EU Study Looks At Software Patents

Cardinal Biggles writes: "A study into software patents commissioned by the EU seems to conclude that software patents are OK, it's just the U.S. Patent Office that sucks. It addresses Open Source, but seems to suggest that Open Source projects should get patents of their own, and finance their project using the licensing fees. Meanwhile, the European Commission has opened a public consultation on whether software should be patentable. The request for comments itself, IMHO, sounds not very neutral about software patents. You can get your comments in until 15-Dec-2000!" The study appears to be pretty thorough. And I advise any European developers who care to get their comments in about software patents! It's your career...

Comments

Re:Patent vs Copyright

[DaveWood]

Copyright covers plagiarism, which in the context of source code means I could be violating someone's copyright if I cut-and-paste their code and call it my own, use it for my own purposes, etc... without their permission, that is. And open source authors effectively give that permission to everyone, pending a few small details (GNU, for instance, has a number of preconditions - such as that you have to distribute the sourcecode yourself, etc.) Of course, I can read someone's code, learn from it, and write my own code that does the same thing. It may even be very similar, but that would be legal (again, there are a few caveats here, but that's basically the case). Even as a relative radical when it comes to intellectual property law, this pretty much seems fine to me.

Patents are much, much worse. Software patents enable Compuserve, for example, to patent a compression algorithm or a program that reads or writes a specific file format. Once such a patent is granted, it is illegal for me to write a program that uses that compression, or reads or writes data compatible with that format - no matter how I implement it.

The fun part is what people patent: Windows, pull down menus, command-line interfaces, GIFs (you've heard about the infamous GIF patent, of course!), one-click shopping, word processors that can right align text, you name it, the US Patent Office will grant it to you. I honestly don't think they even read them anymore. And if someone from the USPO wants to show up and self-righteously say "Oh yes we do read them" then... my God, that's even worse.

The reason you can tell the EU is going to have software patents is because their argument - that the USPO is the problem, not software patents themselves - is patently false. An obvious placation.

In a world with software patents, every programmer is likely to violate hundreds of patents throughout their career. There is no way they can know which, since they cannot read and remember the entire patent base, no matter how well-maintained. Every program is a ticking time bomb of patent litigation, as you never know when someone might turn up and say, "Hey! My grandfather patented that in 1986! That'll be 70% of your gross please, or get ready to spend $100-300 thousand defending yourself in court!"

Enough said.