Slashdot Mirror

I'm not so sure that's true because the relevant laws are set such that the penalties are so light for the wealthy violators and virtually non-existant for the most powerful participants in the system. First, the organization with the most patents is not in a position to "feel pain" as you say; IBM's power is (as they've said long ago) in cross-licensing. They said they get an order of magnitude more benefit by leveraging the power the patent scheme was built to exert (which is also part of the problem of calling organizations "patent trolls" as if leveraging that power is somehow not to be expected, or an abuse of an otherwise upright system, when in fact that power is just part of the system operating as designed). As a result, losing patent infringement lawsuits is not common for IBM. Richard Stallman laid out how this works in his patent talks many years ago:

IBM got two kinds of benefit from its 9000 US patents. I believe the number is larger today. These were first, collecting royalties and second, getting access to the patents of others. They said that the latter benefit is an order of magnitude greater. So the benefit that IBM got from being allowed to use the ideas that were patented by others was 10 times the direct benefit IBM could get from licensing patents. What does this really mean?

What is the benefit that IBM gets from this access to the patents of others? It is basically the benefit of being excused from the trouble that the patent system can cause you. The patent system is like a lottery. What happens with any given patent could be nothing, could be a windfall for some patent holder or a disaster for everyone else. But IBM being so big, for them, it averages out. They get to measure the average harm and good of the patent system. For them, the trouble of the patent system would have been 10 times the good. I say would have been because IBM through cross-licensing avoids experiencing that trouble. That trouble is only potential. It doesn't really happen to them. But when they measure the benefits of avoiding that trouble, they estimate it as 10 times the value of the money they collect from their patents.

With regard to Apple specifically, it's not that difficult to see that they get by in part by violating government-granted monopoly and they're wealthy enough to be able to afford to do it repeatedly. The people who run Apple now ran NeXT years ago. NeXT infringed the FSF's license (GPLv2) in NeXT's initially unauthorized GCC derivative in which NeXT added Objective-C support. NeXT and the FSF settled out of court when the FSF got them to comply with the terms of the GPL (lesson learned here: stand up for your strong copylefted free software licenses and the bullies will meet your terms). Apple would again violate the GPLv2 later by distributing an infringing copy of VideoLAN Client. VLC co-author Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote critically of Apple's choice to let the program through it's app store saying "Those terms are contradicted by the products usage rules of the AppStore through which Apple delivers applications to users of its mobile devices." Apple infringed upon 3 Chinese writer's copyrights and were ordered to pay 730,000 yuan ($118,000), hardly a sum that would stop Apple from doing this again. But the pattern seems clear: Apple violates laws it doesn't like and never really meets a punishment that will make the leaders of the organization question whether to do it again. Apple isn't unique in this but that is a detail; we need punishments for the wealthy and powerful that make them take the law more seriously. But most importantly for endeavors practiced by the general public, such as computer programming, we need to fight in an organized and political way to end software idea patents. Mere patent reform is a delaying tactic that benefits the powerful.

So very sorry but I must take exception with this. The "substantial amount of math" comes down to the 4 basic operations. Even partial differential equations come down to it with lots of looping. Really good programmers are not mathematicians for the most part. Really good programmers understand the machine and mathematicians dream up equations that do "something" and then explain in terms that can be translated into code.

No reason to apologize, without exceptions we wouldn't have any conversations, discussions or debates. I find it incredibly interesting that you seem to consider some parts of programming to be mathematics and you can even go so far as to say that "really good programmers are not mathematicians for the most part." I will quote Donald Knuth since he is much wiser than I:

Therefore the idea of passing laws that say some kinds of algorithms belong to mathematics and some do not strikes me as absurd as the 19th century attempts of the Indiana legislature to pass a law that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is exactly 3, not approximately 3.1416. It's like the medieval church ruling that the sun revolves about the earth. Man-made laws can be significantly helpful but not when they contradict fundamental truths.

Understanding the machine is very important as well but any programmer should know mathematics first and foremost. I use logic daily in writing boolean expressions in any language I use and on top of that, De Morgan's Law has saved me countless of hours of rederiving truth tables. Furthermore the knowledge of when to use a hash map versus any other collection and the run time of my code is so deeply seated in mathematics that I would find myself writing code that works very easily in my unit tests but might take days or weeks to run on real world data. Your assertion that mathematics in computing ends at the "four basic operations" is laughable.

And as to the bit about functional -v- object oriented languages, your tipping your "coding snobbery" hand a bit

"Coding snobbery"? How is it when you collect all the tools out there that are available (most free of charge) you're suddenly exhibiting code snobbery?! I'm not telling you to always use it, I'm not saying it's the silver bullet. I'm just saying that in some cases it makes sense to use it!

and indicating you are the kind of person who just wants to play with the newest toys.

I am absolutely floored by this mentality. There is no silver bullet in software development.

All the languages out there are mostly based on C and no one has yet been able to come up with anything that is actually better, but is rather simply a derivative. Yes syntactic sugar abounds but strip that away and you have C.

Surely you're not suggesting that one language is just "better" than any other language at everything. Could you explain to me how it is that the family of Lisp languages that began appearing around 1958 are "syntactic sugar" on top of C that was written between 1969 and 1973? Are you telling me that Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, etc are all just variants of C with syntactic sugar?! And Prolog's development in 1972 was based on C as well?

Functional languages are almost pure syntactical sugar as the underlying code that is generated is still the basic loop and branch that applies to all languages regardless of their style and name.

It turns out there are very inte

Just as with the IBM patent story on /. a couple of days ago, the FSF and its friends have taught us about the dangers of software patents years ago.

The heart of that IBM story IBM told us about in a story in their promotional magazine called "Think" magazine from 1990 and Richard Stallman taught us about the consequences of this problem in his talk "The Danger of Software Patents" (which you can find in the FSF audio and video archives).

The heart of the danger for computer users (regardless of what you use a computer to do) was addressed by Stallman in a portion of his talk concerning Paul Heckel's patents:

Even the patent holders often can't recognize just what their patents mean. For instance, there's somebody named Paul Heckel who released a program for displaying a lot of data on a small screen, and based on a couple of the ideas in that program he got a couple of patents.

I once tried to find a simple way to describe what claim 1 of one of those patents covered. I found that I couldn't find any simpler way of saying it than what was in the patent itself; and that sentence, I couldn't manage to keep it all in my mind at once, no matter how hard I tried.

And Heckel couldn't follow it either, because when he saw HyperCard, all he noticed was it was nothing like his program. It didn't occur to him that the way his patent was written it might prohibit HyperCard; but his lawyer had that idea, so he threatened Apple. And then he threatened Apple's customers, and eventually Apple made a settlement with him which is secret, so we don't know who really won. And this is just an illustration of how hard it is for anybody to understand what a patent does or doesn't prohibit.

In fact, I once gave this speech and Heckel was in the audience. And at this point he jumped up and said, "That's not true, I just didn't know the scope of my protection." And I said, "Yeah, that's what I said," at which point he sat down and that was the end of my experience being heckled by Heckel. If I had said no, he probably would have found a way to argue with me.

I'm going to go with "argumentum ad verecundiam" here - I know... bad form.

Here's Professor Emeritus Knuth's Letter to the patent office.

Here are a collection of quotes with references.

If you don't know who Donald Knuth is, you should find out before trying to participate in this discussion. It seems unlikely to me there exists a software patent that isn't derivative of his work.

And since I'm a Groklaw fan, here's a Groklaw article about the good professor's views on the subject.

Ya, that's why Donald Knuth is in such huge proponent of pate... OH WAIT, NO! What a stupid point you made.

IBM stands alone in the world of patents because IBM holds the most patents. This fact places IBM in a unique position: IBM can leverage the power of cross-licensing more than any other patent holder. This is a formidable power. For IBM the trouble of licensing patents is mostly hypothetical. In "Think" magazine, #5, 1990, IBM estimated the value of this cost. As the link above says:

The value IBM gets from cross-licensing measures the trouble that the patent system would cause IBM if IBM could not avoid it. IBM's estimate is that the trouble could easily be ten times the good one can expect from one's own patents--even for a company with 9,000 of them.

IBM doesn't pursue patent lawsuits because IBM can pressure virtually any patent holder into cross-licensing. IBM isn't failing to sue because they're choosing to take a defensive position (whether reluctantly or not). IBM's power here puts the lie to the 'lone inventor' myth the patent system sometime engenders just as it puts the lie to any "protection" a small software developer would gain should they discover IBM believes they're competing with IBM.

A transcript of Richard Stallman's talk on this problem (including mention of the above article) is online (1, 2), as are audio and video recordings of him giving this talk. I highly suggest reading and/or watching the entire talk because the talk is highly informative, and he is clear to separate his work on free software from the trouble with software patents. The danger of software patents "relates to the question of whether the programs are free or not, the dangers of the same for all software developers".

True, but it wasn't used in real-time whatsoever until '91, like I said.
and then likely in simple and experimental uses. Trying to improve the algorithm would be premature optimization.
before then real-time graphics rendering wasn't feasible, especially not lighting.

Besides, this all just comes down to a billion variables. Maybe people weren't interested in this subject for awhile. Maybe the right people weren't working on it. Maybe in 2 years nobody came up with anything, but in 9 years somebody would have. That doesn't mean it took somebody 9 years to develop.

Look at math. Some solutions took centuries for the right mathematician to come along and solve the problem. But they don't get a patent on it because it isn't a work of creativity that they made them self, it is a description of a process which already exists in the world. Other mathematicians necessarily NEED that algorithm to continue the work of math, it isn't a single element, but rather each takes the ideas of the previous and uses them to prove further things. Algorithms are very similar. Donald Knuth said all of this much better than I ever could:

http://progfree.org/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt "Congress wisely decided long ago that mathematical things cannot be patented. Surely nobody could apply mathematics if it were necessary to pay a license fee whenever the theorem of Pythagoras is employed. The basic algorithmic ideas that people are now rushing to patent are so fundamental, the result threatens to be like what would happen if we allowed authors to have patents on individual words and concepts. Novelists or journalists would be unable to write stories unless their publishers had permission from the owners of the words. Algorithms are exactly as basic to software as words are to writers, because they are the fundamental building blocks needed to make interesting products. What would happen if individual lawyers could patent their methods of defense, or if Supreme Court justices could patent their precedents?"

And if David Kappos' recent move is any indication, her next big step is clear: head up the US Patent and Trademark Office when Kappos leaves. I'm guessing that IBM would love this move because there she can better serve IBM's interests against those of the public. Kappos, current USPTO Director, was former IBM vice president and assistant general counsel of "intellectual property" law. IBM holds the most patents. First-to-file undoubtedly helps large firms like IBM because large firms hire lots of lawyers to file all sorts of patent applications. The more patents IBM holds, the more IBM can cross-license their way out of any threatened patent litigation by threatening countersuit and then negotiating a patent license.

But I have yet to see a rational argument for why physical inventions but not virtual inventions should be patentable.

There are lots of clear rational arguments against software patents

Freedom of speech;

Software source code is a form of Speech; it is a method of communication from one programmer to another about mathematical concepts and their usage. Free software, in particular (though probably not most "Open Source" software) is often political speech. As such, under the UN Convention on Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Constitution of the USA, it is the most highly protected form of free speech. Software patents attempt to interfere with that and are clearly criminal.

mathematics / algorithms

A program is; simply; a large integer. Running a program is, exactly running a series of mathematical operations on that large integer. Mathematics is explicitly recognised as non patentable in most patent regimes.

A similar argument can be stated in terms of algorithms. Software patents always claim a "method and aparatus". The reason for this that a pure algorithm is recognized as not patentable, only things with

the nature of software development

Software is developed differently from bridges electronics and other areas of physical engineering. In other areas we much more start with a design, apply known techniques and get to a given end. New forms of bridges come out of separate explicit research where prototypes are built and actual work is done separately from the development process. This means that advances come more slowly and explicitly from research to development. In software, every new software development effort includes and should include new ideas explicitly. Once these ideas are developed it is very easy to package them up into libraries and make them available. The same ideas are re-invented repeatedly. At the same time, it is almost unheard of for a software developer to benefit from reading a software patent. Finally, a bridge builder will probably take days or weeks to consider a single idea. A programmer will probably use a hundred patentable ideas in a single day. The only reason that the programmer is able to work at all is that software patents are a new idea so 99.9% of those ideas will already have been used by someone else. In other areas, a patent search taking several days may be done for every new idea.

• there is no need for patents because ideas are continually re-invented;
• software ideas are cheap; the loss of one single new idea is not a big worry
• patents do not provide the benefit they should to the software development process.
• software can be developed by home developers who can't afford patent lawyers.
• the cost of patents to software development is much higher than to other areas
• handling software patents properly would need 1000 lawyers for every programmer

I'm not nearly the first person to put these forward. If you haven't heard them before, then you might want to have a look at Groklaw, the league for programming freedom. There is a long list of reasons given on the end software patents web site.

It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use.

The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. (See http://swpat.org/ and http://progfree.org./ This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.

Miguel says everything is cool so you are wrong and we have nothing to fear. Ever. EVAR !

It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use.

The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. (See http://swpat.org/ and http://progfree.org./ This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.

This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C# implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which is good. (The GNU Project has an implementation of C# also, called Portable.NET.) Ideally we want to provide free implementations for all languages that programmers have used.

The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn't make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.

We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs in C#. Therefore, we should not include C# implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions or in their principal ways of installing GNOME, and we should distribute and recommend non-C# applications rather than comparable C# applications whenever possible.

Well then congratulations. You have discovered why people don't like software patents and have completed your quest for knowledge. Happy yet?

Also, it should be noted that stopsoftwarepatents.eu is of course an EU website. You'll note that more American centric commentary often brings up the non-patent-ability of math.

Citation: Donald Knuth

To a computer scientist, this makes no sense, because every algorithm is as mathematical as anything could be. An algorithm is an abstract concept unrelated to physical laws of the universe.

http://progfree.org/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt

For more examples of this argument being made, see EndSoftPatents.org.

"We are watching the landscape," Cook told financial analysts. "We like competition, as long as they don't rip off our IP, and if they do, we're going to go after anybody that does."

(see here)

Apple has been building up for a patent war and so Nokia has no choice other than to strike before their N900 phones make them vulnerable. Remember Apple's lawsuit happy history was what caused the League for Programming Freedom. I guess the fact that so many seem to believe that Nokia is the agressor here (remember, they've been trying to Negotiate for years before this suit came out) really does show that Apple can distort reality.

There is sort of a hope out there that most voters will remain above the fray, but in practice this is a misplaced hope most of the time.

most of the time the people sent to the standards are paid specifically to get what are called "fundamental patents" into the standard. That is where you have patented one particular way to do something (we do remember patents are about methods, not objectives) and you manage to get the standard to say that it will be done in the way your patent says it will be done.

this is basically a fun drinking game. You sit there for hours stoney faced saying "no" all day for the first day and explaining deep technical reasons why your competition's patent won't work in this sitation. Then in the evening you go out and get seriously drunk. Whilst drunk you start trading off what things each person really wants to get in to the standard. Then the next day, those who can still remember what was said get their way with the standard and only serious and proper persuasive arguments combined with good blackmail drinking photos are allowed to change the agreements of the previous night on pain of ostracism.

In telecomms standards this isn't even particularly immoral since the companies playing are all big boys who can take it. In the example before us we have Apple; about 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 for "intellectual property" evil and Nokia (about 7 or 9 but with a tendancy towards 10). Remember Apple is the company which inspired the League for Programming freedom. In fact Apple is arguably worse than Microsoft (has done more in practice; but doesn't go in for unsubtle bully boy threats) and is only clearly less Evil than Qualcomm (rates 15 on our earlier scale of 1 to 10).

Whilst I'm definitely anti software patent, and strongly believe in controlling the influence of other patents, this is a lawsuit happening to a company that really really had it coming to them.

You won't truly understand what's going on until you examine the system. You cannot explain why big business loves software patents even if they lose a patent lawsuit here and there.

Microsoft and many other large corporations (particularly IBM which holds the most patents) will never "admit that software patents are just plain bad" because software patents are not bad for them. Software patents pay off very well for them in the long run. Software patents don't benefit society for a variety of reasons which Richard Stallman has expertly gone into in his patent talks. Software patents don't benefit you or me specifically: we are liable to lose a patent infringement lawsuit; ask patent holder Paul Heckel how he was able to get money from Apple in 1990 by threatening to sue Apple's users for infringing a couple of his patents which, according to Heckel's lawyer, read on something Apple was doing in Hypercard. But big businesses benefit and one big business can come close to quantifying that benefit.

As bad as you find patent payoffs to be, that's not the half of it. Cross-licensing patents is worth more and is far more revealing about how patents don't (in the propagandist language lawyers use) "protect" anyone. In IBM's magazine "Think", #5 from 1990, IBM told us how much more patent cross-licensing is worth to them: 10X more. Quoting from a talk Richard Stallman gave about the problem with software patents:

IBM said that they have two kinds of benefits form its 9000 active U.S patents. One benefit was collecting royalties from licenses. But the other benefit, the bigger benefit, was access to things patented by others. From mission to not to be attacked by others but with their patents through cross licensing. And the article said that the second benefit was an order of magnitude greater than the first.

In other words, the benefit of IBM is to make it things freely, not being sued, was ten times the benefit of collecting money from all their patents.

This is why IBM recently filed a friend of the court brief which makes no serious dent in the ability to obtain and use software patents. This is why they don't want the patent system to flatly reject ideas expressed as algorithms in computer software as some other areas of endeavor are simply unpatentable. IBM is the king of the hill. And as the US foists its patent regime on other countries through trade agreements (under duress, no doubt), IBM will be there cheering them on.

So if you don't see that it is the system that needs to be corrected, if you want to go on with "Fuck Eolas"; if you believe that the players in that system are somehow going to turn around and see things your way without any compelling reason to do so, you will find it difficult to understand how to properly reign in the power big business and make big businesses the subordinate of citizens as they ought to be. And to think, this is the easy issue to get right: software patents aren't even a life and death issue like other patents are (we have yet to see the full flower of the ramifications of the Chakrabarty decision which made it possible to patent a living organism, for example), like other corporate-driven/anti-citizen policies are.

Knuth's argument misses the point. The distinction is not between mathematical and non-mathematical algorithms, but rather between an algorithm in the abstract and an algorithm as applied to a real world problem. An algorithm, in and of itself, lacks the utility required for patentability. Once applied to solve a problem, however, the invention is no longer the algorithm per se but rather its useful application, which should be patentable.

Suppose one invents an algorithm for efficiently solving systems of non-linear equations. Alone that algorithm should not be patentable because merely thinking about equations in the abstract is not useful. But if one applies that algorithm to, say, efficiently simulating the motion of fluids or forecasting the weather, then it becomes useful.

To avoid charges of 'thought-crime' one can always institute a requirement that the application of the algorithm be implemented on a computer, but that's a mere formality. Few new, useful, and non-obvious software algorithms can be used effectively by the human mind alone, and it would be virtually impossible to prove infringement. Furthermore it would be a PR disaster.

Red Hat's argument is also very weak. Software patents are often of low quality primarily because the Patent Office long resisted hiring patent examiners with computer science backgrounds. In fact, it is still much more difficult for someone with a computer science degree to become a patent examiner, patent attorney, or patent agent than it is for someone with a degree in chemistry, physics, biology, etc. As a result, the Patent Office is understaffed and many of the examiners are underqualified.

Another reason software patent quality suffers is because patent examiners often first look to patents and patent applications as sources of prior art. Because software has only been patentable for a couple of decades, there is a much smaller body of readily accessible prior art. Examiners can and do look to journal articles and other sources, but time and budget constraints make thorough searching difficult.

The problem Red Hat describes is not entirely confined to software, either. Patents of all stripes have dubious or overly broad claims. The answer is not a patchwork of allowed and disallowed subject matter or different rules for different kinds of technology. Better answers are to either eliminate the presumption of validity that patents enjoy or to tighten the rules on enablement and written description, which would mean that applicants could only make narrower claims closer to their specific implementation and not to the broader class of invention.

AIUI, Stallman's position is not against C# as a language, or implementing C# on Linux. FTA:

The problem is not unique to Mono; any free implementation of C# would raise the same issue. The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. (See http://swpat.org/ and http://progfree.org./ This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.

I wish some knowledgeable folks would weigh in how possible it would actually be for MS to do this for C# in particular. (Do they already hold relevant patents?)

Whether you like MS and think Stallman needs a shave and a bath or not, it is an indisputable fact that MS has threatened to use patents against Linux in the past.

I think Kappos having been brought up in IBM will make him more open to (or at least less skeptical of) open source-type ideas than any of the other former directors, and his computer/engineering background will also make him more critical of our patent system, and not as focused on ratcheting protections up as far as they can go.

I don't know what being "more open to open source-type ideas" means. Nor would I use the term "IP" as you did. Software patents hurt all developers except those at IBM because IBM holds the most patents. Holding the most patents means IBM can cross-license far more easily than any other patent holder. In fact, we know how valuable cross-licensing is to IBM because IBM has told us. IBM has told us cross-licensing outweighs the value of collecting patent license fees by an order of magnitude. IBM got ten times the value of using patents held by others than licensing its own patents. This means IBM alone can skirt the trouble the patent system causes everyone else. IBM can completely undo the alleged advantage the patent system is supposed to give smaller organizations trying to commercially launch their work. You really should read Richard Stallman's examination of the US patent system as it applies to software development for a fuller description of the details on how IBM's statement in 1990 reveals the harm done to all software developers under the USPTO's thumb.

The solution is to completely deny anyone software patents so software developers can go back to relying on trademark and copyright law which is sufficient to avoid defrauding consumers and enforcing licenses, respectively. But I doubt the world's largest patent holder is in favor of disempowerment, and now that they have a man running the USPTO I doubt we'll see that office seeking to make software algorithms unpatentable.

I think what we're seeing here is just another instance of how corporate-friendly President Obama is. The more I read self-identified "open source" adherents saying how good this move is, the more I think that the open source movement is too corporate-friendly as well. Mere affiliation with a movement that isn't fighting for software freedom isn't doing you any favors; raise your critical standards and keep on fighting for the end of software patents.

Perhaps Slashdot story submitters should have to certify that their understanding of patent law comes from something more than perusing the musing of RMS at the League for Programming Freedom. A short course in claim construction would help in differentiating between broad patents that cover something commonly used and narrow patents that are easy to avoid.

The claims of this patent all include the limitation of a "name space extension" that adds at least one "non-file system object" to the file system display. For example, opening a zip file as a folder is an example of adding a non-file system object. If it was part of the shell, instead of an extension to the shell, then the shell probably would not infringe. The capability of extension by third-party vendors is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Windows Explorer.

There may be prior art that invalidates this patent (after all, prior art can be in any language, any time before invention). But, it would have to be prior art that reads on the narrow scope of this patent, not the bizarre, broad interpretation offered by the submitter and by /. commentators.

Some applications are just way too complex. As your application grows, this test will be less useful. I am trying to learn automated testing of web applications, and so far, I've found that javascript and popups are evil.

This post is kinda silly.

--
say NO to software patents
Donald Knuth Letter to the Patent Office.
Carta a la Oficina de Patentes por el Profesor Donald Knuth