LWN: Comments on "Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)"

The point is concrete COPYING, not abstract

xoddam — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 05:19:53 +0000

*Actually* the best reasons not to allow software patents have nothing
whatsoever to do with abstract notions of whether software can or can't
embody an invention. (Plainly, it can).

The question is not quite being asked correctly. What we wish to
prevent, by preventing 'software patents', is the addition of artificial
restrictions on distribution and incremental improvement of software.

Patents are (supposed to) encourage innovation by protecting inventors
from better-connected or better-capitalised competitors who might outsell
them (even before the inventor has arranged any production at all) and
deny the inventor any reward or recognition.

Computer programs are a different category not because they can't be
original inventions, but because there is no capital barrier to mass
distribution. Like smiles, you can give them away and everyone ends up
the richer. In fact, the only people who can possibly lose out from
copying software are those with a protected monopoly; there is no natural
profit to be made from mere copying.

The granting of a government-imposed monopoly on *any* invention which
*might* be implemented as a computer program prevents that potential
program from being developed or distributed by anyone but the monopolist.
In principle, such a patent need not explicitly describe a software
invention.

Free software is completely vulnerable to patent minefields in an
environment which encourages patents on everything.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

XERC — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 17:28:57 +0000

without the special investment.

The point is, that very often the market is
a sufficient motivation for making the investment.

Amusing

bojan — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 05:02:55 +0000

> (1) [...] It's not clear why the invention should be patentable if implemented in hardware but not if implemented in software.

Maybe it isn't clear to you, but it is to me and some others. By allowing broad patenting, we are going on a really slippery slope. Idiotic things like business methods are already being patented as "inventions". What's next? Legal proceedings? Music? Literature?

A boundary has to be set somewhere. Software is already protected by copyright, just like other literary works. We don't need another monopoly protection for it. And we sure don't need anyone to publish their "software invention" in order to get some progress.

And your whole "it's not necessarily text" thing is just rubbish. Text is written down *ideas*. That's the point.

> (2)

Nitpicking, IMHO. This is LWN. People know what I was referring to.

Current UK position on Software Patents

wookey — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 00:51:24 +0000

OK, I've been following this closely for the last year or so, so I'll see what I can do.

Software has been patentable in the UK and Europe for 20 years or more

This is fairly contentious. I could write a long spiel about the UK patent law the European Patent COnvention and the case law that has gone on since the 1980s progressively allowing more and more 'softwarey' things to be patented, but instead I'll point you to a couple of URLs which give a reasonable summary.

UK software patent history

And this page from the UK government sums up the current position reasonably well: http://www.intellectual-property.gov.uk/std/faq/patents/computer_software.htm

So EPO (european patent office) and UKPO (UK Patent Office) practice are similar but not identical. In general the UK is more restrictive about what can be patented due to the limitation to technical fields (i.e. image procesing algorithms are technical, but language processing algorithms are not). Most programmers think this is a crazy distinction.

An example of what is at the edge of patentability in the UK at the moment is this patent from ARM limited - which covers the use of copying a pointer rather than the data it points to, when doing CPU simulations (for switching the register bank). This patent went through the special process of arbitration for ones they aren't sure about 'ex parte', but it did get granted. Again, any C programmer is pretty surprised to find that you can patent this highly unoriginal use of pointers in 2002. The point of course is that this is 'only' in the field of CPU simulations, but still - some of us might quite like to write a CPU simulation using this technique.

There is a very cogent explanation of how this demonstrates the empiness of the 'technical contribution' test here: http://www.softwarepatents.co.uk/current/technical-contribution.html

the proposed Directive restricts patentability and grants de-compilation-for-interoperability rights that previous patent law did not

The proposed directive would restrict patentability if it said 'Computer progams are not patentable', or 'data processing is not a field of technology in the sense of patent law', but it doesn't say either of those things. It appears to in places by saying things like 'computer programs are not patenable unless <something longwindeed which turns out always to be true>'. There are several instances of this sort of language which seem pretty clearly intended to confuse anyone not intimately familiar with the debate into saying 'well that sounds OK, I could support that'.

Asking what 'the proposed directive' says is more complicated than you might think - there have been several versions, and the degree to which they restrict patentability, or offer defences, varies enormously. The original Commission draft basically allowed complete patentability. The amended EU parliament(that's elected representatives) version essentially added clauses like the above offering genuine restrictions and and interoperability defence. The current EU Council (that's the collection of government representatives for each country) version took out nearly all the parliament amendments and added a few even more egregious clauses (such as claims on the actual media containing the prgram as well as the program when run, making copying and quoting infringements as well as running) so this allows complete patentability.

I must admit to not being sure if the interoperability clause has survived in any form, but I have read plenty suggesting that it will probably be a very weak defence in practice, depenmding on what the court deem 'interoperability' to mean. We think it means 'being able to play my DVDs, and read/write file formats', but 'they' think it means 'can write a plug-in for a patented program'. i.e. a piece of software which is not talking directly to the patented program is not 'interoperating'.

Hope that helps. If you haven't already read http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ , then do so, as that is the clearest site on the subject by a long chalk. It doesn't go into the UK-specific questions too much, but it is the european level that really counts. It is safe to say the the UK is at the 'most pro-software patents' end of the discussion at the moment, and few cracks in that government position have opened up so far, although there are signs that they might be beginning to.

Amusing

hppnq — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 22:27:07 +0000

While I respect the mental effort, don't let the intriguing philosophical aspects of what contitutes an invention cloud your perception of the fundamentally flawed patent system. One of those flaws is that it was conceived in an age when there was nothing like software, which is why we are forced to discuss the mechanical aspects of software now. ;-)

Amusing

sepreece — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 14:38:36 +0000

(1) The fact that much software is described as text is irrelevant. Patents are text as well. Nor does software need to be described as text - there are visual and by-example programming methods, too, for instance. Software is a written description of a way to cause a machine to do something. Software also defines behavior, in a way that generally could be replaced by a mechanical/electronic device. It's not clear why the invention should be patentable if implemented in hardware but not if implemented in software.

Here's a gedanken experiment for you, if you believe "text representation" is an important issue. Suppose we built a hardware realization of a programming environment - little functional boxes, corresponding to C functions, that we could plug together as physical entities and would, when a button is pushed, execute as a program. Would you then say that because it was a physical process it should be patentable, but that an exactly equivalent text description should not be?

I still tend to believe that if you accept patents at all, there's no obvious reason why software should be less patentable than other technical inventions. I do, however, completely agree that the current system is broken, grants many bogus patents, and generally patents things for too long, all of which should be fixed.

(2) While I do agree with you that Linus has a reasonable grip of copyright, your original arguments as expressed ("long time working on the kernel" implies "knows copyright" and "smart" implies "knows copyright") are completely without logical support. I was not saying anything about Linus, I was only commenting on your original argument.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

alexs — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 07:32:08 +0000

lets try to be compliant with some treatys... ;-)

allow patents for drugs, for mechanical machines,
for any sort of apparatus, for an electrical component,
for the software prduct that you can buy in a shopt -
that means patents for just for any prodoct that is
new for an expert of the subject, inventive at a non trivial degree
and teaches you something new of the applied science of physics.

thats what is roughly requested by TRIPS - and you can still
tune the three criteria for an individual country.
lets say the USA possibly has a rather "trivial" level for patents.

BUT ideas, algorithms, boolean logic, math, business practices
and all alikes are not covered by the applied physics.
other than that its hard to proove that some specific idea
in such non materialistic fields was never previousely used.

patenting of such areas is therefore neither requested by TRIPS
nor is there a reasonable way for the patent office to make sure
that there was never any prior art out there. ideas are thougts
and therefore need some sort of object to materilize for proof.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

alexs — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 07:18:02 +0000

patents do cover inventions in the field of physics.
but since when the science of math is a subsection of the science of physics?

Amusing

bojan — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 01:44:35 +0000

> I believe the comment about separation was going to the point that many things that most people would consider to be inventions include both mechanical and software parts, that in many cases the software is where the technical innovation occurs, and that there's no obvious reason why there should be a line between them. If you support patents for anything, that's a reasonably strong argument.

Of course there is an obvious reason. Maybe it isn't obvious to you, but last time I checked, software was text. And text is nothing but written down ideas. It is not different in that regard to a bunch of mathematical expressions, a piece of music or a book of fiction, all of which are not patentable. What computers do is not different from a mental process of a human - it is simply information processing. Whether that occurs inside some kind of mechanical invention or not is entirely irrelevant. It should not be patentable.

> I have no idea how much Linus knows about IP law, but there's no reason to assume that working on Linux for a long time (or on writing a book, for that matter) would inevitably cause you to learn anything about copyright.

You must be joking. Linux is done in a collaborative fashion with every contributor retaining the copyright in their contribution. A quick glance over the COPYING file will show you that Linus *does* in fact understand what he is talking about. He would have to be a complete idiot to not know the issues involved, while accepting *copyrighted* contributions from hundreds of different people. While writing a book may not be a good example of learning how copyright works, *choosing* a licence for Linux and doing a whole heap of merging does. You are probably the only person that believes otherwise.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

josh_stern — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 17:43:06 +0000

It's a tough issue. The premise of the drug patent is that the capitalist company would not have invested to create the drug in the first place without the possibility to get a time-limited monopoly from the patent and profit from that. Companies do regularly set different prices for their drugs in different parts of the world, and then they also get criticized for that (and people in the U.S. want to import the lower priced foreign versions). So there is an interesting moral question about what pricing should be used for a life saving patented drug once it has been created, or where should subsidies come from. I think it would make sense for the patent system to give the govt. the option to buy out the patent in certain cases, like a life-saving drug.

Having said all that, the comment above reads like basically a simple denial of the premise: the patent is bad because it prevents a lower price on a drug that would have been created anyway. If that is the problem then we don't have to go to the examples of life and death because every patent is bad if it covers something that would have been created anyway without the special investment.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

XERC — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 17:09:24 +0000

I agree, that the third world countries
(India, China, let's not forget Russia,
all of the African countries) need some
reasonable transfer period(20 years?),
but if they enforce pharma-patents immediately,
then they can only blame their own amazingly
stupid or just corrupt or indirectly corrupt
governments and their own culture.

Their own culture? Well, there is a saying that
every country has a government, that it deserves.
Most easily followable examples: U.S.A., Russia.

U.S.A.: With the U.S. don't-care mentality, one gets
exactly the kind of system, where everybody
sues everybody, poorer averagely talented
people can't get higher education(the few brightest
ones can get a free grant, but that doesn't chance
the big picture) and many people are without
any kind of medical aid. And yes, this system
is at least partly with a positive feedback:
number of court cases increases, duller citizens
vote for duller president candidates(and put up
duller candidates to vote for), duller
leaders(presidents) make duller decisions, which in
turn result something bad.

Russia: For a non-russian person with some intelligence,
who has been living in an an area that was one of
the states of the former(and future?) Soviet
Union, it's easy to understand, that there will
be no democracy in Russia, EVER, no matter what
the government or president. I might be mistaken
here, but I guess that at least the last 500 years
of Russian history supports this statement.

John Collins attacks interoperability clause

sepreece — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 17:08:00 +0000

Actually, I don't think the lawyer says anything about whether it's a good or bad thing, he just says that the proposed Directive would allow circumvention in some cases where current law would not.

I'd be interested in learning more about exactly what the intereoperability exemption in the Directive allows.

Amusing

sepreece — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 16:55:31 +0000

I believe the comment about separation was going to the point that many things that most people would consider to be inventions include both mechanical and software parts, that in many cases the software is where the technical innovation occurs, and that there's no obvious reason why there should be a line between them. If you support patents for anything, that's a reasonably strong argument.

I have no idea how much Linus knows about IP law, but there's no reason to assume that working on Linux for a long time (or on writing a book, for that matter) would inevitably cause you to learn anything about copyright. Nor does being smart imply that you know anything about any particular topic. I suspect Linus is reasonably familiar with copyright and patent issues, but your argument that we should assume that is baseless.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

sepreece — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 16:39:42 +0000

In US IP law, copyrights protect authors against direct copying of their "expressions", which could be words, code, musical notes, etc. Copyrights also protect against someone producing "derived works", such as translations into another language. However, they do not protect against someone expressing the same idea independently. Thus, I can tell you what a copyrighted book tells you, but I can't use the author's words. [This is an oversimplification, since the structure and purpose may also be important in determining whether a copyright is infringed, but it's the general principle.]

A patent, on the other hand, covers an idea and a method of implementing that idea. This is much broader protection, in most cases, than a copyright, because it covers the method, rather than just one expression of the method.

So, to answer your question, there could not be "software inventions without software code", but the code is just a single expression of the invention, so copyright would protect that code (and its derivatives) but would not protect the invention.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

sepreece — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 16:21:14 +0000

I suppose it's predictable that most of the comments posted on this note so far are really opinions on whether or not software patents should be allowed, rather than on what the lawyer actually says.

It would be interesting if somebody who actually knows something about European IP law could comment on the assertions that:
- Software has been patentable in the UK and Europe for 20 years or more
- the proposed Directive restricts patentability and grants de-compilation-for-interoperability rights that previous patent law did not

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

mmarq — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 15:24:58 +0000

" Torvalds and his supporters lack a fundamental understanding of intellectual property rights as they seem to be unaware that copyright can only protect software code, and not software inventions..."

How in the hell could be software inventions without software code ?...

This argument seems flawed from tip to toe. Its obviously in contradition with the spirit of protection that copirights is all about. Software is obviously only a language, not a product, which primary form is the code, and the imense different *mathematical* speaches that you can make with it,... and if you protect software code you are obviously protecting also software inventions in a large sense.

There are several human speaked words that mean the same,... there are several mathematical algoritms, that a computacional binary machine will deliver the same result,... lawyers will never get that!.

Otherwise this lawyer seem to argue that, copyright should be void some how, and then 'there is an open door' to steal(copy) everbody's code as long it dosent steal the invention apparatus, whatever that might be !..

I only wonder how much F/OSS must be connect/derived/influenced in every sort of invented apparatus software!?

John Collins attacks interoperability clause

pdundas — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 14:32:29 +0000

John Collins, a patent attorney who has written against the restriction of software patents before, says:

many innovations in protocols in the telecoms industry, for example wireless-to-wireless communication or wireless-to-landline communication, could be copied without infringing the patent.

This is another way of saying:

many common tasks in telecommunications could be caried out by writing new software from scratch, without infringing the patent

The lawyer seems to think this would be a bad thing.

Paul

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Seegras — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 14:10:09 +0000

Yes, I second that. I get this feeling too, and Thomas Jefferson was sceptic if patents would be "the right thing to do" as well.

And from my extra-strong libertarian point of view, a patent is nothing more than a government-granted monopoly; thus an unnecessary intervention of the free market; ergo evil ;).

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

niner — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 13:06:14 +0000

On the risk of dramatising, but ask some people in the third world countries facing month salary high costs for drugs on the one side and patents prohibiting them from producing these drugs themselves on the other side about how harmful the effects of patents in the pharmacy industrie really are.

Thank you

niner — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 12:59:35 +0000

So you obviously know what you're talking about. I was just asking, because I'm still undecidet about how I should think about your statement. Although most programs are just an implementation of some specification, of some things I could think of as an invention. Maybe some program languages themselves, something like regular expressions. Maybe something like the first compiler.

Certainly nothing I ever did, but I could just imagine. One could argue, that really everything came out of a need (like making programming easier) and nearly everything existed in some way before. But the same is valid for nearly ever patentable "invention" out there. Most are just some way X to reach goal Y more efficient, cheaper, whatever.

I'm certainly not for software patents. I'm not even for any patents, but it's an interesting question just what an "invention" really is.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

XERC — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 10:11:10 +0000

I don't know exactly, what it's like in the
team of biologists, but we, programmers,
develop tools for our corporate biologists and
in our case it's exactly so, that people tend to do exactly
what's more intereasting, more thrilling, exiting and
what they believe, will give as good results as they
can get for biologists---to develop better drugs.

So, I have a reason to believe, that, almost no matter
what the management thinks, there are probably many
people among the biology team members, who also,
tend to sneak to most interesting
tasks, most thrilling tasks. As the biologists
are also humans, the intereasting tasks may very well
be drugs for really serious diseases.

I visited one inter-corporate conference
once, whiches name I leave intentionally unsaid, and
the guys there presented research on such a horrible
NATURAL diseases, that most of us have probably never
even heard of. Yep, and it was a halve-fun project for
them, not something that the management ordered them
to do.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

petegn — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 09:29:38 +0000

The whole thing boils down quite simply to the fact that Patents SUCK and no matter how he tries to explain a way round the issue they SUCK and need killing off the way things are heading these daye you wont be able to write a letter with out infringing some idiots Patent somewhere (most likley sponsered by that well known perveyor or dodgey Patents M$ Corp)

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

pointwood — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 07:11:21 +0000

The idea might seems nice, but handling that would be a huge "mess"...

Executive summary

hingo — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 05:59:45 +0000

For hose of you in a hurry, I've summarized the article in plainspoken Egnlish below:

Linus Torvalds doesn't know squat about software, but I do, lawyer says

Disagreeing with Linus Torvalds, Rasmus Lerdorf and Michael Widenius as well as previously stated opinions by Vint Cerf, Tim Berners Lee and the Apache foundation, a lawyer who's an expert on intellectual property effectively says that the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the software quartet most commonly used to drive websites: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, are definitevly not innovations by his standards.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

ccchips — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 05:41:46 +0000

I believe the idea of copyrights ant patents (at least as framed by the founders of the U.S.,) was to have a trade between short-term monopoly and long-term, unfettered public access.

If you ask me, the real problem here isn't whether something should be patented, but that we have to be so concerned about it. Why?

Could it be because our leaders can't be trusted to make any sort of commitment? That they come up with these social contracts, only to turn around and break them when it suits?

In a world where these things worked like the philosophers intended, I believe we'd probably put up with this. The problem is that the people in support of coftware patents aren't going to stop if they get their way.

Then they will start attacking the "limited time" part of the idea.

Understand?

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

XERC — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 04:15:26 +0000

...then it takes years to approve...

I don't want to say, where I know this, but
I believe that I can assure You that nowadays the
lifecycle of a totally new drug is no more than
6 to 7 years. That is, from the the handfull of smelly chemicals
to the market.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

mrshiny — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 02:46:10 +0000

I don't have any data, but my impression is that drug companies DO spend lots of money on advertising. This is, in fact, a problem for doctors and pharmacists, who find themselves constrained when trying to select medications for patients because patients insist on something they've seen on TV. I believe this sort of thing can be handled with legislation targetted at the drug industry. I don't think the same is required for other fields; all cars are roughly equal in saftey (compared to drugs) so the choice of cars isn't a major risk to consumers, therefore let car makers advertise cars. But the choice of drugs is very important, and many people are over-medicated. This is a burden to healthcare systems and is not a benefit to society; therefore an argument can be made that drug companies should be regulated (more). But I certainly believe that there would be fewer drug companies making new drugs if they didn't have patents.

And anyway, patents in the drug industry don't have the same harmful effect as they do in the computer industry. If I need to share data with you, but that data is in a patented format, I'm out of luck unless I pay up for the patent. There are lots of other examples where the software industry is harmed by patents, these do not apply to the drug industry. For one thing, if a new software algorithm is released, someone else might be able to immediately apply it to a novel new idea. However, if it's patented, they have to pay for it. Waiting 20 years for the patent to expire is not feasible. However, with drugs, inventing a new drug, even based on an old one, takes years, then it takes years to approve... in that kind of timeframe a many-year patent is not as big an impediment to innovation.

How is a software invention distinct from software code?

kirkengaard — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 01:16:36 +0000

This seems to be a distinction that is easy to make if you don't understand software except by analogy. Implementations are patentable, where ideas are not. (yes, oversimplification) All programming starts with a problem, around which you build an algorithm, which algorithm is implemented in a language, creating source code, which is compiled into binary form. It seems to me that problems are universal; there may be a range of possible algorithms usable to solve any given problem, and so an algorithm may be unique, but is itself an idea, and not patentable; the code used to implement the algorithm is the only "patentable" thing in the chain. The code is the invention.

Torvalds and his supporters lack a fundamental understanding of intellectual property rights as they seem to be unaware that copyright can only protect software code, and not software inventions."

Come again? How, then, is copyright not sufficient? I seem to have missed that one...

Coding styles

jd — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 01:16:28 +0000

Yeah, I'm a programmer. I do most of my programming in C, but I can also write "cold" in 80x86 assembly, ADA, Java, Pascal, Perl, Python and PHP. If the reference manual's handy, I can also do Prolog, Occam, Fortran, COBOL and SISAL. I'm learning D and PL/1 for fun. I tend to think more in the Software Engineering side of the field - I can read/write Z specifications - and this does influence my perspective.

Z Specifications, EBNF, Jackson Structured Diagrams, Flow Charts and Source Code all show the same data, it's simply which way you rotate the paper and link the elements. In fact, if they didn't, they wouldn't be useful. If you couldn't change the view to one that was suitable for what you wanted to do, without changing the thing you're viewing, it would be absolutely horrible to maintain anything.

Having been in the computer industry, professionally as a programmer, for over a decade, and having been programming in general for 25 years, I know just how bad it gets without proper documentation and source control. However, that doesn't mean you couldn't engineer such documentation from any source you had. Actually, this would make maintenance a whole lot quicker - debugging a spec, and then translating that into the code, is quicker than debugging the code directly.

GPL vs. No copyright protection

zblaxell — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 01:11:16 +0000

The differences are subtle.

The GPL uses copyright law to make the right to redistribute the software
conditional: the software must be redistributed with the same GPL
license, the software distribution must not be encumbered by any other
agreement that might effectively prevent any of the GPL rights from being
exercised, and the software must include all source code required to
exercise all GPL rights.

Removing all copyright protection from all software would effectively put
all software under terms similar to a BSD license. This would grant
everyone the right to copy, use, modify and redistribute all software,
unless they had a separate agreement (e.g. a contract) which prohibited
such activity.

The GPL makes redistribution rights conditional on certain behavior on the
part of the people doing the redistribution. Removing all copyright
protection would grant the redistribution rights to everyone without
imposing the obligations of the GPL on anyone. This would mean that
people would be free to make binary-only proprietary Linux distributions
and distribute them only to people who sign an agreement to keep the code
absolutely secret...something the FSF probably doesn't want.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

verzonnen — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 00:31:02 +0000

If a patent can only be granted on "new" inventions, than I can see an unsurmountable problem with patents, at least for those of us who claim that we are religious. Think about it, if this god is all knowing, than surely that would be a strong case for prior art. And any sugestion otherwise would be tantamount to denouncing god.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

prahal — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 23:33:50 +0000

as all lawyer this is a man who play tricks on words ...

where did this respectble shark got the idea that software was technology ?
Because it is part of a technological good , the computer ?

Algebra is it a technology just by the fact without it plane would crash ?

Those are just the old jesuits disguised ... WTO treaty told taht all technology are patentable thus software have to be patented ...
SOPHISM !

good luck with those mad cows ... did they achieved to patent genome in USA , believe so because animals are used by factory to make cosmetics, hamburgers believe us they are technology ...

I always though technology was the fruit of man s knowledge, now we should relearn , technology is the source of science ... nature , universe, ideas, mathematics are technology .

Invention is overrated...

grantingram — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 23:33:48 +0000

I'll avoid your comments on what should constitue a patent and what shouldn't as that is way too deep for me. This however sparked my interest:-

... Not all transformations are equal in magnitude. Some are based on pre-existing information (eg: the mathematics of fixed-wing flight pre-existed the first aircraft), others work largely from scratch.

I've never seen an invention that was worked largely from scratch. Every single invention I've seen has been a derivative of something that went before. That's not to diminish the achievements of inventors - it's simply the way the world works.

Everyone stands on the shoulder of giants, some people just don't look down!

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

josh_stern — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 23:25:39 +0000

Practically every software program creates a process for creating a modestly
unique spatio-temporal mapping between its inputs and its outputs. Nobody
cares about that, but I am just trying to show that this kind of highly abstract
word play for describing what should be patentable doesn't get us anywhere.

Patents are regional...

grantingram — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 23:23:11 +0000

Well I'm not an expert on engineering patents but I did go to a talk once....

I think it is perfectly possible to have a patent in the UK that doesn't cover the USA for example. The UK Patent office site seems to imply that this is the case.

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

josh_stern — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 23:20:41 +0000

The distinction between a process and a static doesn't really do any work
here (even if one buys into the idea that the static is somehow natural
and the process man-made) because a program can also be seen
as a process to create specific configurations of data or machine
states (take your pick).

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

josh_stern — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 23:12:59 +0000

We are basically in agreement. Any type of patent, including a
software patent, should only be granted if patenting that type of
thing is defensible by some strong argument of societal benefit, and
you are saying that there is no evidence for benefit from software
patents. The basis for the idea of societal benefit would be the claim
that the invention would not have happened without the promise of
financial award that the patent can help realize.

The only place I might disagree is about the strategy of how we should
practically categorize what type of patent leads to societal benefit. I don't
think the categorization should be based on field of endeavor, but
rather on whether a strong case can be made that a particular discovery
would not have been obtained without a large prior investment of money
(or something inter-translatable with money) directly supporting the
research (maybe the length of the patent should even be proportional
the required investment size). So, for example, I'm mostly sympathetic
to the drug patenters that require large investment to find new successful
drugs and get them approved for safety. But if someone finds the
next miracle penicillin mostly by accident, they shouldn't get a patent
on that just because it is in the medical field. Similarly, if there was
some software discovery that really required enormous investment
to obtain that went beyond regular product development, then it
should be eligible for patenting. Something that could readily
be discovered by a volunteer developer would be excluded
by design.

Anti-software-patent lobby should pay attention

danielthaler — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 23:00:41 +0000

... okay, I know the FSF doesn't even think copyright should apply to software in an ideal world,...

That sounds wrong. I'd say the FSF feels all code should be free (as in open/accessible/modifiable). Copyright (or rather copyleft) is a means to achieve this. If they felt there should be no copright there would be no GPL.

Chemicals are patentable

glenalec — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 22:53:43 +0000

I think rrigs' point was that chemicals et. al. weren't always patentable,
not that they are not today. (I'm not commenting on the accuracy of this
claim, though, as I have no knowledge in this field.)

Amusing

bojan — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 22:48:00 +0000

I like the bit when an attorney explains to a programmer what software is all about:

Moreover, the open source community believes that software can be entirely separated from mechanical and electronic inventions.

Huh, next time I download the kernel, I'll make sure I also get the hardware with it ;-)

How about this one:

Torvalds and his supporters lack a fundamental understanding of intellectual property rights as they seem to be unaware that copyright can only protect software code, and not software inventions.

That's news. The man that's been slaving for over 10 years over a large copyrighted work doesn't know what copyright is. I was always under the impression that Linus is a rather smart fellow. Well, looks like I've been wrong ;-)

The problem with some lawyers is that they think the law itself is the beginning and end of everything. Laws exist (or at least should) to protect the people and the society. If they aren't doing that, then they have to be changed. But I guess that's a bit to hard to understand for this particular lawyer.

LWN: Comments on "Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)"

The point is concrete COPYING, not abstract

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Amusing

Current UK position on Software Patents

Amusing

Amusing

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Amusing

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

John Collins attacks interoperability clause

Amusing

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

John Collins attacks interoperability clause

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Thank you

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Executive summary

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

How is a software invention distinct from software code?

Coding styles

GPL vs. No copyright protection

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Invention is overrated...

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Patents are regional...

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Anti-software-patent lobby should pay attention

Chemicals *are* patentable

Amusing

Chemicals are patentable