Co-editor: It is not Bernard Leong. 

Yes, our very own Alice (member of ping.sg) got onto the papers on her campaign against VueStar. I knew about the entire campaign from the beginning and I admire her courage to pull through with all of Bernard’s unwanted comments (sorry, Bernard, but if your comments is anything to go by, I think you are surfing from Mars now, oh, link here and in the event that the comment is ever deleted, there’s always a pdf =P).

Of course, in short, what Alice is trying to do is to gather enough people (and resources, read: money) to get a class action suit against VueStar. This probably means they will be trying to refute whatever that VueStar is claiming against them and at the same time invalidate that patent.

Back to this thing about patent troll. No doubt there is a chance that VueStar might be a patent troll, but quite a number of companies are actually doing that. Besides concentrating on their main products, they go into placing land mines on patents and wait for people to step on these mines. Of course, if the products are valid and prototypes have been made, then there’s not much of a troll to talk about. It may just be a matter of cost-effectiveness to build and to market a product whose value is not known at that point in time. After all, it’s always important to time the market when pushing out a new product.

I have not read through the implications of Paul Smith’s remarks, but it’d be interesting if we can get a critical mass against VueStar. Strangely, Bernard stopped talking to me recently. Hmm… =(

LAST week, software developer VueStar was reported to be threatening legal action against website operators here unless they paid it an annual licence fee for using what it claimed was its technology.

This week, a response has come from among netizens - a PhD student is marshalling support to overturn the firm’s patent for the technology, which enables a user to find webpages by clicking on visual images instead of text links.

Ms Cheong Lee Sing, a Nanyang Technological University graduate student in her late 20s, has set up the website refutevuestarpatent.biz to gather legal and financial backing.

Her call to website owners who have received VueStar’s letters of demand: Fall in.

Ms Cheong, who has some experience with patent applications as part of her graduate work in digital image analysis, is also asking for legal advice and hopes to raise the $500 needed to file an application with the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (Ipos) to ask it to strike down VueStar’s patent.

She is also asking for ‘prior art’, the legal term for examples of the technology already in use, which will make VueStar’s patent invalid.

She has not ruled out filing a class-action lawsuit if her website attracts enough support from affected companies and concerned individuals.

Full-fledged patent lawsuits here can run up to six-figure sums in legal fees.

It was reported last week that VueStar’s patent was to give its technology protection here and in several other countries, including Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and that it was asking for between $200 and thousands of dollars from companies using its patented technology.

Ms Cheong described VueStar as a ‘patent troll’ - a company with no other legitimate business than to collect money by threatening legal action to protect the patents it has filed itself or bought from others.

VueStar managing director Paul Smith, denying the ‘patent troll’ label, said his firm is working on ‘a whole series of software products from security to directories’.

Ms Cheong, who maintains two other blogs, noted that despite widespread indignation in the online community, no one has ’stepped up’ to do something about it.

Frustrated by this inaction, she set up the site to organise the drive against VueStar, even though she is not among those personally affected.

She had at first wanted to do this anonymously, but soon realised few would give their trust or money if she did not ‘out’ herself. She said wryly: ‘I have already been called a scammer, and that I am actually working for VueStar.’

Unperturbed by her crusade, Mr Smith said: ‘I strongly advise her and other bloggers complaining about VueStar to get some legal advice, read the actual patent, and make sure their interpretation of it is correct.’

This is another in a series of recent online campaigns launched by netizens against perceived injustices.

Last year, online petitions were taken up after anime distributor Odex sent letters of demand to anime downloaders, demanding thousands of dollars. A petition was also launched at the height of a debate in Parliament over the law on sex between men.

chuahh@sph.com.sg

Article obtained from straitstimes.com on 4th June 2008