There is no hope [LWN.net]

There is no hope

Posted Jul 29, 2003 19:08 UTC (Tue) by rknop (guest, #66)
Parent article: Legal commentators weigh SCO's chances (Inquirer)

Software patents are going to kill Linux, and we're going to sit back and watch.

The problem is that even Lawrence Bloody Lessing has come out and said that intellectual property and "free culture" issues are not voting issues, not the issues on which you decide which candidate to vote for, not in 2004. If a leading light of the Good Cause says that, you'd better believe nobody else is going to have the stomach to do it.

Most of the country doesn't know or doesn't care. They have no clue that these sorts of things could affect *them*; it's one reaon to support the copyright-violating filesharers, simply because they might make up a sizeable voting bloc.

But even amongst those of us who know and care, who understand the issues, we aren't going to vote for politicians based on their intellectual property stances. We're going to vote for the Democrat or the Republican, based on in which party we were brought up, and we're going to justify it based on all our other positions and tell ourselves that intellectual property isn't as important as all those other things.

I mean, hell, if even those of us who care won't cross party lines or won't make it a make-or-break point to vote for legislators with half a clue on intellectual property issues, how are we ever going to reduce copyright terms? How are we going to stop ever-more-restrictive legislation about intellectual proprety? How are we going to forstall the coming software patent disaster? We aren't. Most voters don't know, those who do know aren't giving it the attention it needs, and meanwhile politicians do only what is in their best interest-- vote the way the big campaign donors want. The MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft can afford to throw a little cash at the politicians, who *won't even suffer* for voting with the companies, since none of us have the backbone to vote against them for their bad positions on this issue.

If you care, you need to consider voting for a politician in the "wrong" party, or a politician with the "wrong" opinion on Iraq, gun control, abortion, health care, or tax breaks, if that politician has the *right* view on intellectual property. If *we* aren't willing to do that, if we aren't willing to do all we can to help politicians who do that, you can be damn well sure that nobody else will, since nobody else even realizes it's an issue.

We might as well just sit back and enjoy the ride as the very core of free software is gutted in the name of "protecting intellectual property", "the rights of companies", and "investing in the economy".

Please consider making intellectual freedom a make-or-break voting issue in 2004. By 2008, it may well be too late for free and open source software.

-Rob

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There is no hope

Posted Jul 29, 2003 20:13 UTC (Tue) by dwalters (subscriber, #4207) [Link]

I agree with what you say, and can't argue with any of it. However, the problem is that you'd probably have to vote Green if you really want to cast your vote with a party who's intellectual property stance is aligned with FLOSS, and the Greens are not likely to win any seats.

Since we're talking Big Picture here, it's worth noting that the world does not begin and end at the borders of the USA; the entire world as a whole is shifting towards GNU/Linux and free software. India and China (who together make up nearly half of the world's population) are embracing FLOSS. If we Europeans and Americans don't want to get left behind while the FLOSS Tsunami is changing the software world for good, our governments are going to have to start listening a little less to big corporations, and a little more to the free software advocates.

There is no hope

Posted Jul 30, 2003 7:58 UTC (Wed) by jdthood (guest, #4157) [Link]

> the world does not begin and end at the borders of the USA

That is true. However other countries can be bullied into harmonizing their law with American law. That is where TRIPS is so useful to the USA. TRIPS is the part of the agreement that resulted from the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations.

[TRIPS] requires that 20-year patent protection
be available for all inventions, whether of products
or processes, in almost all fields of technology.

There are some exceptions to this, but software is not one of them. However, software is not listed specifically as included either (so far as I know). Given the TRIPS framework, the only way to exclude software ideas from patentability is to classify them as non-products. Most people accept that purely mathematical ideas are not patentable and even the European Patent Office is willing to say that software as such is not patentable. However, according to the EPO, as soon as software is run on a computer it is liable to perform a service, and then it is a product and so is patentable.

Whether or not to include software in the class of things that can be patented remains a political decision. Where the content proprietors have been very effective has been in obscuring the fact that there is a decision to be made. By characterizing ideas as "property", and users of those ideas as "pirates" (unless they pay up), they have managed to present the issue as one of protecting property and the rule of law (tm).

I have seen a paper that argues that mathematical theorems should also become patentable as a way of promoting progress in the mathematical sciences. Using a naïve economic model this idea might seem plausible even if it is counter to our intuition that we should not have to pay to think. The question of personal liberty aside, more realistic economic models show why our intution is correct. Mathematics, software and other things whose development occurs incrementally will probably not be developed faster under a patent regime but slower. This is a fancy way of supporting an argument that RMS has been making for decades — that society benefits from being able to share information freely without artificial restrictions imposed by artificially assigned owners.

But I am preaching to the choir here, aren't I? We don't want software to be patentable. We have to bring our concerns to the attention of legislators.