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Grokline Launches - Come and Help, Please (Groklaw)
Groklaw announces
the release of Grokline 0.1.
"We hope with this Grokline project to be able to identify any
conceivable legal issues that those wishing to block, slow, hobble or tax
GNU/Linux may try to use in future legal assaults on the community. If
there are litigation risks, even just from nuisance lawsuits, particularly
with respect to patents, we want to find those risks, hopefully before they
do, and mitigate or resolve them now. I am personally convinced, as you no
doubt are too, that the next wave of attacks on GNU/Linux and the GPL will
involve patents."
(Log in to post comments)
Systemically Broken Posted May 25, 2004 2:34 UTC (Tue) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256) [Link] Unfortunately I think that Grokline will mostly serve to illustrate just how systemically broken our intellectual property environment has become.It seems impossible to write any non-trivial block of code without brushing close enough to some patent or another that someone *can* sue you. The SCO case has shown that a desparate or motivated (and funded) party can take a case to court with only the barest semblance of apparent cause. I would not be surprised to find that there are broad and vague, trivial, over-reaching patents that can be construed to cover (if you squint hard It seems obvious that the US patent office has been wholly derelict in its responsibility to ensure that patents are reviewed and only issues to inventions which are NON-OBVIOUS and NOVEL. We clearly need to also distinguish between the original patent and the many ensuing trivial variants and enhancements that currently warrant their own patents quite contrary to the stated intentions of the framers of our Constitution. It's also obvious that the lawyers rule the roost and they our system is heading further in the wrong direction --- so that big businesses will gain even more pervasive hegemony over almost every mode of expression, from technologies (patents), to words and images (trademarks) to every sequence of more than three musical tunes or phrase of more than a half dozen words (copyright). I wonder where the breaking point will be. JimD
SCO has not claimed any patent infringement Posted May 25, 2004 4:02 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] Congratulations, you've just become yet another poster child for the FSF's argument that "intellectual property" is a confusing term to avoid. The only people who have been accused of patent infringement in the SCO case are SCO themselves.Moreover, documenting the provenance of source code, like Grokline is doing, has little to do with patents—independent invention (unless it came before the patent) is not a defense in a patent suit. Not that patents aren't a growing problem. (The best solution, from my point of view, would be to simply stop granting them for software, or for anything that can be copyrighted—the economic incentive structure that, in principle, justifies the patent system never made much sense for things with zero marginal cost. Trying to get patent examiners to impose stricter obviousness/novelty criteria will never work sufficiently, and doesn't address the root problem.)
Read it again! Posted May 25, 2004 4:27 UTC (Tue) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256) [Link] I didn't conflate the different forms of IP. I said that the SCO case is an example of how flimsy the "cause" of litigation can be. The Groklines stuff was about all forms of IP risk assessment and mitigation with a focus on patents as being the most blatantly ominous.JimD
Software and Law are similar.... Posted May 25, 2004 10:19 UTC (Tue) by mgh (subscriber, #5696) [Link] I find it very interesting that software and law are basically tools and mechanisms created by writing words in a strictly pre-defined language.What I want to see is what happens when a legal precedent is set and the law firm that wins the case patents the legal argument.... Now that would be fun to watch, in many ways this is what software companies are doing - software is copyrightable, but not patentable otherwise many many other similar type mechanisms are patentable. So the government of the land writes a new law (API) - the lawyers busily look for a test case (first application). They find the test case and prosecute. The other lawyers spend lots of time looking for an loophole, defense etc (exploit) and a court to run the exploit in and get the accused off the charge :))
Software and Law are similar.... Posted May 25, 2004 12:37 UTC (Tue) by LogicG8 (guest, #11076) [Link] I think that is a very good analogy. This series of articles that tries to explain the law process to programmers uses a similar one.To understand why legalese is so incomprehensible, think about it as the programming language Legal. It may have been clean and simple once, but that was before it suffered from a thousand years of feature creep and cut-and-paste coding. Law School in a Nutshell
Software and Law are similar.... Posted May 25, 2004 12:44 UTC (Tue) by sandy_pond (guest, #9734) [Link] A legal document is an algorithm written in words, not much unlike the RSA algorithm, to be encoded/decoded by lawyers. I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't get the patent office to approve a patent on a legal algorithm under todays laws as they did on the RSA algorithm.
Software and Law are similar.... Posted May 25, 2004 14:32 UTC (Tue) by welinder (guest, #4699) [Link] An algorithm is a set of specific instructions describing how to perform a given task in a finite number of steps.That seems very different from law to me.
Software and Law are similar.... Posted May 25, 2004 16:08 UTC (Tue) by WRatzka (subscriber, #912) [Link] Well, infinite loops and numerical algorithms that fail to converge in certain cases are not totally unheard of.
Been there, done that Posted May 25, 2004 14:27 UTC (Tue) by justme (guest, #19967) [Link] Actually, Thomson publishing (owners of Westlaw, a database of legal opinions) tried to claim copyright on the *entire* database, claiming that they had created a unique presentation of the cases. IIRC, this was in response to efforts to mirror and/or compete with their database.I don't really remember how it turned out. As for your suggestion, I think it's off to the patent office for you. Could be a nice bit of civil disobedience to patent, say, class-action suits, and demand a license fee from every settlement.
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