Patents For Open Source Projects?

A nameless reader writes: "Salon has an interesting article on an organization and a company that are teaming up together to try to provide free software programmers with patents to protect free software in general from the corporate grip." The Salon article is about IP.com, a company (surprisingly, with the Patent office's promise to check their database) planning to put patentable ideas online as evidence of first creation, for a much smaller fee than filing a patent. If the idea appeals to you, check out openpatents.org as well -- the idea there being that the right to pool patents is a good incentive not to keep technologies locked up for more than a decade.

Comments

They are not trying to provide patents!

[Bruce Perens]

They are not trying to provide patents to Open Source authors! They are providing Open Source folks with the ability to put our art in a prior-art database that patent office folks will search. For free if you go through Foresight, for less than $20 if you go directly to IP.com .

I agree that software patents are bad. As someone whose Open Source project appears as prior art in a patent, reducing its scope (search for "Perens" in the patent database), I do think this might help us a bit.

Thanks

Bruce

Does this make sense?

[ChaoticCoyote]

No.

In an ideal world, patents promote innovation by giving inventors an exclusive right to profit from their creations; in return for this financial benefit, the inventor must publish a detailed description of the invention, so others can build on it. It is a good system that has been perverted by modern corporate concepts.

Patenting Open source is -- well, patently stupid. By nature, Open Source is published, and it has no direct profit motive. A patent on Open Source does not promote innovation, because innovation exists in Open Source by default!

The Open Source movement would do just as well by having a central repository or library of "prior art" that can be used by the patent office to determine if a "new invention" is indeed a new invention. We need to make it easier to prevent patents on core knowledge; I don't see the point in making more patents when our goal is to prevent patents.

--
Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos

No Thanks

[Duncan Cragg]

• IP.com is a dot-com. They are a commercial entity who plan to make money. They are not there for the benefit of free software. Their service is nothing we can't do ourselves, for nothing, with the right principles behind it.
• As the article says, they are a drop in the ocean of available 'prior art' data repositories.
• Patents are a bad thing and no amount of tail-chasing and legal niceties can get around that fact.
• If you have IP to protect, you should try and patent it yourself.
• If that fails, be thankful that the US patent system is in such a mess that it will eventually collapse under its own weight of stupidity.

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But, but, but

[ackthpt]

As Jim Allchin, a Microsoft troll, put it, this kind of thing is a challenge to innovation! I mean, the guy has a point. If you can't hoard the patent, a-la Rambus, and use it to crush competition, do a product very badly, and protect the worst crap you really want to sell, what's the point.

And just this morning, I read that our very kind President Bush wants to ensure we have enough arsenic and heavy metals in our drinking water.

God, the flag, Mom's apple pie, and barbarians at the gate, what could be more american?

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