Slashdot Mirror

jbc writes "The O'Reilly Network is running a debate between Tim O'Reilly and Patent Office Director Q. Todd Dickinson. Among the highlights is Tim's call for a Slashdot-like forum to serve as a means of identifying prior art." A bare-knuckled debate, not as in-depth as I'd have liked, but it's good to know Dickinson's perspective. Someone else mentioned a list of educational patents on computer assisted instruction techniques some of which go back to the 1960s.

jmason writes "An update on the EU's deliberations regarding software patents is up on the www.freepatents.org site: "the European member states of the Munchen convention have decided to wait for one more year before taking a decision on article 52.2, which says that computer programmes as such are not patentable. The European Commission (DGXV) seems to be pushing for more software patents rather than for more control on trivial software patents with no industrial application." "

After Michael Widenius of MySQL denouncing patents, now it's Linus' turn. During a panel at LinuxWorld, Linus said: "I agree that the patents as they stand now are a real problem. Something should be done to make changes to the laws, either making software patents a non-issue by not granting them or making them unenforceable. I don't know how to do that in the next nine months. Start writing your letters now and if they get enough, maybe they won't think you're a crackpot. We need a level-headed person to be an advocate for this." RMS's comment that "three years ago, Congress passed a law that doctors aren't restricted by patent infringements in surgery" shows that writing your representative might not be a complete waste of time. You can lookup your representative here. Thanks to Jean-Paul Smets for this one.

Michael Widenius, the main code-contributor to MySQL says that that software patents are bad for the community, should not be awarded for software ideas, user interfaces, standards or interoperability. Moreover if a patent were to be awarded, it should only be for major work (something that can't be done by a single individual within 50 years) and last 2-3 years at most.

Jean-Paul Smets has opened his new site Freepatents.org (mostly in English), which encourages Europe to maintain its no-software patents law. This law is apparently under threat. He's also well known for this study of the economics of free software (in french only at the moment, contact me if you can translate it, but you can use babelfish in the meantime). The new site contains the text of a resolution adopted by the french ISOC at its Autrans meeting, which requests that before Europe introduces any patent law a detailed study be conducted to determine the impact of patents on innovation, competition and free software, and that provisions are added to ensure large corporations cannot use patents as a legal manoeuvre to block innovation, competition and free software. The League of Programming cites example of patent misuse and reasons to be against software patents.