RMS Seeks Anti-Patent Information

SubtleNuance asks: "Free Software's venerable leader has made an open appeal to the Internet community. RMS seeks information about instances where Free Software projects were impeded by a software patent. You can read his open letter at Linux Today. RMS specifically seeks 'cases where a free program has been withdrawn from use or interfered with'. Surely the /. community can come up with a few examples to aid Mr. Stallman's arguments. Parties with specific information are to send an e-mail to patent-examples@gnu.org "

Comments

Thoughts

[Enry]

Lessee..:

GIF encoders/decoders
MP3 encoders (are decoders covered?)
RSA encryption (expired, but that's besides the point)
DeCSS probably doesn't fit, as it wasn't a patent.
Is CueCat patented? Probably not.

-Mark

Re:Thoughts

[1010011010]

CueCat is subject to patents -- and broad and horrible ones at that. They have patents on creating "network events" using a barcodes scanner. That covers anything done with a network and a barcode scanner, even if it's not the CueCat. I.e., if I have been using and old Symbol scanner for years to input data into a program that updated a database over the network, I'm now screwed.

Digital Convergence has licensed and is defending NeoMedia's patents:

http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US06108656__
Automatic access of electronic information through machine-readable codes on printed documents

http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05933829__
Automatic access of electronic information through secure machine-readable codes on printed documents

________________________________________

Re:Thoughts

[dougmc]

Just for the record, the CueCat probably *is* covered by some patent or another. I don't have one in front of me so I can't easily check, but I'll bet it is. This shouldn't affect writing software to use it (such as drivers and such) so it shouldn't affect any software projects, but it probably *is* covered by patents. Hell, they may have patented the idea of making a bar code reader look like a cat.

And you're right, DeCSS doesn't fit.

front page material?

[Jose]

while I can't think of any off the top of my head (i'll be looking for examples in a bit), I think this AS is definatley front page material..

why would you omit this from the Front page Cliff?

ogg vorbis.

[Anonymous Coward]

now add that to the list.

Re:Thoughts - GIF encoders

[AtariDatacenter]

I think the biggest one of the group has been the GIF patent and how it has been treated. (Thanks Unisys, Compuserve!) It quickly became THE standard for images, and only once it was popular did they mention anything about their software patents. If that was known from day one, GIF would have died a quick death.

RSA patent

[rjh]

GnuPG fails to fully implement RFC2440 due to the IDEA patent. While IDEA is specified as a PGP cipher, GnuPG can't implement it.

For a long while, the RSA patent was also an obstacle to GnuPG, OpenSSH, and just about everything else out there that needed public-key crypto. The expiry of the Diffie-Hellman patent (in 1997) helped some, but there were still a lot of obstacles.

patents and non-profit...

[meridian]

I was always under the impression that patents could be used for non-profit. Perhaps the gnu license doesnt allow for this in particular? If it doesnt, wouldnt be an idea that until this stupidity is overturned that there was a license available to allow for the inclusion of patented "whatevers" in freely available software. I understand that this would mean that that software would then limit the useage of the software, but like the existance of the FWTK it would allow it to at least be used by those who want to use it.