Police raid not about software patents [LWN.net]

Police raid not about software patents

Posted Mar 13, 2008 16:24 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501)
In reply to: Police raid not about software patents by stuart_hc
Parent article: Some topics related to MP3 players

The European Patent Office takes very little notice of article 52, or more accurately,
interprets it very differently to you or I. The sisvel patents are most certainly algorithmic
patents, although some of them are described in terms of hardware, and can equally be
implemented in hardware or software, they are largely stuff that most people here would
consider shouldn't be patentable. MP3 is an interesting example because the original work did
actually require some real research into psychoacoustics, and was dealing with audio
representations, rather than software as such, and thus a better case can be made for granting
patents on it than most algorithms. Nevertheless, having those rights for 20 years so we
_still_ can't freely implement mp3 is clearly excessive, even if you don't think it was plain
wrong in the first place.

Sisvel's aggressive enforcement tactics are legendary. They are just as vile as the more
famous  US-based patent trolls, and indeed have gone as far as sueing other MP3 patent holders
(Thomspon, Fraunhofer).

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Police raid not about software patents

Posted Mar 14, 2008 0:38 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I've always hated the term "software patent," because hardware vs software has little to do with patents. (In fact, I find about 90% of the use of the terms "hardware" and "software" in general are in sentences that aren't really about hardware and software).

"Software patent" is usually used to refer to a patent on an invention which would typically be implemented with software. It doesn't matter if that software is integrated into a physical device which is the unit of distribution. The distinction between this and other kinds of inventions seems to be mostly related to the relatively cheap engineering process that creates the invention.

I believe this is the first time I've seen someone refer to the software patent issue as stuart_hc does: the idea of patent rights covering the distribution of an invention via information transmission as opposed to movement of matter.

Police raid not about software patents

Posted Mar 14, 2008 1:12 UTC (Fri) by stuart_hc (guest, #9737) [Link]

I believe this is the first time I've seen someone refer to the software patent issue as stuart_hc does: the idea of patent rights covering the distribution of an invention via information transmission as opposed to movement of matter.

Personally I see no difference between an algorithm implemented in a general purpose programming language and the same algorithm burnt into a custom chip. Having spoken to patent examiners from a the UK patent office it is clear that they do see a difference. They will not grant a patent on an algorithm (unlike in the US) but they will grant a patent on a device which uses that algorithm for a particular area of industry e.g. video compression. When I asked whether I could distribute video compression software which implemented a heavily patented video compression codec, they grudgingly admitted that I could. But if I distributed a physical device, even a general purpose computer with the software installed, I would be infringing the patents. See this article for more detail on how European courts deal with software patents for two actual court cases.

Police raid not about software patents

Posted Mar 14, 2008 18:45 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I'm way out of my area of expertise, but from the articles about UK software patenting, it sounds to me like the same rule that you can't patent a computer program would apply to a physical device that runs (and is packaged with) the program. I.e. if there's nothing novel about the CPU and the only thing invented was a new sequence of instructions for it to execute, it falls under the computer program exclusion.

I also notice that the articles distinguish UK from Europe, so at least under that terminology, I shouldn't consider these cases to be examples of how "European" courts deal with software patents.

Police raid not about software patents

Posted Mar 14, 2008 0:52 UTC (Fri) by stuart_hc (guest, #9737) [Link]

Article 52 of the European Patent Convention's exclusion of "programs for computers" includes the "as such" qualification. In practice (rightly or wrongly), this has allowed European patent offices to grant patents on devices which include software as a component of the physical "invention".

My point was that this situation is still very different to the US and contrary to the article's assertion that Europe is in the same unfortunate situation. In Europe we can still safely develop and distribute software which implements MP3 audio, MPEG-2 video and other codecs since the software is clearly a "program for computers ... as such". It's no coincidence that some of the most aggressively patented areas of human endeavor have actively developed free software implementations safely hosted in Europe (x264, FAAC, FFmpeg).