Slashdot Mirror
James Gleick On Software Patents
haase writes: "James Gleick has written a thoughtful and compelling piece on software patents for the New York Times magazine. This would be a good piece to send to your representatives. You can read it at
the NY Times Web site. (Registration required.)
"
Who the hell is James Gleick?? I hate it when you do this.. you always have so many articles written by so-and-so (basically nobodies that are pulled out of your asses).. I mean even a link to their bio would be helpful.. Although you guys may have been worshipping these random nobodies since you were 3, some of us have no clue who they are.
A famous author can be full of shit as easily as a nobody!
Fight Spammers!
The About.com site here.
The sidebar is very good, but you have to hunt for the links if you are using a CSS enabled browser and the article as a whole suffers from formatting problems. Still it is a very good article and I really liked the illustration "Procedure for Simultaneously Walking and Chewing Gum" by Dugald Stermer.
Nonetheless there really isn't much new here for us Slashdot folks. That is, other than some really good new ammunition for the next time you want to talk about stupid patents. (I really cannot believe someone got a patent for measuring breast sizes with a measuring tape!) For us Mr Gleick is preaching to the choir.
Our real hope is that everyone else wakes up and realizes the danger stupid patents (and, perhaps, software patents in general) represent to our currently flourishing 'New Economy'...
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
I'm constantly worried now in my software projects that I'll need to waste all of the money on a patent to keep companies like Amazon from illegally patenting later what I already invented and shutting me out from use of my own invention. Prior art on Amazon's one-click shopping? Yes, it's called a vending machine, and it's been around for a while. I suppose vending machines are now going to have to add a button for "are you sure?" to keep Amazon away.
...and check out the article at James Gleick's personal site, around.com:
http://www.around.com/patent.html
Wonder why when I submitted this story it was declined...hey, I should have taken out a patent on the idea of posting this story, I mean, it's obviously an original and innovative Business Strategy...
Everyone is out to get you by making you paranoid, once they succeed, are they still out to get you?
Fight Spammers!
The old world is not going to go down without a struggle, nor should they be expected to. And so it's war, and they are coming after the internet, and all of its "free" this, and "open" that, with everything they've got. What this amounts to is an attempt to "fence in the frontier", and it is a direct and strategic attack on open source - you can't GPL it if someone's already patented it - and more broadly an attempt to kill off the ecosystem that has allowed it to flourish.
Someone needs to start the Gnu "prior art database" to catalog all of the unpatented implementations and algorithms. And sooner or later, the geek tribe needs to become a political force and kick some butt in Washington.
"Fig.1 - a device for knocking patent officer's heads together..."
I registered with the New York Times because I don't think that giving my name to them in exchange for free access is a bad deal. If you don't want them to know who you are you can still read the article; simply go to the local newsstand and buy the damn newspaper.
I'm serious here... if some non trivial percentage of patent examiners were Open Source programmers, there would be two immediate benefits:
1) Stupid patents would be caught earlier.
2) We would have more time to write code.
Both are important here, remember what Albert Einstein did for a living while working on some of his early theories? It's basically a 9-5, gov't job with full benefits, and you have the rest of the time to yourself. No 80 hour weeks of unpaid overtime, leaving you too exhausted to do a little kernel hacking when you get home.
I think its time we got off our collective asses, and really did something to make a difference here.
Me.
http://www.around.com/
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
But this is not longer true. It appears that the European Patent Office does not issue patents not because they believe that "software is inherently unpatentable", but because originally they believed that they did not have the equipment of skills to judge their quality!
IBM (all hail the mighty patent machine) lodged a software patent with the EPO last year and had it turned down (as per their plan one would assume) and then lodged an objection and while the patent was still refused the appeal ruled that the exclusion of software from patents is not valid under all circumstances
Which all means that companies are falling over themselves to get software patents out in the EU as well, left the good times roll
EPO Appeal search engine, search on software
IBM Appeal (PDF)
C.
I sometimes write stuff
Get your facts right, the NY in NY times does mean New York. New York Times is actually an anagram for "Semite Workyn"
This is basically saying "Let jews be our slaves". The swastika was around as a nationalist pure race symbol long before the Nazi party was created.
The Nazi ties of the last four editors were merely a way of infiltrating the Nazi party. They also have ties with a number of other organisations, including the KKK, Communism and various masonic organisations, as well as many organisations that despite racist leanings have a better public image. The actual purpose for these seemingly contradictory ties is a mystery.
Also don't make the mistake of assuming that the NYT, MS and all the others are working together. Their aims are the same but they are not neccesarily working together.
[a very well written article, IMHO] is:
Meanwhile, the dollars-and-cents reality of running the American patent office has also encouraged the patent explosion. In 1991, the patent office was cut off from general tax revenues and required to subsist entirely on fees for its operating budget. The political argument was that customers should pay for government services. Thus, officials think of their fee-paying patent applicants as their customers: the more the better, again. Examiners know that their year-end bonuses depend on productivity. Each morning, as Commissioner Dickinson arrives at his Crystal City office, he walks past a framed poster bearing the motto "Our Patent Mission: To Help Our Customers Get Patents."
It's virtually forgotten that government's customers also include the rest of the nation, the citizenry at large, whose fortunes depend on the agency's judgments and policies.
Also, to the guy spouting on about "Who the hell is James Gleick" - I think you've missed the point. It's common courtesy to attribute an article to an author (in the same way as software to an author, a movie to a director, a song to a singer, a slashdot post to the poster...)
Nobody said "by the wonderful James Gleick", or even "by the authoritative James Gleick".... work it out.
My 2 cent's worth.
--- cut: Eat well, exercise, die anyway.
C.
I sometimes write stuff
at least not according to a lookup here altho I'd love to find a silly one like that in the database.
All I can add is, after grad. in '82 I went to the PTO and worked in the "info storage and retrival" section for a summer - it's a ruff job, slogging thru all the legalese and trying to shoot 'em down, but that's the examiners job. I had a few pat. applications, several actually, which were just 'burn a program into a 2716 ROM and patent the ROM' (REJECT!!). I actually was about to issue a Patent on a few but my supervisors said, "What's so new about this" and quickly produced a document that preceeded it if you interpret it broadly enough. They kept emphasizing 'broad' thinking - that is, if someone tries to patent a memory scheme that is implemented electrically in Si chips, you can reject it with a 'similar' memory scheme implemented mechanically in wooden disks and dowell rods.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
This is a great article to help the average person figure out what's going on with software patents and such. Most of the things in this article have been discussed here on Slashdot already, but the article offers a lot of great insight for those who may have missed it.
:)
The ignorance about software at the USPTO is a huge problem. Possibly worse is the fact that the patent examiners have a lot of incentive to grant as many of these patents as they can. JG claims that examiners' bonuses are based on the number of patents they grant.
I'm not sure what the answer to this problem is, but there's no doubt that this is only going to get worse until something is done about it. It seems obvious that software patents are doing a lot more to stifle innovation than to foster innovation. It seems obvious that the big guys will reap huge rewards due to their ability to abuse the patent system so easily. As you can tell from the article, Commissioner Dickenson from the USPTO seems blissfully unaware of the problems with the software patents they are granting. In fact he seems downright pleased with the current state of affairs. Keep in mind that the USPTO's budget comes from examaning patents now--all of it if I understand correctly. And since software patents have become so popular the USPTO has been granting patents in record numbers.
In other words, don't count on the USPTO to try to change things for the better--unless they can find a way to do it that will allow them to issue more patents.
That's my read on it at least. Great article at any rate. The author even used the word "hacker" in a non-derogatory context. I'm impressed
numb
The patent system should be changed so that the patent application would need to have a public "Problem description" posted for a defined period of time. Anyone could try to describe solutions for this problem. If anyone submits a solution that covers the attempted patent, the patent should not be granted, because obviously the solution is implicit to a person skilled in the problem area.
One point in the articles was very revealing to me - the pay and bonuses for the patent examiners comes from approved patent applications. This is a serious management mistake. A better approach would be to charge a signinficant fee for an application, refundable on approval but forfit if the application is denied. I doubt it would ever happen but it does strike me as fairer and more efficient.
Fairer because approved applications are presumably a public boon, so it is only fair that they be publicly funded, while denied patents are just a public nuisance consuming public officials time and energy, so it would only be fair to make the applicant pay.
More efficient because they would give the examiners an incentive to deny frivolous applications and fees could be set at a level that would be a disincentive to frivolous applications.
As I said I doubt it will happen, but it appeals to me because it would reverse a system that currently seems to be travelling flat out in the wrong direction.
Aren't what some of the patents cover actually coverable by trademarks? I mean, a series of shortcut keys for menu items (Brief/Star/Borland) isn't actually a /process/, but it is, in a sense, a mark of their product. Likewise, Apple's blue gel encasing is a mark of their trade, not a /process/ and not patentable (unless there is really something innovative in that casing as they would have us believe).
Where to trademarks play into this? I mean there has to be more use of tradmarks than to simply protect the word "Coca~Cola" (tm).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
As the article mentions, Gleick's most recent book is /Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything/, and it is an outstanding book. I highly recommend it.
:-)
It even quotes from the Jargon File.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Of course you can. The GPL makes no pretense of granting rights which are restricted by law. The GPL merely provides that the copyright holder(s) are not restricting use/distribution/modification of the code under copyright law: there may unfortunately be other laws that do restrict use/distribution/modification of the code, such as U.S. export laws, or patents.
That said, the existence of a patent can make software non-free (at least in the portions of the world where the patent is restricted) and free-software authors should use alternatives whenever possible (e.g. LZ instead of LZW compression).
The moral of the story: merely being GPLed (or BSDed, or in the public domain) does not make a piece of software free, but it's all the copyright holder can do. (Unless, of course, the copyright holder is also the patent holder.)
--
Patent 5,993,366 is not for "Playing tennis with a kneepad", it appears to be for a method, or substance to improve the quality of copiers and/or laser printers, made by a rubber company. Sorry to be so specific, but it's the wrong patent number.
Stupid is as stupid dies.
The biggest problem I can see with software patents vs. open source is that open source has no revenue stream to use to finance a defensive patent portfolio. Though that leads to an interesting idea upon which others have speculated before: the Open-Source Patent Portfolio. Since one of the ways that companies (like IBM!) derive revenue is by licensing patents, the OSPP could patent inventions by open-source inventors (or have the patents sold to them), and license them out under a license which gives anyone the right to use the inventions in open-source software for no fee. Companies wishing to use any OSPP patents in closed-source products could do so for a fee and a cross-licensing agreement which allows all their patents to be used in open-source software for free under the OSPP license. This scheme might even generate enough revenue to kick some back to the inventors.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I didn't register. Someone did it for me. The login slashdoted/slashdot still works, for those who don't care to attach their name to things. (NYT still gets their ad-impression revenue if they don't get your name, so the privacy-invasion is just a cheesy bit of Little Brotherism.)
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I know I'm following up to my own post, but I've just been looking around Gleick's homepage for the first time, and discovered that /Faster/ has its own domain:
http://fasterbook.com/
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Hey, I submitted this story to slashdot really early on Sunday morning - only to have it rejected.
:)
It got posted to slashdot after all, so the community got a chance to learn about this, and nothing was lost (except my pride
However, I have to wonder about the editors (all those new, post andover and post valinux guys). If someone rejected a piece that Hemos thought was worthy of being posted, it means they have a different sense of what constitutes a good slashdot article. Which is OK, because different editors can disagree (of course, this seemed like a pretty obvious slashdot piece - and obviously Hemos agreed). The problem being, what if this article had only been submitted once, and was rejected - the community would suffer.
A lot of these new editors have been reading slashdot for a lot less time then some of the readers, wield way too much power, and don't really understand what the community is looking for. People who don't know what we want are controling what we get!
I think some system should be in place, where the editors' actions can be observed, at least by the chief slashdotters (cmdrtaco, hemos). When an article is rejected, it should list who rejected it, so the heads (and us readers) can learn what kind of decisions an editor is making. Perhaps the system could be semi-automatic, when you submit a story, it should log the url of the page, and an editor can see if other submissions to the same page have been made, and their status. Therefor, we can avoid repeat posts, and someone like cmdrtaco or hemos could see if some of the new editors were rejecting good stuff.
I think the entire patent system should be abolished.
Now before you write me off as a kook think about it. Why do we, as a society, grant patents at all?
Usually when I ask this question people answer, "To reward innovation." But that's really only a means to an end. I contend that the real reason we grant patents is to encourage innovation.
What's the difference? Once an innovation has been introduced society gains no benefit from rewarding the inventor.
But most of us consider innovation to be a good thing and we believe that by promising the protection of patents we can encourage individuals to expend time, resources, and their brains to create things that would not ordinarily have been created.
But our economy and population has reached a size where the incentive of exclusive use is no longer a necessary motivation for innovation. I'm sure people can find examples of technologies that probably wouldn't get invented without the incentive of patents but overall the patent system does more to stifle innovation than to promote it.
I say the patent system is not worth fixing. Let's ditch it and we'll see more innovation, not less.
Current practice, however, is to patent the "use of a calculating device and communications network to distribute news in a timely manner". Suddenly Slashdot, the NY Times, and dozens of sites owe me 0.25% (I wish), even though each uses different methods to implement the concept.
It used to be that people patented specific, and presumably better, designs for implementing a carburator. Now they patent the very idea of a carburator.
Aficionados of silly patents will rejoice in finding this patent, kneepad and all, in the patent database, just with a slightly different number. It's US Patent 5,993,336.
Also, for those who have browser troubles on the around.com version of the story, there's a stripped down version linked from Advogato.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
I hate to tell you this, but if you insist on barking at the moon with paranoidal tendancies you can at least get your facts straight. The swastiska is an old folk symbol for fertility and luck, not a pure race symbol. In Winston Salem NC there is a settlement called Old Salem from the 1600's. It was a Moravian town that is now a tourist attraction as most of it has been preserved and restored. In the old houses on display, the headboards of the beds have very ornate and beautifil swastikas on them, for fertility. Leave it to Hitler to screw up using that symbol for everyone else. Conspiracies are fine, just be sure you know your facts first. It makes you a little bit more credible.
Sorry. I was running a bit short on ideas. I suppose I should have left that out but it was marginally more accurate than the comment that the swastika was invented for the Nazis (Which ruined the origional troll for me a bit), and I thought that I could get away with making that bit up expecting nobody to call me on it. I've come up with some much better conspiracy theories in my time.
I still haven't worked out if the Swastika and the Fylfot (Same shape but made from horizontal and vertical lines rather than diagonal lines) represent the same thing or not. People use Swastika to descibr both shapes.
If the US Patent Office violates its constitutional mandate, shouldn't we be able to sue them? (Note that the constitutional mandate may be completely different from the statutory mandate - they may be following the laws passed by Congress to a "t", yet still violating the constitution). Constitutionally, the purpose of patents is "to Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". If the Patent Office is not doing this, then I would suggest that they are engaging in some kind of illegal restraint of trade.
BTW, I don't see any kind of change occurring until the megacorps decide that it is in their best interests.
The first pages' patent with a picture of:
"Procedure for Simultaneously Walking and Chewing Gum" by Dugald Stermer
It's only logical to replace the mans brief case with a laptop.
I'm sure Jeffs got a team busy on it now...
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
Companies have lost sight that to increase their value they must produce an item, and make a profit. Patents do nothing but make the companies stock more valuable in the eye's of stockholders. Amazon, to my knowledge, hasn't posted a proft yet, and the only way to make stockholders happy is to file patents which increases the value of the stock. Stock value is no longer linked to the company's profits, but to a perception of the company's value.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Which basically reinforces my point: the patent system is being used as a club to beat open source over the head with. But surely the very act of publishing a piece of software creates an example of "unpatented prior art" which should invalidate any patent. And conversely, if an idea is already patented it renders the GPL irrelevent. (you can gpl it, but no-one can use it for 20 years.) Please correct me if I'm wrong. In any case the situation is serious and demands concerted action.
So this idea is so innovative and non-obvious that it deserves a patent, but companies who have never heard of this person and their patent probably chose to use this method.
Either somebody's university didn't require a course in elementary logic, or (more likely based on the attitude shown here) somebody cheated their way through it.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
depends on your tradition, really. You can trace a swastika, fylfot, crooked cross, whatever back as far as you want to go. It's shown up in cultures as diverse as egyptian and japanese, each taking on a different meaning. Symbols are all relative anyway. I have alot of interest in brittish paganisim (as opposed to the lame-ass wiccans of today), so that's where my interest in swastikas stems from. Interesting to note that around 500ad the swastika was used as the cross of christ by the christian church, in yet another attempt to gain followers by assimilating local pagan traditions and symbols. Really fascinating stuff, and I wholely believe that the symbol will come back "in vogue" in a couple hundred years, after the Nazi distaste fades a little.
;-)
glad to see I managed to troll SOMEONE
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
The patent situation has gotten absurd. The vast majority of the stuff is not origional. There is an old saying that I think is right on: "Origionality is the ability to conceal one's source" P.S. Your servers are s..l..o..w. Perhaps if you went to Windows 2000...
The other purpose of patents, besides encouraging innovation, is to document and disseminate information about the invention.
Amazon would have invented and used 1-click ordering regardless of whether they were going to get a 20-year monopoly on it. So it doesn't meet the first objective.
The author mentions that anyone skilled in the art of web programming wouldn't need to see the patent of 1-click ordering to reproduce it. So it doesn't meet the second objective.
This is a clear example of a gaping hole in the patent system that was at least smaller in the past (right?). Neither objective of the patent system was met.
We need at least a new patent guideline to address this sort of nonsense. What would it be?
-Frank
(Damn, carriage return didn't change fields in my browser. Oh well.)
:) After all, he did spend his early years working in a patent office, verifying the claims of physicists wanting to patent new ideas.
From the article:
"...Did Einstein invent his formula, E=mc2, or was it there all along, waiting to be discovered?"
Actually, he probably stole it.
There. You can't say everyone who approves patents were entirely incompetent, can you?
:)
Solomon Kevin Chang
Database Design and Programming
FutureStep.com
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
A lot of people have been talking about doing something about broken software patent law. I think now it is finally time that we should actually do things. There are at least two things we should do:
1-- Establish a pool of open software patents. Anyone can use any patent in the pool providing they agree to make all of their own patents (if any) available to everyone else in the pool. proprietary developers who want to use some of the patents in the pool may do so: if they add their own patents to the pool.
2-- Establish OSS patent language: you may use this software, but any patented material you add to it must be licensed to all users, etc.
3-- Support reasonable compromizes like the one Amazon is backing. Not the best of all possible worlds, but as someone said, better than a poke in the eye with a broomhandle.
What are we waiting for?
Why patents are a good thing once the problem of obvious patents is solved (and how to solve that problem)
(1) Society benefits from a patent when the idea, design, machine, or program that is patented is (a) useful and (b) would not have been produced if it were not the patent system. Whether the thing patented is idea, design, machine, program is irrelevant if (a) and (b) hold.
(2) Society is harmed by a patent when the thing patented would have been produced anyway because the patent restricts its use.
(3) The problem with the recent explosion of patents is that many of them fall into the second category.
(4) The problem with scrapping the whole patent system or a class of patents, e.g. software patents, is that society would lose the benefit of patents of type. I expect that most slashdot readers would argue that this would be that this would be a good thing despite losing the benefit of type (1) patents. Perhaps this is true, but I think it is easy to jump to the wrong conclusion - when patents work, it is hard to see them working, when they don't work its is very obvious.
(5) The ideal situation would be to only have patents of type (1); the problem is finding an objective way to identify type (2) patents.
(6) Here is my solution. If you have something that you believe is worthy of a patent, you define the problem you have solved and send it together with a fee, say 10,000 dollars to the patent licensing body. The patent licensing body publicises the problem the patent applicant has defined for, say, 3 months. Anyone via the Internet is then invited, to come up with a solution to the problem. If someone comes up with the same solution as the patent applicant, the first person to do so gets to keep the 10,000 dollars and the solution enters the public domain. If no one comes up with the solution before 3 months have passed, then is not something obvious, so worthy of a patent. Clearly, people have a disincentive to apply for frivolous patents, e.g. one click, since there's a good chance they'd lose their money.
I hope this interests someone.
I think you missed the point of Amazon's patent.
Thousands of hours means at least two thousand. That's one person full time for a year. Honestly, a coder that dumb should never be allowed near a keyboard. That demonstrates an incredible (literally, as in, not at all credible) level of incompetence. I honestly can't believe a programmer that dumb exists, even against the dumbest coders I've ever encountered.
Perhaps Amazon's new slogan needs to be "Patents Are Like A Box Of Chocolates".
A battery powered automobile includes an air operated turbine fed by front and side air scoops for providing both charging current to the batteries and driving power for the automobile. An auxiliary internal combustion engine is included for use when necessary. Deceleration and wind sensitive controls operate door structure on the front air scoop so that it opens, increasing drag, only under predetermined conditions. Braking energy is utilized to help charge the batteries.
Yes, you too can patent your own perpetual motion machine! Only don't use those words, say something like "reclaimed energy" or "useful continuous work".
You don't need to file a patent to stop somebody else from patenting the idea. All you need to do is publish the idea in a public forum, and get some sort of evidence of when you did it. Such a "free ideas" website would be a good companion for the free software movement, if anybody out there has some spare time.
I would hope the same would apply to the Ask Jeeves search-on-a-question patent.
OS sanity test: click here.
Except when I read it back in the day, it was funny, and not scary :)
BTW, this (or some variation thereof) works at a lot of "free registration required" sites. cipherpunks, cypherpunks, cipherp, cypherp... Get creative. :)
--
--
We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
They only cover commercial use, not research or other non-commercial use. So hobbyist programmers and free software would be safe from patent lawsuits.
Surely these types of restrictive practices are ultimately bad for the USA in the long term. Ill-informed patent officers could be damaging the USA more than helping it. Take Atari's patent on the 'ghost ship' technique used to represent a game players previous attempt at a game. If I want to include any form of ghost ship in a game that I release in the USA, I have to cough up some money to Atari. What ? Ridiculous. The result is that for the USA version of the games I write I just take out the ghost ship - saving me a few cents per copy. The result of this is that the American consumer receives a product with less functionality than the rest of the world. This is just plain silly. And not fair, surely. As an aside - I wonder if a supermarket could get away with patenting the '10 items of less' checkout isle quite as easily as Amazon has patented One-Click(tm). 8)
Try slipping 'a method for protecting intellectual property' past the USPTO and then sue them.
Alternately flood the system with junk patents until it grinds to a halt. Of course, lodging a patent application requires money, which is why a philanthropic billionaire who believes patents are basically defensive might want to fund such a piece of direct action. Mr Bezos?
-- need more time?