claim for damages (for no "less than a reasonable royalty"), he specifically targets the ribbon interface Autodesk added to AutoCAD 2009. The ribbon interface was designed by Microsoft, and was unhappily imposed on the Rest of the World by the likes of SolidWorks, SpaceClaim, and Autodesk. Oden is also suing Microsoft.

Reading patents is a mind-twisting exercise, but it appear to me that his idea is to modify toolbars when the window is too small, so that the otherwise missing portion gets stacked underneath, or compressed (displays fewer icons).There are small arrows that indicate wrapping. (See figure below of the stacking and the icons, taken from the patent filing.)

Autodesk's implementation of the ribbon manually and automatically compresses and expands the ribbon. Small icons indicate when a panel is compressed vertically; the user clicks the icon to expand the panel. See figure below.

AutoCAD compresses and expands the ribbon horizontally automatically, depending on the width of the AutoCAD window and the number of open panels; the user can also open panels that are compressed horizontally.

Mr Oden's patent also includes a number of keystrokes for controlling toolbars, such as joining two bars and manually compressing or expanding toolbars. I don't know of any keystrokes that perform similar functions in AutoCAD; it's all mouse-driven.

Restoring Balance to Software Licensing

Owen Wengerd is writing a series of important articles on the need to restore balance to software licenses:

• Software Licensing: A Case For Reform

• Software Licensing: Who's On First?

Over in Australia, the government is looking into doing exactly that. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Nick Abrahams writes in When 'I Accept' is not really 'I Accept' (h.t. R. Paul Waddington):

Last week the Australian government launched a discussion paper which takes aim at organisations that use "take it or leave it" standard form contracts and the technology sector is squarely in its sights.... The Minister for Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs, Chris Bowen, hopes to fast track the new provisions into law by January 1, 2010. 

Dell No Friend of Autodesk

The "netbook" term was revived by Asus for its then-new line of small-screened DVD-less notebook computers. The Psion came out of the woodwork, with lawyer-written letters threatening blogs and others over use of the term.

Now Dell is fighting back through the US Patent & Trademark Office, accusing Psion of abandonment, genericness, and fraud.

One's thoughts spring immediately to Autodesk's attempt to use the USPTO (and civil courts) to monopolize use of DWG. Abandonment and fraud don't apply to Autodesk, but genericness does, as Dell's lawyers point out:

The term "netbook" has been widely used by the computer media and consumers to refer to a subset of "notebook" computers that are small and inexpensive.

Rewritten for DWG...

The term "DWG" has been widely used by the computer media and consumers to refer to a subset of "CAD" files.

Source.