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RMS Seeks Anti-Patent Information

Posted by Cliff on from the stuff-to-look-into dept.

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 RMS specifically seeks 'cases where a free program has been withdrawn from use or interfered with'.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 "

5 of 8 comments (clear)

  1. Thoughts by Enry · · Score: 3

    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

    1. Re:Thoughts by 1010011010 · · Score: 2

      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

      ________________________________________

      --
      Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
    2. Re:Thoughts by dougmc · · Score: 2
      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.

  2. front page material? by Jose · · Score: 2

    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?

    --
    The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
  3. RSA patent by rjh · · Score: 3

    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.