Morfik vs Google – You and What Patent?

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, June 5, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Australian firm Morfik Technology Pty Ltd, the makers of WebOS AppBuilder, an AJAX IDE and framework, issued a press release taking issue with Google GWT and announcing their intention to vigorously defend their intellectual property rights.

Now the press release refers to it as JavaScript Synthesis Technology, "JST" (Patent Pending), while their web site refers to it as revolutionary patented JavaScript Synthesis Technology (JST). Which is it? Patented or patent pending? Anyone retaining a pricey IP law firm in Palo Alto is unlikely to be so imprecise with legal language.

This got me a little curious. Since they retained said U.S. law firm, I took a spin through the USPTO database looking for Morfik, JST, Javascript, Synthesis, and Mirkazemi (the last name of the guys on morfik's whois record and apparently their chief architect, Aram). I even checked on Protel aka Altium, the firm with which Aram Mirkazemi used to be associated. Nothing. Nada. If there is a patent out there, it was not filed by Morfik, Aram Mirkazemi or Protel.

Maybe they filed it somewhere else? Searches in the EU, Australia, etc., all yielded nothing. No patents issued or pending. Also, the Morfik.com domain was created right around the same time that the company was supposedly founded:

Some time ago Morfik's founders identified JavaScript as the limiting factor in the development of complex interactive Web-based software applications and decided to develop some proof-of-concept prototypes for the translation of a high-level language to JavaScript. The success of the proof-of-concept resulted in the establishment of Morfik as a company in the year 2000 and the further development of JST. JST allows developers to use a high-level language of choice and have it compiled directly and seamlessly to JavaScript. Morfik spent the ensuing years building a state-of-the-art Rapid Application Development tool to make JST accessible to small businesses.

It seems unlikely they would have filed the patent application under some other name, right? Going to the Wayback Machine, we see that the first page was archived on 2/5/2005, so no activity on this domain before then. What were they doing before then?

The plot thickens. I am not a lawyer, let alone a patent lawyer, so I may have missed the filing. This certainly isn't the definitive word on Morfik's IP claim. So to Morfik: if you're going to defend your IP, where's the patent? Let's see it.

Related posts:

1. Does Google Eat its Own Dogfood?
2. AJAX Java IDE Support – Roundup
3. Better JavaScript Development with Google Closure Tools
4. Exploiting the Google App Ecosystem
5. Eight Javascript Code Generators

Comments (0)

Software Development

Comments

• Leave a comment
• Comment feed for this post
• TrackBack URL

None so far.

Leave a comment