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Europe's tug of war over software patents (Herald Tribune)
The International Herald Tribune reports on the European
software patent issue. "A European Parliament bill that would
have made all software subject to patenting is the focal point of the
outrage among technology activists. Opponents of the bill succeeded in
adding amendments in September that would essentially prevent patents from
being issued for most types of software. The proposal is due back in
Parliament in the next few months, and the outcome is far from
certain."
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Rallying call Posted Feb 2, 2004 16:35 UTC (Mon) by dwalters (subscriber, #4207) [Link] <rant> I believe this issue (software patents) will be, without exaggeration, the single most critical obstacle to the interests of free and open source software in the future. When SCO is just a footnote in the annals of technology history as the company that tried and failed to overcome the free software tsunami, the real threat to the existence of free and open software will be software patents. When people talk about companies needing software patents to protect their technological innovations, remind them of what Bill Gates said about software patents not too long ago: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete stand-still today". When people ask how software authors' work can be protected without patents, remind them that copyrights do this, just as they protect the work of book authors. Can you imagine patents applying to printed works: "Once upon a time ..." Oh wait! I Can't write that, it violates Big Mega Publishing Corporation's patent 123XYZ - "a method of describing nonspecific chronological events in a story". Tell them that a patent that covers something like storing a word-processing document a single XML file sounds just a ridiculous to a software author's ears. This is an example of a patent that has actually been filed by Microsoft with the European Patent Office! Everyone who cares about the freedom to write unencumbered software should do everything in their power now to prevent Europe from going down the same road as the US and Japan in allowing unlimited software patentability. </rant>
Danger to all of the software industry Posted Feb 3, 2004 9:32 UTC (Tue) by NZheretic (guest, #409) [Link] Applying game theory to long term markets, for both open and proprietary vendors, based on software patents...1) Small software developers are unlikely to benefit from payments from licensing of their software patent portfolio, since competing software vendors are just as likely to hold other software patents that the developer uses in his own products.Software and business methord patents do not promote the art and ongoing development of the entire software industry. In 1981 US courts ruled that software and business methord could, without legislation ot the contrary, be patented. From 1981 to 1989, with a few exceptions the entire software industry just ignored the issue of software patents.
Challenges and Strategy -Bill Gates Email Memo 1991 Category 3The 1991 paper from The League for Programming Freedom can be found here http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/ As Bill Gates rightly stated " If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today". The Silicon valley revolution would not have taken place. From 1991 to 1997, the major software vendors slowly began build software patent portfolios and entering into cross licensing arrangements and most of the smaller vendors still ignored the issue entirely. From 1997 on, driven by the greed of the Venture capitalists of the DotCom era, vendors and other groups began gobbling up businesses based not upon the current business viability, but the so-called intellectual property the business held. Most in the software industry still ignored these third party parasites, but larger vendor also began expanding their software patent portfolios.
Complex cross licensing arangements are increasingly becoming a legal quagmire. Microsoft is facing a number of lawsuits from companies which Microsoft did enter into a formal relationship, for example Timeline Inc
However Only the GPL and LGPL so-called "viral" licenses effectively grants all downstream users the right to freely use the sofware. A license that even the largest of patent portfolio holders, such as IBM, are adopting to collaboratively develop new software. This, along with customer demand, is the major reason that Linux is being widely adopted and not one or more of the BSD based distributions.
Danger to all of the software industry Posted Feb 3, 2004 12:08 UTC (Tue) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] In many application categories straighforward thinking ahead allows you to come up with patentable ideas. Surely any such idea would instantly fall foul of the "obvious to any competent practitioner in the art" restriction? Cheers,
Danger to all of the software industry Posted Feb 3, 2004 12:27 UTC (Tue) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link] You would think so wouldn't you? But if you read some typical patents you will see that most of them are pretty damn obvious to you and I. Patent examiners are either too ignorant to know what is 'obvious' to a software engineer and/or are pushed by other pressures to award patents anyway. The problem is allegedly worse in the US, but the european examples seem pretty egregious to me too: http://swpat.ffii.org/pikta/index.en.html (Software patent horror gallery)
"don't care" mentality Posted Feb 3, 2004 13:09 UTC (Tue) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link] Well, there's one catch. Do people WANT TO HAVE BETTER SOFTWARE, FREEDOM FOR INNOVATION AND THEREFORE BETTER MEDICINE AND BETTER QUALITY OF LIFE?(Yes, medicine depends directly on software, like almost any other technology dependant field. For instance, think of drug development, genetics and computational biochemistry.).I do care about the technological freedom, but as approximately 90% of the operating systems are Win__ws ( reference_link1), then I can assume that 90% of the global community also has a "don't care" mentality. After all, evarybody knowns, what's Mic**oft (reference_link2) and alike, and that they are not working towards making this world to be a better place to live. I've heared one of my mother's friend's say:"Why should I care, who is the vendor of the software. My employer pays the license, I get those few papers written and printed and all the rest doesn't concern me at all." So, in the end, it's just the intrests of a technical community, who wants any tecnological progress or sees, that money is important but not sufficient. For business(wo)men, technology is just another good way to make money. After all, the only bad thing that the CEO of Intel sees about patents, is that "the litigation costs are too high"(reference_link3), and he doesn't even mention, that may be we could have many good products in our drug store or local super-market, if the development hadn't been slowed down or financially banned by patents. After all, a patent is an artificial mean to LIMIT COMPETITION!!! OK, I understand, that a case withought any "IP-protection" is also as bad or even a little worse than the current patent system, but there are other ways. One thing that I propose is, that the product verification should be carried out by the same organization, who grants the patents. One important part in my proposal is, that if the verifying organization claims, that the product does not infrige any patents or needs licenses only for patents X,Y,Z, then this would end the story for that product. If it later turns out, that the verifying organizatiojn(Patent Office) was mistaken, then the producer has no legal liabilety about those infrigements and can continue to produce the product withought restrictions. This way, the responsibility of the consiquences is put on the organization(or even people), who really cause the consiquences(I'm talking about patent system in general). As the patent system is "for the nation" and applies to everybody(at least in court), then the verification service should be partly funded from taxpayer's money, and therefor made accessible to everybody. The prices should vary: no need to help IBM or other giants from texpayers monay, but a local, small, startup firm should be capable of getting the verification service with a reaonable price. If you think, that lowering the prices stinks, thehn think of it this way: Would You like, if you could call the police or firefighters only for money(I would have used the ambulance sevice as an example here, but I understand, that in the U.S., the ambulance and healthcare is "for monay only" and that people find it to be normal.)? In that kind of system, this verification service is an essential need when doing business(just like patent verification nowadays), and, as said, it doesn't have to be free. The verification service just has to be reasonably accessible. The other two parts of the proposal deal with sequential development. The idea is, that the monay payed for various patent licenses is fixed with the product's selling price and has no absolute value. Then the percentage(40% or more) is equally devided between the patents, that the product directly "needs licenses" for. An example: Let's say, that a product A costs 100EUR. Then, 40EUR goes to patent holders. Let's suppose that the product A uses technology which is directly covered by patents p1, p2, p3 and that the patent p1 actually uses(depends on) technology, which is covered by patents p1_1, p1_2. The license fees would be divided like this: p2--13,3EUR p3--13,3EUR p1_1--2,6EUR p1_2--2,6EUR p1--8EUR So, if it's a very good product and sells well, the inventor get's it's fair share. Yet again, the inventor does have to keep inventing to get paid. Another important point here is, that the producer does not have to ask the inventor to get the license, it's given automatically. This way, competition is not limited and that's good for the consumers and to the community as a whole. In this proposal, software and business methods are not patentable. Naturally, the prediscribed proposal is an extremely unpopular one, because real invetors get a good share, people at patent office have resoponsibility and the current system abusesrs can't just file a paper somewhere and start collecting money for doing nothing. Now, let's add here, that the rest of the community doesn't even care.
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