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Stallman on Software Patents
An Anonymous Coward writes "On Monday Richard Stallman gave a speech at the Cambridge University (UK) Computer Lab. Over at ZDNet UK they have a transcription of the speech - the most eloquent discussion of the subject I have yet seen. Software patents victimise developers, he says, but there are ways to get around them. The best part is his comparison of writing software to writing symphonies: 'Oh Beethoven,' they would have said in 1800 if there had been patents on music, 'you're just bitching because you've got no ideas of your own.'"
heh, sometimes a line between plagarism and progress is very thin :)
first post suckus!!!!
Hedgehog
RMS and the rest of us Merkins are victimized.
An audio version of the talk can be found at:
http://www.odl.qmul.ac.uk/stallman/
So if we generally agree that the current patent system is flawed with regard to (but not just) software, but also understand that large corps. Have a vested interest in maintaining some form of control over software developed in house, maybe a new category of patents needs to be created. One that specifically addresses the problems faced with software. Any ideas?
-------------------------------END--COMMUNICATION
I guess it isn't quite the context he intended, but I'd still get upset regardless...
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
That has just about as much validity as me saying l.i.ts are not eligible for fp, so the fp belongs to the first AC. Maybe if you get Taco to put something to that effect in the FAQ, then I'd believe it. I would say my fp was more offtopic flamebait than a troll.
quote..
Nobody is so brilliant they can create completely new music that everyone wants to listen to, and nobody can create software that does not use existing ideas.
...end of quote
Well excuse me Honorable Stallman but I know a really original piece of software that does not use existing ideas. Its revolutionary in itself.
Check it out at http://freshmeat.net/projects/gtktrue
when I read you I wonder how I would suppose you were another schizophrenic I.
had you been logged in I'd have given you fp.
are you Michael ?
BTW: has sbd some news concerning atrowe (the guy that used to sign "card carrying mensa member - i have no toleranse for stupidity") ?
he sure was a great troll.
Smile, don't click...
Can Music be patentable? I mean software is just a bunch of zeroes and ones being processed and when they're in a certain order something cool happens. Music is just tones at different pitches and when in a certain order it sounds cool.
If one-click shopping is patentable, shouldn't one-hit rimshot be aswell? Why is copyright enough to protect music but not enough to protect software?
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
"The battles not over yet" To me it seems more lost. atleast in the USA. Control is the keyword. The fact is that big corporations want patents so that they can control everything. Its all about control and power. Simply put it is the misuse of capitalism. But money os a powerful thing. This may be good or bad, but when money comes even the presidents wag their tales. And in the end the corporations stand to lose. Has anybody thought why didnt europe suffer through the slump as badly as america did. Why did the big companies suffer. This will definately happen. Software patents is a big part of the overall picture. The rich and big want control. It gives a sense of satisfaction. Why did hitler go about doing genocide. It was about control. And this is also about control. Controlling software would mean that these guys can tell me and you to use what they want. To pay up. Sure stallman thinks there is a way. But he has conveniently forgotten what the community is up against. Who writes software, of course people, and big corporations are also run by people. No its the indivisual vs the so called organised software. Well it will be intersting to see what will happen. But one thing this is going to result in is more confusion in the states. And europe stands to gain a lot. Already many of my friends are more eager to work in lower paying european companies than in the US. Something has to be done by you people. I just watch as an observer and it somewhat amuses me, that the US, which taught us the meaning of freedom, and the free society sccumbing to controls! It is definately amusing.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
If you're in the patenting biz, or have some patents (copyrights, environmental problem, any sort of valuable asset/liability), it's worth alot to you. You will spend alot of energy [money,time,...] defending your interests and trying to make things go your way before the Courts, Legislatures, Regulators, media, markets, public opinion.
Your very-numerous prey/antagonists do many things. You little asset/liab is a small part of their lives. It's hardly life-or-death for most of them to put up with you. [Parasitic!] If they ever found out, they might not like what you're doing, but it's not worth enough to them to be worth fighting. A whole reservoir of opposition gets trapped below the inaction thresholdaa.
Now some people will always complain, and more do if the inaction threshold can be lowered [email & Internet]. But how do you _prevent_ the squeeky wheel from getting the grease?
A lot of patents are in the hand of the Big Five of the American Corporate Jungle. Thank goodness I live in a country without software patents
-- and they call america free,/i>In Part III of his speech... "To make a copy of a program you type 'copy', and the same copy command will copy any program."
:)
Hmm, but wouldn't you have thought someone like him would use "cp"
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
funny that stallman uses biotech as an example where patents "work differently"
patents obstruct biotech in the same way as they obstruct software development. everyone is holding on to their little precious idea and tries to make as much money from it, and if that's not possible, lock up the idea with a patent.
Richard Stallman is very annoying. Often he comes out with rabid driven that just makes me want to shout "shut up you idiot!" for the damage it does to the OSS community. Then he comes out with eloquent, intelligent and thought provoking prose like this. Most annoying.
You don't know the difference between patent and copyright, do you?
Microsoft would make just as much money if the patent system was done away with... it would be just as illegal to copy Windows under copyright law, and, with the closed source code, it would be just as hard to reverse engineer.
Patents have little to do with open-source vs. closed-source, the majority of closed-source software is unpatented.
Name a patent that MS has made money off, or even enforced.
Patents on lists of thing to do are a stupid idea, even when you get a computer to do them for you.
Very very few companies have made money off software patents and many have made money off non-patented software.
It is very hard to make money off free software but that's got nothing to do with patents, and nor is the fact that it's a lot easier to make money off private software.
you'll go wtih Closed-Source proprietary, patented software.
Closed-source software is not normally patented, and there's no reason it should be.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Software patents are a good idea. There, I said it. If it weren't for these patents, none of those big, bad companies like Microsoft would make any money, and computing technology wouldn't be art the point it is.
Here comes your fault... Microsoft makes money not from patents on software, but on closed source. Patents force the patent holder to open the source to the public.
Did you ever read something about Microsoft battling someone else infringing Microsoft's patents? No. They are bitching about copyright and reinventing ideas. And no patent ever hindered Microsoft to do so.
I don't think the choice is as black and white as you put it. As the article says in the preamble:
The point he is making is not that we should insist all companies go the route of open source, his point is that companies should not be able to block open source.
Patenting, or probably more correctly copyrighting, of individual software programs is indeed a good thing. It means that the companies that produce them can make money selling them, and have the product (and so the time spent developing it) protected. That is good for the economy and for the art of programming. But it does not require that patents be applied to the ideas behind the code. That is what blocks development of other programmes.
Sure, enable companies to make money from software, but don't enable them to stop other people using a concept.
Trev - used to be interesting. Honest.
The issue is that if something was independantly discovered, the patent should hardly be granted since it doesn't induce anything that wouldn't otherwise happen.
I sense much fear in you...
McAfee patented Webservices as a whole !.
And now look at the second line of the article you're linking to:
We hope to dispell the myth that this covers all application service providers.
And now say the same thing again...
What I like is at the end of the article, he implies that part (or most, or all) of the problem is that the US patent system is based on patenting a Physical Process, and here we have people patenting Idealized Processes. Copyrights are more apropriate for the Idealized Process, or at least it's a closer fit.I'm sure he's not the first to notice this, and he won't be the last, but it needs to be repeated over and over until we get it though the US Goverment's Thick Skull(tm).
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
that would be caused if they patented something like, say, the .GIF format.
We'd all be paying out the ass!
I was present at this event. Despite what ZDNet claims, RMS did not use the term "PGP patent" but, correctly, described it as the public key cryptography patent.
The "transcript" is abbreviated which is acceptable, maybe even laudable, but it is also an inaccurate record of what RMS actually said --- which is not.
IMO, Stallman gave an extremely good talk aimed at those who were not experts on how the patent system works in practice. Far more eloquent than I'd anticipated from his previous writings on this and related subjects.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
He more than likely uses 'cp', however, the average Windows user doesn't know what 'cp' means. But everyone knows what 'copy' does. He is taking it to the lowest level so everyone can understand.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Now of course the lawyer gets paid each time you file, so it's just fine by him. The management tends to side with lawyers, but honestly, patenting ideas, especially in software is stupid. People confuse patent with copyright. Software should use copyright only, because you're protecting the actual work that went into building the application. It's both impossible and idiotic to patent ideas. Unfortunately lawyers run the country and now we have things like patented business process. Like the company that patented the use of Prozac for treating PMS for women. Ideas should not be patented, since it's not possible to police thought. Well that doesn't stop corporations and the government from trying.
Just because RMS can be a raving nut at times, that doesn't automatically discredit every word out of his mouth. Now if only there were more clear thinking people in government, we can fix this damn problem.
money isn't the point... or maybe it is... maybe our society has run out of 'valuable' things to create and this is our artificial way of killing off cultures who are not neccessary(the un-American non-consumer open source user). The companies and corporations continue to exercise their control over the masses not through free choice but through legislation and marketing and selective inbreeding of consumer groups. Sure maybe a resistant 'open source' culture or meme arises from time to time, but you've got to have a random factor to help the consumer organism from becoming completely retarded and lazy. So go ahead and block out the sun and charge for light. You'll make a fortune.
He is a fantastic speaker... he managed to speak for 1.5 hrs without notes in totally engaging fashion. I didn't realise he'd be so good. He did have some odd physical habits, but he spoke very well. He was rather rude to the questioners, though.
> You don't know the difference between patent and copyright, do you?
:)
I'm not sure whom you're addressing, but I would think that most of us do.
Just because both copyright law and patents are dangerous in the hands of a monopolist, does not mean that anyone is equating the two. Nor does it mean that they are necessarily wrong. Your point about copying software whose license forbids such behaviour is perfectly valid. However, what if Microsoft had been granted a patent on the concept of "an operating system with an integrated graphical user interface", or something similar. This would be much more serious, because any (potential) competition would be stifled by such a restriction on creativity.
I think the root of the patent/copyright confusion stems from the verb "to copy". If you make a verbatim copy a piece of software, or music, or film, when the creator of that work has requested in its license that you do not do so without paying them money, then you are in breach of copyright law. If you take someone else's idea and copy it, in order to produce a competing product, and the creator of that idea had sought patent protection for it, then you are in breach of patent law.
The latter scenario causes markets to stagnate as the company with the most lawyers goes round racketeering from their ability to file more ideas at the patent office in a given period of time. The former scenario royally pisses off the customers who suffer from the copy-prevention madness that is currently circulating in the form of the bill-formerly-known-as-SSSCA.
Stallman's point is that software, like music, art and speech, is not by its very nature amenable to patent protection. In my opinion, enforcing software and business process patents is like legislating water to run uphill. Whereas enshrining some level of copyright protection in law can allow many business models to survive where software developers want to make a living, patent protection on software does nothing for the wellbeing of its creators nor its consumers.
In conclusion... I think I'm agreeing with you, but in a rather roundabout way
These sigs are more interesting tha
It is easy to get the impression that RMS is just a foaming-at-the-mouth ranter. But I have to say I was very impressed. He came across as a level headed pragmatic person - willing for example to admit that there *may* be areas where patents do work, he was just a software guy who knows they dont work for software.
Either he was on good behaviour or he is very misrepresented. I know which way I think it goes.
DWR is Ajax for Java
Anyone have mirror?
Just as a matter of interest, what software patents does M$ actually own?
Anyway, for the protection of software, copyright is a more than adequate tool, and when used with trademarks it protect the rights of a software developer to earn money from what he produces.
Patent was introduced to encourage innovation, as an exception to the generally held view at the time that an idea became free at the point at which it was spoken. In reality the need for this applies only when the idea itself is the end product of work, whereas in software an idea is simply a means to an end, and a problem solving technique, with the possible exception of specific Algorithms for specific jobs.
I'm not arguing against patents in general, as they can be usefully applied to algorithms to be licensed, but the concept of patent applied to broad ideas and ambiguous implimentations of a technique just seems to be too restrictive.
What would we as software developers do if someone had patented context menus, toolbars, buttons, list boxes, etc. If each demanded a few percent of your sales then what would be left over and who would write software. Not me.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Although I didn't see him mention this specifically, I think it's worth pointing out, given his discussion of music and the borrowing of material from other sources. In particular, how borrowing is important culturally.
One moment I recall quite clearly from my college years is the day in class when the teacher of the survey course in music asked the question "What makes American music American?" This was something I hadn't considered before, and the answer wasn't clear to me until he asked more precisely "Why is the 1812 Overture so distinctly Russian? Why is Appalachian Spring American?" The answer is that both borrow themes from the folk music of each country. The Russians knew that Tchaikovsky was writing Russian music because it had recognizable themes that reminded them that they were Russian. The Shaker melody in Appalachian Spring is something many Americans had heard many times before, when that piece was written. (And even moreso now, as "Spring" is itself a common piece of music to hear performed.)
So without the ability to borrow ideas and themes and work them into new compositions, music would be a barren landscape.
One could argue, similarly, that if we impose stronger and stronger restrictions on what we can build into software, then we are resisting the natural cultural synergy that results from algorithms and features being shared among the community members.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Please be aware when reading this transcript that Stallman is a folkie. For this reason, his views on music are intrinsically screwed and cannot be used as a supporting premise for any other argument about anything else.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I recall it said that in lieu of filing for a patent an individual could write his ideas down on paper and mail it to himself. The idea being that the date stamped envelope and it's contents could be used to indicate prior art.
Another tactic I've heard was to writee up your ideas and bring them to a notary public to have them notarize the document (being sure to stamp each page).
Perhaps these stories are akin to urban legend. I don't know. But it leads me to wonder what is the best way of recording your work so as to be able to prove prior art. Is publishing your work on SourceForge sufficient? Do you need to have your work recorded in a source control system? Even if you did this will you need to hire a high priced lawyer to prove it?
Anyone that was there fit the bill?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
As the author of this posting notes, the best part *is* RMS' comparison of writing software to writing symphonies. This is because it demonstrates the intellectual dishonesty (the alternative is just plain stupidity which I don't give any credibility to) in which RMS argues his points. ("GNU"/Linux being another classic example.)
RMS creates a paper tiger and is nearly mauled by it... One does not patent ideas, one patents implementations. He knows this as should you all. The expression of ideas is covered by copyright and, indeed, the creation of a symphony is thus covered and the questions of originality that RMS warns us that a composer would have to be wary of do indeed exist - as copyright violations.
Patents would cover aspects of the implementation of the idea. For example, the use of a bow run across tight strings to produce sound might be a patent. Stretching animal skin across a hollowed cylinder could be patented. These might limit the choice of instruments a composer would utilize in his production if agreements could not be arrived at but, remarkably, both the composer and the patent holder seem to nearly always find some terms if the invention and idea are truely useful. It would be folly for a composer to consider how to create a 220 hertz tone from a stretched catgut while writing his composition so RMS' comparision is specious at best.
RMS' apparent confusion does betray his underlying premise, however. That is - his belief that no one should own the fruits of their own labour if they are not tangible. This is to deny the very existence of real property rights by reducing the argument to that of how one can physically control and protect what is his. Societies come into being as a result of the voluntary creation of rules governing how people will deal with each other and conduct trade. Intellectual property is fundamental to the peaceful progress of such societies and, without them, everything does break down to the very concept of "might makes right" that RMS claims to fear now. While the well known problems with the current process of granting patents do hurt the rights of legitimate owners, they are reparable. RMS's efforts, however, attack the very foundation of these rights which, once lost, will not be peacably regained. RMS' folly is his blindness to the fact that the result of his efforts will not be the utopia he seeks, but rather, a condition several orders of magnitude worse than what he decries today.
It's nice when you think even MIT has losers to introduce.
If I, sitting in a darkened room with no internet access, design and implement a software solution to a real-world problem I can make money from it because copyright in the program belongs to me. No effort involved, copyright automatically belongs to me.
If patents are available as "protection" then wealthy corporations and individuals will take advantage of them, most of us won't.
Pretty soon I won't be able to sit in my darkened room anymore because I will have to conduct exhaustive searches on my ideas just in case somebody, somewhere, has a patent on one of its components.
Is this really the best environment in which to nurture creativity, innovation, self-reliance, etc? Or is it merely the best environment to enable wealthy corporations to stifle competition and get richer?
The whole idea of GPL and Copyleft in general is to not put the software in the public domain. Read What Is Copyleft, my emphasis:
It's GNU General Public License, by the way.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
Disclaimer: I haven't read the article
But here is my take on the analogy... and a pretty good analogy I think it to be.
In Music, there is copyright on pieces of music. You cannot distribute copyrighted music nor resell it without the permission of the copyright holder. I am all for this. In software, if you make a piece of software, you own the copyright and people must get your permission or a license to use the software or source code. That works well too.
Now patents are about ideas. There are no patents in music. You can't stop people from copying the idea that major scales and minor scales sound good. You can't patent the 12 bar blues but you can patent any piece that uses the 12 bar blues. To stop people from using the 12 bar blues seems ludicrous... and it is just as ludicrous as people in software engineering patenting quicksort, mathematical algorithms and compression techniques such that others can't use them for 10 years
I like the music analogy
I think a major part of this is because it wasn't one of our major landmarks/corporate buildings/status symbols which was hit.
Also, our economy has pretty strong links with the US (as the US is a pretty big market) but there is much more outside the US than inside, so basically we'll get some impact from US issues, but barring worldwide economic meltdown we're mostly fine:)
I hate to say it, but in many ways biotech is worse than the software situation. I have thought of leaving the field multiple times.
Why? Because all too often in biotech people obtain patents on things they didn't even invent, like genetic sequences.
So if you think it's bad that ideas that people came up with are patented (and it is bad), just think about the situation in biotech where corporations patent things they merely discovered. They are claiming ownership to the human body.
Atrocious.
When discussing the pros/cons of software patents, I would suggest that patent medicines might be a better analogy - expensive to develop, cheap to produce. In the U.S. system, I believe these patents are treated differently with a much shorter enforcable lifetime (5 or 7 years?).
I think the existing laws are being abused by corporations who take advantage of back-logged and under-educated patent offices. I would support the exclusion of certain categories of intellectual property from the patent process. For example, I think the trend of patenting human genome sequences is a bad idea. I don't think you should be able to patent things that exist in nature, nor should you be able to patent mathematical or physical laws.
The patent process wasn't originally this dysfunctional. There was a time when it provided legitimate protection to inventors for a limited period of time. Now, I'm not so sure that the public is well-served by patent mechanisms (as was the original intent), given the short-lived nature of today's inventions.
Is the solution totally eliminating the patent system? I'm not sure. I would suggest that, in the time period discussed in the article, there was less up- front investment needed to produce a new invention or process. These days, in the drug industry, at least, the research costs are so high that I think some form of short-duration monopoly protection is required, just to insure that they can recoup their investment. We certainly wouldn't want research on things like cancer and AIDS drugs to slow just because of the risk of not recovering the research investment.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
Patent law, like any law, attempts to resolve grey areas and create social contracts that reach the best balance of competing needs.
Obviously, trying to patent something like the wheel is silly, and a patent granted for something so obvious is wrong.
On the other hand, consider something like Olestra (a non fat butter substitute that never really went anywhere). Proctor and Gamble spent tens of millions of dollars trying to make this work, and had a decent product, but by the time they had finished development and gotten past all the government regulatory testing and hurdles, the patent life was down to 5 years or so left. Thats a lot of investment to re-coup in such a short time. After that, it all became public domain, though last I heard P&G was trying to get an extension. Lots of companies took note of this, and I promise it has resulted in lots of products we would all like to have being abandoned for fear of repeating this scenario.
If someone was trying to patent or copyright a "network communications system" to prevent other people from using networks without paying royalties, that would of course be wrong. On the other side, if a certian Redmond software company took the latest RedHat distribution, ran a sed command s/RedHat/Microsoft/g against, slapped a new label on it that read "windows XP extreme", and started selling it at CompUSA, then Red Hat should have legal recourse to have them stopped.
The first time I bought a house, when I was going into the process, I thought the mountian of legal documents were an idiot pain in the rear. By the time I was done, I thanked God for every one of them. Arguing that "legal documents are too complicated and too confusing" is like saying "why can't C++ be more readable". It has constraints and requirements for precision that do not easily translate to high readability. It should always be a goal, but you can't sacrifice precision and completeness for "friendlyness". You hire a coder to understand your C++, you hire a lawyer to understand your contracts.
Last year, an associate came to me with an interesting idea for a very simple but very usefull piece of software. He had the business sense and the capitol, I could code. I threw together a fully functional prototype in a weekend, worked perfectly. It would have been sold to larger hardware companies for free inclusion with products, would have gone for pennies a license, and would have been very usefull (though certianly not revolutionary by any means).
It would have cost us about $15,000 to develop, market, and release it (much of which was simply the paperwork for setting up the corporation and doing the marketing). We were on track to pull the trigger until our legal counsel managed to scare up a public domain program that was remotely similiar (though never used and out in a completely different context).
The day we found out, we immediatly dropped all efforts, had a nice dinner, and went on our seperate ways. We had no way to recoup the investment of time and money we would have had to put into it to get it finished and out to the public. Anyone that argues that patents and copyrights do NOT foster innovation is simply wrong (and more then likely on a government payroll). I have had a firsthand experience where lack of patentabilty stopped an otherwise useful project dead in its tracks.
And before you go flaming, I have written and released open source software. That was my idea, it was interesting to me, and I wanted of my own free will to give back to the community. That model works fine also, but it is not the only viable one.
Stupid patents are granted, but they don't often stand, and they are not easy to get. Don't make a fool of yourself by being a knee jerk reactionary and making blanket statements like "proprietary software is evil" or "there is no such thing as intellectual property". The laws exist to help manage these grey areas, and they will always be compromises between different needs.
First, grow beyond just talking about things, and start doing things. Second, grow beyond just doing things, and grow to doing things that get results. Tilting at windmills might make you feel morally superior, but you will never accomplish much and you will be a real bore at parties.
If this stuff really bothers you, Either develop, improve, and release open source software, or work to improve the more idiotic aspects of the laws that exist or are being proposed. Do something that actually results in an improvement in the situation, don't just bury your head in the sand and keep believing there is no good reason for copyright and patent law. No one will take you seriously.
Bill
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
Sure there are a small set of notes, and only so many ways you can arange any two notes in any tempo. After two notes, it is all in the arrangement, and composition.
The Yes! We have no bananas! case set the precedent that four notes is enough to get a songwriter sued in the United States. Given that there are only about 30,000 ways to combine four notes in the Western music theory (reply if you want a more detailed explanation of the math), it appears that the only reason songwriters haven't exhausted the melody space is that the big "all your right are belong to us" publishers have entered into cross-licensing agreements with one another. This is part of why you should write your legislators and request a repeal of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Will I retire or break 10K?
One difference, of course, is that the GNU license forces your code (and all future instances of it) open, whereas an expired patent wouldn't necessarily force you to show your source.
Maybe we can combine these two ideas and shorten the time to come up with a hybrid:
The Delayed Free Software License (DFSL)
- For a short time (say, 18 months) the creator is allowed to keep the source closed and idea under his/her control.
- After the time elapses, the source code and idea are released under the GPL.
It might address these problems:
- Closed-source companies going out of business and taking their code with them.
- Software patents lasting too long
- For-profit software developers complaining that they can't protect their ideas
- Proof of prior art (you could just release anything under the DFSL without having to go through a lengthy process)
I like the music analogy
;-)
I don't. You're forgetting the purpose of patent protection: to encourage innovation.
There's no real cost to innovating in music or art. It doesn't take ten years and three billion dollars to come up with a new melody. So there's little barrier to innovation in music. Anybody can do it, and many people do.
But-- to take a counter-example-- consider engines. We've been using internal combustion engines for a long time. To come up with a better engine-- one that runs on water, or chained hamsters, or the moral power of virginity-- would be a huge effort. Ten years and three billion dollars. Why bother doing it? Because you can patent your invention, and for a period of time you can have the exclusive right to build it, or you can collect royalties from other folks who build it. Without patent protection (so the theory goes) nobody would bother building new kinds of engines.
So ask yourself: is software more like music or more like engineering? It certainly has elements of both: one person, working alone, can churn out page after page of software, just like music. Ninety percent of software is crap, just like music.
But software-- and more importantly innovation in software-- is a really important thing. To a large extent, our society and our economy are powered by software. It's in our best collective interest to encourage innovation in software by whatever means we find appropriate, including granting exclusive rights in the form of patents.
I think this analogy is a bit of a stretch. One of the problems with a software patent is that it can broadly cover A BUSINESS PROCESS. Let's say that a composer had been granted a patent for creating symphonies as "A method to glorify God through the use of music." That patent would preclude anybody else (for a set period of time) from glorifying God through the use of music (unless the method could be improved upon). This patent does not necessarily stop Beethoven from glorifying God and it does not prevent him from finding a better way to glorify God (even through music). While ultimately restrictive, even such a broad based example doesn't fully apply to the situation of the 18th century composer.
You can make an argument that says that protecting a composer who pioneered the glory of God through music is important, maybe patentable. But the REAL issue (in every patent argument I've seen) is that patents are being issued for processes where there is prior art and where the method does not qualify as "not-obvious".
The real issue for Beethoven (and all other composers) was copyright and royalties. Scores might only be distributed hours before a performance. Otherwise, they would be swindled and the composer could not get paid for his/her music. The strong (but not too strong) protection of copyright is a pillar in the Capitalist develompent of Intellectual Property.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
You're wrong! It wasn't the fact that the idea wasn't patentable that stopped you in your tracks, it was your belief that you couldn't produce something good enough to stand up by itself that stopped you.
Good software, like good books, will sell and make money if marketed in the right way. No-one ever patented the concept of an operating system, but yet there are many different operating systems out there each making money for the developers (or at least those developers who want to make money) and there is competition so that people buy the one that best suits their need.
What I'm trying to say is that software doesn't have to be unique, it just has to be better than the rest, and patents squash this drive to self improvement because it allows the author to rest upon his laurels and rake in the money without improving upon his work. Thus patents blatently harm the public good by preventing better software coming out.
One reason that M$ produces a new OS every year or two, is just so that they stay one step ahead of everyone else. Who truly can say, with their hand upon their hearts that linux would be what it is today if M$ had agressivly improved windows constantly, driving consumer demand for more usable software. Indeed, if someone had patented the CLI, chances are we'd still be using black and green dumb terminals today.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Interviewer: Mr. RMS, what do you think about software patents.
RMS: They're bad!
Interviewer: Well. Thank you, and good evening.
RMS: That's GNU evening!
(At this point Interviewer rolls eyes and exits stage left) --- end of interview ---
Patents are important and used by big companies but it's even more important for the small man.
As an individual you have no way to get fair treatment and payment from big companies without patents. If patents doesn't exists they will just grab your ideas (that you may have spent several years of your life on) and use their big pile of money to push and you are basically screwed.
I think the whole debate in the software developer community is very one sided and most peoples concerns are more about the abuses (in the US) than patents themselfs.
The existance of patents and the abuses are two different things.
If the patent office would restrict themselves to truly novel, non-obvious ideas, the damage would thus be greatly contained. But essentially all software patents currently being granted fall outside this definition. Hence disaster.
Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
These tatics are urban legend. They don't work well.
With a good lawyer, such protection is better than nothing, but not much. You have to pay a lawyer, and then you are taking your chance in court. At best you have even odds of proving that you invented something. At worst you pay all the lawyers, and a pentialty for a frivious law suit.
If you want real protection, get a patent, or publish your work everywhere when you do it. In the former case the law is on your side, in the later you can supenia half the world as witness that your invention was known at the time of the patent (but not nessicarly that you are the inventor, people tend to forget that)
If you want to make nice, solid, constantly evolving software, go with Open-Source. Otherwise, if you're like the rest of the worl, you'll want to make money along with nice software (hopefully). Then, you'll go wtih Closed-Source proprietary, patented software.
The problem with patented software is that the patents that the USPTO has issued in the last 20 years are so d*ng broad that instead of "promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts," they have precisely the opposite effect. For instance: data compression by dynamically building a character-to-string dictionary? Patent 4,558,302. Falling blocks puzzle game whose goal is to remove a specified initial set of colored or shaded blocks from the playfield (in other words, B-type Columns)? Patent 5,265,888. Image analysis by blocks against a smaller version of the same image? Patent 5,065,447. Heck, even topological sorting and XOR drawing were once patented in the U.S.
And don't count on waiting for the patents to expire. Just as Hollywood managed to get a Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act passed with tons of soft money and (possibly mandatory) individual contributions, watch the pharmaceutical industry propose a Cherilyn LaPierre Patent Term Extension Act.
Will I retire or break 10K?
That's very interesting to hear, because I also noticed several glaring typos in the transcription (not misspellings, things like missing verbs). Damn sloppy, ZD, damn sloppy.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
If instructions to a pool of computing resources can be patented, why not instructions to a pool of cooking resources (i.e., kitchen+cook)? Isn't software just recipes for computing? Julia Child, contact your patent attorney immediately!
Or how about instructions to a vehicle+driver on how to get from one place to another? Can Mapquest patent AAA out of the trip-ticks business?
The whole idea of patenting software is ludicrous.
Copyrights are something else entirely, and IMHO (IANAL), completely appropriate for software.
In Part III of his speech... "To make a copy of a program you type 'copy', and the same copy command will copy any program." Hmm, but wouldn't you have thought someone like him would use "cp"
For one thing: Among English-speaking *N?X system users, it is commonly accepted that the utterance /KAH-pee/ refers to the `cp' command. It's analogous to calling the Hollings bill "sucker" after its former initials (SSSCA).
For another thing: Stallman doesn't use DOS, but he knows DOS, and he knew that many people in his audience were more familiar with DOS commands than with *N?X commands.
Will I retire or break 10K?
At first I thought he was a corperate bigot. But now I'm seeing the light. He has his principles and stands by them. He has thought through them on his own and won't change them for anyone. He won't even listen to arguments about it, which appears quite brutal to people undecided on the issues.
I don't agree with everything he says, but I understand what he believes in, and I like it better then what the corperate culture believes in.
I would rather live in a world where software could be viewed and understood then one where you had to pay through the nose for any change (or you had to figure out a way around the problem without knowing the depth of the problem).
The problem is not patents themself, they are a powerful tool for the individual to protect themself from money-strong coorporations who would otherwise take whatever they want.
The problem is the abuses, that really needs to be adressed. You should never be able to break a patent by mistake, that means, it shouldn't be too broad and not to obvious.
Maybe so, but what you have is still nothing like having a patent. You might possibly prove you created the invention, but that's not at all the same thing as patenting it.
So you're right, it is an urban legend, but you didn't go far enough dissing it.
"There's no real cost to innovating in music or art. "
Really? How would you know? I say that an artist who struggles his whole life and invents a new music genre should own that genre. Why should Nirvana have invented gruge and then have a bunch of other bands get rich off it? Its unfair!
On the other hand, software is nothing more than an mathematical equation, or a set of ideas put into a language-like representation. Kind of like changing celcius to fahrenheit. The fact that there are millions of programmers in the world who write new code daily shows that nothing in the programming world is new or unique. So I'd argue program source doesn't even qualify for copyright status.
The difference between you and me....I'm better thought out.
Why did hitler go about doing genocide?
This thread can not continue by virtue of Godwin's Law.
It's very clear that the whole patent institution is a school example of human greed. We all want as much good for ourselves as possible. Some of us don't think anybody else than themselves.
If we would think of progress globally, and if we would settle for less, we wouldn't really need the whole patent system. And still, it's very likely that the inventors would be recognized, as it has always been in sciences, and it's also very propable that they would get more than enough money.
You are right. Also, patent laws are more used by individuals and small companies than big companies. For big companies things such as trademarks are typically more important.
Part of the reason, though, that developing large software projects can be such a chore, is that developers cannot recycle existing patented/copyrighted solutions. A company like MS might spend ten years and tens of billions of dollars producing a somewhat stable OS. To me, this is an extraordinary example of inefficiency. It's not exactly an argument in favor of working in a vacuum, that's for sure.
I agree that software is important part of our economy. An important part of the entire economy. Not some isolated junket that should recieve all of our accolades and money.
Most of us want the same thing: high quality software produced and distributed as efficiently as possible. (Of course there are also those who simply want to take as much as they can get.) I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Fewer high-quality programmers who have access to each other's code will produce better code faster than a whole bunch of overpaid amatuers working in isolation.
Forget the handwaving theoretical arguments for a moment. Look around. We have examples of both points of view to compare. On the one hand, we have the closed, proprietary, patented, buttoned up shrink wrap license vendors. On the other hand we have free software. Compare the amount of resources each consumes relative to its output. Tough measurement to make, but I'm strongly inclined to believe that the free software movement is producing better software faster per unit input than their proprietary counterparts. All we need are a few more sponsors like IBM to fuel the fire, and this race will be over.
And this is in spite of the fact the free software crowd oven has to route around existing copyright and patent encumbrances.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Woah--you're on really thin ice there, comparing the value of artistic and software innovation. Technology is nice, but I'm damn glad that when I turn on the radio, I don't hear grunts and stone pounding on every station.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
But if you make an engine, I can look at it, disassemble it, take it apart and find out how it works. I can then make my own version and sell it.
With software, all the clever stuff goes on behind the scenes. I've used Photoshop, but that doesn't help me code my own Photoshop.
Software doesn't need patents to protect it becuase the amount of effort to reverse engineer some code is often more than the energy needed to code something new in the firstplace.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Why woudln't it be news? Software patents and intellictual property are near to the heart of a nerd, whether you believe they are good or bad. Just because Stallman is old news and annoying to you, doesn't mean this is not interesting to others.
One man's news, is another man's trash. Or something like that.
Exactly! Somebody mod the parent up!
In his talk, Stallman says:
And I thought to myself "Wow! My home country has a progressive attitude to patents, even back in the eighties! Good for us!". So I went looking for that study and instead I found this PDF (here is the Google HTMLised version) of a press release from the Australian Government announcing a more recent (1999-2000) nine-month study into patents, competitiveness, and the "new economy" entitled Inventing Our Future: The link between Australian patenting and basic science. The press release says, in part, that the study found:
This is a good thing in itself or as an indicator of activity in those sectors? And also:
This seems to imply that a higher number of patents as a proportion of GDP is a good thing. Is comparing the number of patents in relation to the GDP really a recognised measure of... something? :-)
Here's the PDF of the actual 1999-2000 report, which I have not yet read. Does anyone have a link to the 1980's Australian report into patents that Stallman refers to? It would be interesting to compare them.
Thanks in advance.
Now patents are about ideas.
And that's where the problem lies. If you look at the current patent system in most Western countries, it is about protecting process, not ideas. Even the infamous business patents protect a process by which a business objective is achieved. When I went to law school, our intellectual property prof always insisted about the difference between patents and ideas. And then suddenly the legislator introduced these patents on software ideas..
The problem with software patents is that you're not really protecting a mean of solving a problem, you're actually protecting the very idea that such or such problem exists and that it should be solved by some automated process. This is wrong. If I invent and patent an embedded microwave window defroster, it doesn't prevent you from inventing a different approach to solve the same problem. In the software world I would prevent you from addressing such problem in the first place.
And this in my view goes against innovation, disclosure and publig good, all honorable objectives for which the patent system was created in the first place.
The engine example isn't always good. When the company i work for was acquired by a larger company, their lawyers came in and told us we needed to start looking for software we could patent. They used an engine example. They said that is the engine had been patented in a purposely obscure way, it could cover _all_ types of engines. So, if i had created an engine before the internal combustion engine, and had the forsight to create a patent that was obscure enough to cover all engines (who would have known at the time???), then i could reap royalties from all other engines ever made (until the patent expired).
Now, a large company is looking to protect their market. So anything they patent will be to prevent competition, and they recommend that we attempt to patent vague concepts. The lawyers do the work of submitting and following the process, the developers just come up with the ideas of what may be patentable. They are looking to patent something that will cover a large range of things, and then use that to prevent others from coming into their space.
For me, programmer X to patent something under my name is fine. I will probably be reasonable to others and let them use/expand on it for a minimal/no price. For MegaCorp Y to patent something, that something is effectively unavailable for someone else to market, even if MegaCorp isn't doing anything with the technlogy/idea.
I don't see why i can't look at how something works (not the source code, but just the idea/interface, etc), and have a moment of brilliance on how to improve it. If i implement my new idea for an old problem, and that old problem is patented, i may be infringing on someone elses patent, even though the guts of solving the problem are different than the original solution.
When!? Where!? It bothers me on how many here agree with this yet I find no evidence of it. Stallman is a very concise writer and rather than "preaching" as so many put it (which I've never seen it done) always supports his opinions and philosophies with rational argument.
I've been following the GNU project for a while now and have usually read RMS's articles and interviews with interest. Have we de-evolved so much that everyone we disagree with is suddenly a "raving nut" or is just easier to dismiss opposing arguments that way?
All this time I've seen few actual counterarguments against Stallmans position. Certainly I've seen unrational responses. Most of these are based upon misconceptions on Stallman's position. The rest are usually mixing together ethical arguments with economic arguments, which Stallman has seemed to traditionally avoid. Arguments like "It is ethically wrong because there isn't a business model that supports it," which is obviously an invalid argument.
Are people still upset about KDE? Is it the copyleft that people feel threatened by? Are employed developers afraid that free software will put them out of work?
Please oh please, where are these misconceptions coming from?
I don't. You're forgetting the purpose of patent protection: to encourage innovation.
There's no real cost to innovating in music or art. It doesn't take ten years and three billion dollars to come up with a new melody. So there's little barrier to innovation in music. Anybody can do it, and many people do.
I think that you are quite silly. Masterful composers can take years to write innovative new symphonies. There are few people who even are capable of doing this. It is not as though any old Alfred E. Neuman can write a symphony.
OTOH, any old Alfred E. Neuman with a copy of VisualBasic can choke email servers around the world.
But software-- and more importantly innovation in software-- is a really important thing. To a large extent, our society and our economy are powered by software.
Let's take a REALLY good example - the spreadsheet. It was not patented, and its inventors made next to nothing from it.
Did we not benefit from this innovation (and this would be considered by ANY standard in use today to be innovative and patentable) ? Is this innovation not broadly in use today ?
In what way would we, as consumers, be better off if the spreadsheet had been patented ?
I guess the argument is that the spreadsheet may never have been invented if its inventors cared about IP. But that is a moot point; they didn't and we still have the spreadsheet. There are scores of other examples of patentable ideas that were not patented (TeX typesetting is another good one) that are REALLY broadly in use today. I doubt as a consumer I would suffer AT ALL if software patents did not exist.
Let's not forget - the entire purpose of patents is creating the largest repository possible of public domain IP. Patents encourage disclosure so that the invention becomes public domain after a limited time, and that makes all of our lives richer, because eventually we use the patent for free.
Software patents rarely become public domain in a meaningful way. They are choking the industry.
In the recent All Questions Answered article, Knuth says
I'd take that a step farther, and say that I'm against patents on things that any competent developer should be expected to discover. I'd like to see a much greater burden of proof put on patent filers to show non-obviousness, beyond the current requirement that appears to be "no one has filed a patent on that yet."Your argument assumes that innovation drives "our" economy. It does not. The real money comes from keeping the gravy train rolling.
No company is going to spend 3 billion dollars developing an novel engine when they can afford to sell their existing polluting cast-iron lumps at a higher profit than competitors through economies of scale. Only in universities is research into alternative fuels carried out to any serious degree.
And, of course there is the highly profitable issue of oil-cartels.
Why is everyone using inferior Windows? Because people have to go out on a limb to use the "innovative" stuff like Linux/Beos/Mac. Microsoft use patents not to protect their "innovation", but to prevent people from taking a potentially more innovative windows away from them.
An invention that you patent currently gives you the excusive right for a large company to steal your invention and out-spend you trying to fight for it in the courts.
As Stallman says, the current patent system is only useful in corporate cross licensing, which does encourage innovation, but does not result in exclusive rights to build, and only serves to give the corporations even more power.
I think you are missing the point.
Stallman specifically states (if you've read the article)
that software is different from physical objects.
He explains why software can be created, be complex and copied
without spending "3 billion $". Only MSFT would need 3 billion$ to convert an idea into software
This thread can not continue by virtue of Godwin's Law.
Godwin's Law only deals with the probability of the mention of Nazis. It says nothing about thread ending.
Au contraire, mon frere. Music, art, and software development all take time. And to adapt the common razz on Gnu/Linux, making music and art is free only if your time is worthless. Could Beethoven have produced the body of musical work that he did if he'd had to keep a day job as a banker?
Often, for large art projects, there is a team involved. Roy Lichtenstein had assistants paint all those big round pixels in his mural-sized comic-strip paintings. Last year I saw an exhibit by the artist Sandi Skoglund. One installation piece had a whole room-sized floor covered with thousands of blown eggshells, with a trail of footprints of broken shells through them. The walls were covered with hand-made 4" square paper tiles. That's when it struck me what a difference it makes when an artist gets some source of funding up front; no one with a day job could have done anything near that scale.
Of course there are plenty independent musicians and artists with day jobs. There are also plenty of volunteer Free Software developers with day jobs. But this is different from saying that either pursuit is cost-free.
Fight for your right to read books!
How do you count it? Using only 13 sounds?
The model I use is designed to approximate the "substantially similar" standard that U.S. courts use to determine whether copying of a melody has occurred. Assume that all melodies on the Western musical scales can be transposed to start on note 5. Ignore sharps and flats, and fold notes outside [1..10] inward an octave (e.g. 12 becomes 12 - 7 = 5). Assume further that the note durations can be classified into short (8th note), medium (quarter note), swallowing rests into the previous note, and longer durations and that the last note is always long (because it's followed by an unbounded rest). Then you get (5, dur), (note, dur), (note, dur), (note, long) where note [1..10] and dur {short, medium, long}. Multiplying the possible choices out, you get (3 * 10)^3 = 27,000.
especially why is it Western-specific?
It assumes that melodies fall into the Western diatonic (major, minor, modal) system, that is, not the hindu or african scales or anything.
ObTopic: If the courts continue to grant monopolies on melody fragments this short, we may be seeing a movement among amateur songwriters analogous to the LPF/EFF effort against software patents.
Will I retire or break 10K?
No, innovating in music isn't expensive...but innovating profitably requires an extensive marketing effort to get other people to appreciate that innovation so you can make money off of it. You have to test-market your ideas, modify and refine them, record it, promote it, adverties, and work very hard to perform it. There is a huge barrier to entry into the mainstream music market because of the expense required to gather a critical mass of admirers which really insert your innovations into the modern musical language, and others build upon them.
Pure engineering likewise isn't expensive at all. Anyone can have an interesting idea, and many people do. The expense is in building test-models to support your idea, refining and modifying it until it works optimally, coming up with a way to efficiently manufacture it, raising the capital to set up manufacturing operations, and then promoting and selling the final product. That's the real expense in engineering, and while the actual process is no more difficult (intellectually speaking) than innovating in music, it requires significantly more capital, because of the need to physically produce something.
But-- to take a counter-example-- consider engines. We've been using internal combustion engines for a long time. To come up with a better engine-- one that runs on water, or chained hamsters, or the moral power of virginity-- would be a huge effort. Ten years and three billion dollars. Why bother doing it? Because you can patent your invention, and for a period of time you can have the exclusive right to build it, or you can collect royalties from other folks who build it. Without patent protection (so the theory goes) nobody would bother building new kinds of engines.
Assuming this is true, why isn't anyone building new kinds of engines? Check the patent files...several highly fuel-efficient and/or electrical engine designs have been invented (and subsequently patented). Interestingly, a lot of these patents are held by companies who either have a lot of money already invested in the equipment used to build current engine designs, or earn a lot of their income from selling fuel (that is, companies who have a vested interest in NOT seeing new, more efficient engine designs come to market).
So how exactly are these patents encouraging innovation? It would appear that patents are frequently being used specifically to discourage innovation. Patents rarely protect innovators (at least not in the way patent proponents suggest). What patents protect is manufacturers of popular prodcuts, and individuals/institutions with large hordes of patents.
So ask yourself: is software more like music or more like engineering? It certainly has elements of both: one person, working alone, can churn out page after page of software, just like music. Ninety percent of software is crap, just like music. ;-)
90% of everything is crap. Big deal. The fact of the matter is, innovating software is more like innovating in music than innovating in engineering. You have an idea, you record it, test it, modify and refine it, record it again, and then market it. There is no capital needed to create complicated manufacturing systems, as the final product (as in music) is information (I know I'm simplifying by ignoring the need for a computer to test the software on, and the possible need to print media/packaging/documentation for the software, but those same costs exist for recording equipment and media/packaging/performance equipment for music, so the level of capital needed is the same, and when compared to the immense capital needed to build a factory for producing engines, is negligible).
Furthermore, like in music, software innovation is largely derivative. Innovative music uses the same notes, chords, and often-times similar melodic sequences, in novel new combinations, frequently combined with compelling poetry which uses words, themes, ideas, and even rhythm structures, quotes, and phrases which are put together in new ways than previous music did. Sometimes the result is nice to listen to. Sometimes the result is extremely derivative, and sometimes it is quite wild and fresh.
Similarly, Designing software involves using the same commands, mathematical concepts, and often-times standard library functions and previously designed and optimized algorithms, put together to accomplish a specific purpose. Sometimes two people might design slightly different software that does the same thing, just like two different bands might create similar songs about the same topics within the same musical genre (we don't grant monopolies on angry chick-rock songs about ex-boyfriends, or poppy boy-band ballads to the first band who performs one, why do we give patents to the first company to release a software product that can compress data, do public-key encryption, or let you buy something with one click, preventing anyone else from designing a different program that might do the same thing).
But analogies and anectdotes aside, why not focus on the actual results. Are the patents encouraging progress, innovation, and the spread of knowledge? Before patents on software processes were widely granted, there would frequently be articles in technical journals detailing processes and design ideas for software to accomplish different goals. The source code itself may have been kept secret, but the algorithms were freely shared. Patents are supposed to be a tool to encourage the sharing of ideas. They are really only needed if there is a problem of ideas not being shared, in as much as they will help spread knowledge around. But what we see today is companies releasing fewer and fewer design ideas for software, in addition to keeping their code secret. As people have turned to patenting software and releasing meager details in incomprehensible legal documents, actual engineers are sharing less and less of the basic knowledge of programming, software algorithms and design with each other.
So where is that getting us?
Who has the patent for the Word Processing feature that let you define abbreviations for long words and phrases?
-Russ
Me
Fewer high-quality programmers who have access to each other's code will produce better code faster than a whole bunch of overpaid amatuers working in isolation.
If we were talking about pure research, or the sciences, you'd certainly be right. That's exactly the model that scientists follow: publish early and often, and read everything.
Maybe we should talk about the difference between academic programming and commercial programming. It's the same as the difference between biological research and drug manufacturing.
If computer programming is a science, then pure research in the field should be in the public domain. But the use of that pure knowledge to achieve commercial gains is something else entirely.
On the one hand, we have the closed, proprietary, patented, buttoned up shrink wrap license vendors. On the other hand we have free software. Compare the amount of resources each consumes relative to its output.
I don't mean to be a grouch, but I disagree. I deal with quite a bit of commercial software, and I have to say that a fairly small percentage of it is complete crap. Of all the freely available software out there, though, there's a lot that's poorly documented, buggy, maldesigned, or all three. A few outstanding exceptions-- like Perl or Apache-- do not an argument make.
Maybe I should have qualified "important." I think it should have been clear from context. I meant "important" in the large-scale economic and social senses. New music and art is important, and that's why we directly subsidize artists in some cases, and ridiculously overpay them in others, depending on whether they're popular or not.
It's the same basic premise, though, implemented in two different public policies. Artistic development is encouraged through subsidy. Commercial development is encouraged-- among other ways-- through the granting of patents.
Why bother doing it? Because you can patent your invention, and for a period of time you can have the exclusive right to build it, or you can collect royalties from other folks who build it.
"Because you can patent it"? What about "because you're the first to do it, giving you a head-start and the best implementation of this idea".
What you're advocating is the IBM/Apple theory of 'I'll invent something, then sit on my ass for a few years and collect checks'.
I can't agree with it. I think Stallman goes overboard plenty, but no one should own a foundation. People love throwing around buzzphrases like "it stifles innovation", but what stifles it more: having to work at making the best {song,car,software} and one-up the competition (or work together for something even better), or thousands of truly brilliant people unable to even touch something and use it in to their goal because it has a legal restriction and some guy wants to get paid today for work he did yesterday?
To stick with your engine analogy, and how patents promote innovation:
Why haven't we seen electric cars in the mainstream?
Because no one interested in making one is allowed to, since the patents were all taken by persons with a vested interest in fossil-fuel/oil-based-automotive corporations. If not for that, we wouldn't need to bomb the Middle East every 5 years; someone might actually get somewhere with a non-oilbased engine.
Musicians still have their place, too: Led Zepplin never worried when a coverband showed up. The only time anyone should be concerned is in resale of the original product, because I can box and ship somthing cheaper than someone else can create, box and ship. If I'm putting work into something, too, I have no real advantage. Cliff's Notes don't replace the original work, nor does spending time developing an application based on someone else's theory.
Since you automatically own the copyright on anything you write originally the moment you write it, this method works to prove you are the copyright holder. If you can come up with a dated work with an earlier date than whoever is contesting you, you win. BUT, if you try to go after anyone infringing on your copyright, all the sealed envelope method can get you is for that person to cease using (publishing or whatever) the material and you can go after lost revenue (which is hard to prove and usually is negligable). If you've filed your copyright properly with the government and sent in the necessary stuff to the library of congress and all that nonsense, only then can you be entitled to some substantial monetary damages.
It would be very easy to reverse engineer open sourced code.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
Proctor and Gamble spent tens of millions of dollars trying to make this work, and had a decent
product,
Decent, if you like pooping grease, that is...
C-X C-S
Software doesn't need patents to protect it becuase the amount of effort to reverse engineer some code is often more than the energy needed to code something new in the firstplace.
But the code itself isn't what's patented. The patent goes for the "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof." The code itself is covered under copyright, and possibly under various protections of trade secrets.
So you don't patent Adobe Photoshop. You could, possibly, patent software for editing digital images in such-and-such a way. It has to be fairly specific. For example, consider patent number 6,337,901, "Customer billing relationships software." (Read it here.) This patent doesn't cover the software itself. Rather it covers the design, methodology, and architecture of the software. In this particular instance, the meat of the patent describes the process that the software implements for generating its output.
So it's not about whether or not you can reverse-engineer Photoshop. It's about whether you should be given the right, for a limited time, to exclude others from writing software that does the same thing Photoshop does.
(This sounds silly because Photoshop is neither patented nor patentable.)
The stated purpose of patents is to encourage innovation. Actually it's supposed to encourage the public release of the information already invented.
.. I wasn't draftable, but my friends were, and I never accepted the rationale for Vietnam.
Examining the history of the past couple of decades I see scant evidence that the current patent law fosters this. I appears more likely that it suppresses it.
Definitely, software patents, as administered by the USPTO, are an anti-innovation mechanism. Except for legal innovation. There's been a bunch of that. Why isn't there a "legal argument patent"? That would make as much sense as a business process patent. Software patents are MUCH worse. The examiners don't have a clue as to what they are regulating. They don't do any search of prior art. And they are paid (well, not exactly, I believe it's performance rating) based on the number of patents that they approve. This is heading toward the worst scenario. Also the process of challenging a patent is rediculously expensive, especially considering the totally slipshod method in which they are granted.
I increasingly find it impossible to believe that this incredible structure occured by happenstance. However, if it did, is certainly isn't maintained by happenstance. It is to the benefit of a specialized class of lawyers and of large corporations. Is it surprising then that public benefit is of scant concern?
When I was 20 I was a pacifist
When I was 30 I decided that anarchy was too unstable to be a good system. So I became a libertarian.
When I was 40 I took a good look at the leaders of the libertarian party, and decided that they didn't speak for me.
So now I am without affiliation. But I'm sure not a republicrat or a demmican.
The primary difference between the democrats and the republicans is that the democrats are more concerned with people liking them.
The primary similarity between the democrats and the republicans is that they will both support whatever the people who pay to get them elected want.
The primary danger of both the democrats and the republicans is that what is good for the people who buy elections is not what is good for the country.
General Bullmoose lives!
Compared to the current flock of ??rulers?? he was a patriot.
And one of the things that the people who buy the elections like is a patent system that allows them to buy up things that nobody previously ever considered property.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well...actually no.
Economic progress has occured for a long time without the existence of Intellectual Property. In Industrialisation without National Patents, the economic historian Eric Schiff tells the story of how some of Europe's biggest corporations owe their existence to the absence of patent law in their home countries, such as the Netherlands and Switzerland.
There is an interesting review of his work by Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who discusses this, in the context of pharmaceutical patents.
(RMS really doesn't need a defense here. But since pretty much everything said in the parent post was addressed in the talk, I though I might as well use Stallman's words for his defense. Everything here is out of context but I try to preserve the meaning.)
RMS: For instance, in 1984 the Compress program was written. At that time there was no patent on the LZW (compression) algorithm, but the LZW patent was pending at the time, and was granted in 1985. Over next few years those who distributed Compress started getting threats. All the Compress programmer did was use an idea he had found in a journal, just like software authors had always done.
RMS: Most people who tell you about the patent system have a stake in it, and so they want you to like it. But patents are like the lottery because they only rarely bring benefits to people. Lotteries invite you to think about winning, never about losing, and it is the same with the patenting system.
RMS: However, one so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the "freedom to choose any license you want for software you write". We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom.
This oft-overlooked distinction is crucial. Freedom is being able to make decisions that affect mainly you. Power is being able to make decisions that affect others more than you. If we confuse power with freedom, we will fail to uphold real freedom.
Proprietary software is an exercise of power. Copyright law today grants software developers that power, so they and only they choose the rules to impose on everyone else--a relatively few people make the basic software decisions for everyone, typically by denying their freedom. When users lack the freedoms that define Free Software, they can't tell what the software is doing, can't check for back doors, can't monitor possible viruses and worms, can't find out what personal information is being reported (or stop the reports, even if they do find out). If it breaks, they can't fix it; they have to wait for the developer to exercise its power to do so. If it simply isn't quite what they need, they are stuck with it. They can't help each other improve it.
RMS: Publishers and lawyers like to describe copyright as ``intellectual property.'' This term carries a hidden assumption---that the most natural way to think about the issue of copying is based on an analogy with physical objects, and our ideas of them as property.
But this analogy overlooks the crucial difference between material objects and information: information can be copied and shared almost effortlessly, while material objects can't be. Basing your thinking on this analogy is tantamount to ignoring that difference.
Even the US legal system does not entirely accept this analogy, since it does not treat copyrights just like physical object property rights.
Me: ?
(Okay, so not entirely a successful excercise but interesting nonetheless. I hope some of what RMS is trying to say is seen from this post. You are certainly allowed to disagree with someone but I doubt you can accuse him of "Intellectual dishonesty or any such nonsense.)
Spider Robinson was naive. He assumed that laws were passed for the public good. And he didn't consider that four notes could possibly be enough. But he saw this problem coming.
I recommend that everyone who can find a copy read "Melancholy Elephants", a short story. One of the places that it appeared was in a collection of short stories called Melancholy Elephants, and I believe that it was originally published in Analog Sience Fact -> Fiction, but I don't even remember the decade.
This was a prediction of the problem, and it predicted about this time frame (though the world was rather different!). And it predicted that the cause of the forseen problem was the extension of the copyright laws.
I recommend it highly. If you are a publisher, please consider reprinting it, as it is quite topical, and will be for quite awhile. If we aren't quite lucky it may be topical for a century or two.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you read the article, you'll see that Stallman argues that patents don't encourage innovation. Any thoughts on this?
I admit that I didn't read the article slowly or carefully, but that's not how I understood it. (Marge: But you liked Rashomon! Homer: That's now how I remember it.)
It sounds to me like RMS is arguing that patents are an obstacle to the writing of software using well-known algorithms or principles. The example RMS gives of LZW compression, for instance, says that the programmer who wrote Compress "use[d] an idea he had found in a journal, just like software authors had always done."
That doesn't sound like innovation to me. It sounds like the programmer wrote a utility using an algorithm that was under consideration for a patent, and got burned by it. That has nothing at all to do with innovation, which is the process of starting from scratch-- or from a foundation of public knowledge-- to come up with a truly new idea. Not program, idea.
The larger question is this: should the LZW compression algorithm have been patented? This kind of goes back to what I said in a previous post about pure research versus commercial research. There's an argument to be made that fundamental algorithms-- like the stuff in TAOCP-- should be part of the field's collective body of knowledge, unencumbered by rights or ownerships. Maybe things like LZW compression should be included in that category.
Of course, Unisys disagrees with that assertion.
It's a tough question, and it's hard to know what to do.
I don't think that RMS's point about promotion of progress can be emphasized enough.
One of the main goals in disclosing patentable ideas is to promote progress. The original intention was that you'd see something patented, and since the problem was solved, you'd go on to work on something bigger and better. That you'd be able to use the patent to help solve problems, because paying a license fee was much easier than developing your own solution.
However, the software patents I've seen or heard about seem to fall into one of two categories:
1) Blatently obvious. Any resonably skilled practitioner of the art would have found a similar solution to the same problem. How does this advance the state of the art?
2) Unusuably obtuse. I have tried reading though the legalese in some of the patents before, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. At any rate, if the public (or even practitioners of the art) can't understand what the patent's about, how does that advance the state of the art?
There are a few gems in there. Actually, I think most of the patents around public key crypto are indeed novel, and perhaps patent-worthy. At any rate, since software patents don't seem to advance the state of the art (at least in most instances), they shouldn't be allowed.
The way software patents are used, on the other hand, is different. Once some idea spreads openly (e.g Lempel and Ziv's compression algorithm), anybody (or at least hundreds of good programmers around the world) can implement it on their own. There are no real secrets that people would be shaking their heads about saying "how did they do that?". None of the software patents that I know of ever gave the companies making them any incentive to publish the code they patented.
Summary: patents were meant to promote sharing of information and research. I don't see software patents doing that. Ergo, software patents suck.
In what way would we, as consumers, be better off if the spreadsheet had been patented?
Bah. The fact that you're asking the question means that you fundamentally misunderstand my point. The question to ask-- which is admittedly hard to answer!-- is "What innovations would we, as consumers, have access to if the spreadsheet had been patented, but that were not invented because no patent protection was available for them?"
I know, I know. It's impossible to answer that question. But that's kind of the point. If we don't offer patent protection for software innovations-- truly deserving ones, I mean-- then we'll never know what we missed.
I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that software patents truly discourage innovation. In fact, the converse is likely true. Today, it's not legal for me to use LZW compression in one of my programs without licensing it from Unisys. If I choose not to ignore that fact, I can do one of four things: give up, or license the algorithm, or use some other algorithm, or develop my own. If I don't want to license, and I don't want to give up, then I have to innovate! (Or I have to use somebody else's innovation that is freely available to me, but that's basically the same thing.)
I suppose the problem could have been in the transcription.
I believe the venue for the speech was in the Gate's building (paid for by you-know-who).
You're going to eat these words. The reason our society depends on software is because there were no patent restrictions hurled upon researchers. Our society benefits from a commons of software much more than if it were locked away in patents.
Paraphrasing Alan Cox, we have the great Internet and software we do today not due to intellectual property laws, but in spite of them.
Except that they didn't invent grunge or alternative music. It was a slightly different take on what people had been doing for years. If anything they copied others and got to make all the money. Should Nirvana have to kick back to the Pixies and Sonic Youth for what they wrote?
Silly Cobain worhipping moron.
kashani
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
Neither does it take ten years and three billion dollars to come up with a software product.
Disagreed, I think Stallman's analogy is a good one. Just as computers cost money, instruments cost money. Then there is the time for training: just as one can't sit a monkey in front of a computer and expect working code, one can't place a guitar in a random person's hands and expect even competent chord playing, let alone what we'd consider musical innovation.
Your attempt to cast the matter in terms of billions of dollars makes me think you're confusing innovation with branding and market development. That is the wrong spectrum to try to see innovation in.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
patents are supposed to advance a given art. software patents do not advance the art of software development.
closed source commercial software is already protected by copyright law. without patents, people would still have and implement ideas. you cant stop that. i think wed would have more software developed if people didnt have to worry about software patents.it only helps companies big enough to use them to stifle competition.
yes, some people make money from software patents. but that is not to advance the art of software, it only holds back development. (except when it forces improvement such as lzw->zlib or gif->ping)
can anyone please tell me where software patents have actually helped the state of the art of software development?
Perl... oh, where can I begin with Perl...
If you want to read a great book on the topic of copyrights and patents, you must read "The Future of Ideas" by Lawrence Lessig. In it he explains how the current battles are not a Left vs. Right issue, but a New vs. Old issue.
The book is filled with good arguments and strong references. He argues that patents are only one tool in the aresenal of the old that are being used to protect the dinosaurs and destroy the freedom of the end-to-end Internet.
It is key to remember that when deciding whether or not we should have patents, the question we need to ask is "do we as a society benefit from patents." I argue that patents for software, especially as they currently are, have no practical benefit for society. Society is supposed to benefit from patents by studying the disclosure of the design, but noone does this because they are not written legibly. Furthermore, the lifetime of patents greatly exceeds the lifetime of software, so by the time the patent clears, society gains little from it. Also, software patents that are also protected by copyright is ridiculous.
Society gains most in a fast-growing sector by having a large commons of ideas to pull from. It is from this commons that innovators are able to flourish.
The Internet is the greatest proof that patents are not the solution. Only because there was a lot of freedom to innovate, unencumbered by patents, were researchers able to develop one of the most freedom-promoting tools for society.
Your arguments are well represented and correct. Innovation is the most important point about the patent system. However, I would say the the patent system in its current form is far more harmful to software innovation than beneficial.
I respect your opinion but my opinion is that software is much more like music than engineering when it comes to generating ideas and implementing ideas. Or maybe it is just because the patent system sucks. For example, you bring patented engines as an example. Sometimes I feel that the software world is bringing the equivalent of patenting any and all types of engines as opposed to one type of engine. Many people have a problem with the patent system because the cover of software patents is too wide whereas most physical patents are specific enough to feel fair
Just a matter of interest: how many patents does MS actually own ?
http://ep.espacenet.com/ lists 3927 worldwide.
Random sample:US6357000,Method and system for specified loading of an operating system
US6356956,Time-triggered portable data objects
US6356907,Providing for data types of properties according to standard request-response protocols
US6356906,Standard database queries within standard request-response protocols
US6356901,Method and apparatus for import, transform and export of data
US6356890,Identifying indexes on materialized views for database workload
Ahh... I will remember this argument. Thanks
+1 Insightful to parent?
The lawyer likely didn't feel like explaining the reality to you. The reality is that these cases are tried in courts and if you try to make it too specific to what you are doing they often don't hold up well. For instance, there have numerous cases where competitors have done things like adding a third wheel to a two wheel device to effectively render the patent worthless. Now you can argue that the system is flawed till you turn blue in the face, but: a) the system is not as evil as you make it out to be b) this is real life and there are flaws in most things, that doesn't mean we should try to radically overhaul a system that has worked quite well.
Nope, sound of Harley is not patented. Harley-Davidson tried to register the sound as a trademark in 1994. In 2000, they withdrew the application after much opposition. There's an interesting analysis of the registrability here, which also mentions successful trademarks on color and scent.
Patents and Copyrights need to be changed.
Here is a case for copyright:
This past week or so I posted an auction on eBay. After a couple of days, another user asked me to take it down because I was infringing on there ad copyright.
Now I don't like copyrights, but I abide by the laws of the land. So, I asked him not to spam me because I had already had copyrighted the headline, and much of the ad and had the certificate from the library of congress (which is fact and the link to it is on my eBay page in addition to a statement I had to put for eBay users: http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/brainclone/)
I haven't used the power of the copyright until that moment because the eBay user kept spamming me. I got frustrated with him and then asked eBay to end his auctions because they were violating my copyright. Currently there are thousands of people using my copyrighted stuff on eBay, but I don't bother them, or ask eBay to terminate there auctions.
The problem I feel, is that if we didn't have the copyrights in there current state, this guy would of never of spammed me, and I would of never of had to had eBay terminate his auction, we would of both made money using the laws of supply and demand, and competition and not on... crapy laws that people use to block others from making a living. I use copyright to protect me from people like this user, not to destroy a great marketplace like eBay by suing them, and asking them to put "Filters" a la napster, to end thousands of eBay auctions.
Software Developer example:
I have a piece of ".NET" code that I have put under the Lesser GNU license. I feel that this code and it's concept is so important in windows development that I didn't want people to use it and not be free in future software developed in windows.
You can get the code and is incorporated into a sample application called videoghost.net that is free.
http://www.brainclone.com/VideoGhost.htm
Since we will be seeing desktop space at a premium with the consistent inflow of new software, we will be seeing this simple piece of code be used more and more to provide access to all desktop applications.
If one entity had the power to use this code and concept exclusively, this would, as described in this article, hurt the software developers by not being able to bring out competitive products into the market place. Competition would lay stagnant, and the evolution of a good application using these simple concepts would crawl to a halt.
This is the reason I felt it should be released using the GNU lesser license. I hope you feel the same way.
Thanks,
Anthony Loera
But-- to take a counter-example-- consider engines. We've been using internal combustion engines for a long time. To come up with a better engine-- one that runs on water, or chained hamsters, or the moral power of virginity-- would be a huge effort. Ten years and three billion dollars. Why bother doing it? Because you can patent your invention, and for a period of time you can have the exclusive right to build it, or you can collect royalties from other folks who build it. Without patent protection (so the theory goes) nobody would bother building new kinds of engines.
So my go-kart company buys your engine, and connects a drive train to it. Now my product is a go-kart powered by a foobar104 model 1 engine. This is fine. Software companies do this all the time. I don't neccesarily mind this, credit where it is due, you get a return on your investment.
Now if i want optimise my go-kart. I put a supercharger on your engine. I use special high performance spark plugs. I bore out the cylenders, and put in brand x valves that have less chance of sticking under the conditions my go-kart will experience. Its still a go-kart powered by a foobar104 model 1 engine. But the engine was modified. You still get your return. Its not a new product. Im allowed to do this.
Joe down the street decides that my modifications are perfect in his dune buggy. He doesnt know how to modify the engine himself, so he buys the engines ive modified to put in his dune buggies. This is still allowed. Joe now makes dune buggies powered by the foobar104 model 1 engine. You still get your return.
foobar104 is also a songwriter. (S)he (sorry not sure of your gender) has an extremely popular song called foo love. I can't buy a copy of foo love, and change the tempo and the fix the grammer, and sell it on my CD. Thats protected by copyright law. Joe cant buy my cd singles, and use the modified song in his CD. That too breaks the same copyright rule.
If foo love covers new ground conceputally, say he expresses his love for misquitos. I can write a new song called I love misquitos, only i explore further into it, say i love gay misquitos. I use his concepts, in my own original way. this is allowable.
Joe loves this. He writes a song about loving gay misquitos. This is still allowed. The concept transfers. loving misquitos (straight or gay) is not patentable.
This is where patents get sticky with software under the current system. Software is both patentable and copyrightable. I buy foobar104soft's misquitolove engine (c) US patent number baz. I can't make a gaymisquitolove engine mod and sell it to joe, because i violate his copyright. Fine, is cool, foobar104 doesnt like it, i respect it.
So I engineer the new gaymisquitolove engine that uses the misquitolove concepts. and get my ass sued because i violated his patent. So because of this foobar104 has his cake and eats it too. Unless i pay him lots and lots of money, I can't make my gaymisquitolove engine. This is where the problem lies. Software is the only industry that allows this. Its fairly rediculous.
To live till you die is to live long enough. -Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Right.
But -- they need the patents to protect their software in the case of an infringment.
It isn't news that Stallman has something to say about IP and patents.
Having a headline that says Stallman has something to say about software patents is about as useless as slashdot making a self referential headline citing a slashdot poster that was against Microsoft.
The sky is blue.
Is that news? It is definitely interesting to certain people as to why it appears blue, but it sure as hell isn't news.
I sat down in my chair, and didn't float to the cieling.
Is that news?
Again, certainly interesting to certain physicists, but not news.
No -- I get the difference perfectly :) :(
Thing is -- patents snag the actual process not the code to make the process. I'd say the patents are more important, in the long run, to a company.
Mind you, patents are not to be allowed in a monopolistic way (see the whole Antitrust suit on cnn.com, etc). Patents, when used correctly, are good.
And, I guessed, flamed to a crisp, and modded down to a -1...that bums me out.
YOU ARE THE MAN's BITCH!
Pardon my ignorance, but who is Richard Stallman?
Oh, and I would just like to point out -- it seems that which speaks for the values of patents and closed-source gets modded down. A pity.
But that's kind of the point. If we don't offer patent protection for software innovations-- truly deserving ones, I mean-- then we'll never know what we missed.
You missed MY main point. Patent protection exists to promote the transfer of inventions into public domain. Software patents barely if at all fulfill that role. By the time a software patent expires, it is usually not useful at all. And throughout its lifetime, it prevents others from using it.
Software, like music, is fundamentally expression based, and copyright was invented to protect expression. And, copyright NEVER protects concepts or ideas embodied in some expression - merely the specific expression of them.
I thought that RMS was boycotting Amazon.com because they support software patents. If so how come his new book Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams is listed there?
I guess he does not not get to decide that kind of thing.If we don't offer patent protection for software innovations-- truly deserving ones, I mean
Ah, but there's the rub. What's a "truly deserving" innovation?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I remember when I first started up a software project and I started mentioning it to a few people. Their first question time and again was "did you patent it yet?" This became frustrating having to try to explain to these non-IT people why patents should not be valid on softare, and why in fact they aren't in Canada.
Software in Canada IS considered to be an artistic creation.
Of course, Canadians get around this by 1) patenting their software in the US, and 2) patenting every little idea they can fool the Canadian patent offices into believing is "more than just software."
When I first met with my current lawyer, they brought in a patent agent, because they figured I would want to pursue some sort of patent for my application. I politely informed him that his services would not be needed.
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
-- Donald E. Knuth
I think it's more than that. RMS is arguing that engineering software is very different from engineeering physical things. He says that, if you compare building a 1 million part physical thing with a 1 million part software project, you're going to end up with dramatically different effort levels.
In the physical thing you have to worry about how the most basic parts are going to interract with each other. For example, you need to make sure that a screw that connects two parts together isn't going to corrode because the physical properties of the screw interracts with the physical properties of the parts it's connected to. Whereas in software, you don't have to worry about an if statement embeded in a while statement corroding.
Additionally, there's an unbelievable cost associated with producing a 1 million part physical thing. You have to build a factory. You have to make sure that the factory can reliably build the thign, and you have to make sure that the factory itself is safe for people to work in. In software, once you've built a thing, to reproduce it simply means invoking an already existing copy command.
He uses this to say that building a million piece software project is much easier than building a 1 million piece physical thing. Which means that we make software much bigger and much more complicated than physical things because we can. Which means that it's dramatically more important in software to depend on previous ideas ideas in order to build anything that's useful. The dependancy on already used ideas is just too great. To completely abandon all previously used ideas is to relegate your software to the state of uselessness. In other words, innovation in software depends entirely on the ability to freely use previous ideas.
Thus he argues that patents in software, actually discourage innovation. And he even uses biotech as a precedent for how the improvement on previous ideas creates an entirely new idea worthy of entirely new protection. Whereas in software, if I improve upon your idea, I'm violating your patent.
I think he makes a really good case for the idea that software patents actually discourage innovation becuase of the dramatically different nature of building software. So if you were to ask, is building software more like composing music, or building an engine, I think he's got a pretty good point to say that it's more like composing music.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
patenting a physical design that is innovative is great. your engine idea is great... except you cant get a patent and then sell the thing. you have pistons? oh well ford owns the piston patent, oh you use a rotary cylinder system instead? talk to Fiat they hold that patent, etc.etc..... your wonderful patent just became worthless as the big companies will instantly tell you, "we will bury you if you dont give us free reign to use your patent."
so your patent just became worthless... and your money and time is now.... worthless...
so what was your point again?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Okay, so it's possible to use the patent system in a way that stifles innovation. That doesn't make patents inherently bad or wrong, like RMS seems to think they are.
I agree that some things shouldn't be patentable. Mathematical formulae, for instance, aren't patentable. But processes are. For instance, the process for making steel was patented when it was invented.
There's a line between algorithms (like bubble sort) and processes (like refining steel). But where is it, exactly? Does it lie in the complexity of the algorithm? Like maybe simple ones should be public domain while complex ones can be patented? That doesn't make any sense, though, because the simplest algorithms are often the most brilliant and innovative.
The problem here is that we're fundamentally talking about a but-for situation. The only way to judge the value of the patent system is to imagine a world in which it didn't exist, and that's hard.
"Obviously, trying to patent something like the wheel is silly, and a patent granted for something so obvious is wrong."
If it is do damn obvious, why is it that the millions of Native North and South Americans had no knowledge of the wheel until the arrival of the Spanish? There were millions of people over several thousand years, and yet, no one came up with the wheel.
Here is a link that talks about the Inca, for example, and the lack of the wheel.
Its easy to say something is obvious after someone else invents it.
Yes, it's true. Just look at the rabid destruction of society caused by paperclips, ball point pens, erasers.......Just wait till it's discovered that Dick owns stock in Microsoft, Unisys, IBM, etc. His socialist mantra won't hold a drop of water then :)
I grabbed this from www.m-w.com: news - a report of recent events, previously unknown information. Let see, Stallman went to the UK and gave a speech. Yup, it seems to fit the criteria for news, for certainly many other people as well as myself didn't know he was going to the UK to give a speech. Regardless, of what he spoke about.
The issue now shifts to the importance of such an event. Not defying the laws of physics isn't important news, nor is it previously unknown. However his trip is something out of the ordinary, as he doesn't travel to Europe at the same time at the same place to talk about the exact same thing.
Some people do find Stallman an interesting speaker and would like to read what he had to say. Others would have like to heard him speak while others would have rather never heard of him. My guess is the posting of the article was not geared for the latter, unless the policy at Slashdot is to piss off people.
Taking from the first page of the article On Monday afternoon Richard Stallman was invited by the Foundation for Information Policy Research to speak at the Cambridge University Computer Lab on the issue of software patents. It's not every day he gets invited to the Foundation for Information Policy Reasearch to speak at Cambridge University. And if he does it is everyday, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS CRAP DOING ON SLASHDOT? NEWS MY ASS!!
Here is a link to Melancholy Elephants.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I'm sorry, but I refuse to identify any work using the word "incentivise" as eloquent.
---Nathaniel
Wishing more English-speaking people spoke English
Again, you're confusing pure research with commercial efforts. The same argument you just used could be applied equally well to medicine: without the free exchange of ideas and information among the medical science community, we'd all be dying of smallpox and whatever the hell else.
And yet we still grant patents in the medical field. Medical instruments and devices are patented. So are drugs.
I'll say it again: there's a line between fundamental research and knowledge in the field of computer science, and commercial uses of that knowledge to create products, processes, and services. In medicine and other fields, that line is fairly well defined. (Although the recent discussions of the IP related to the Human Genome Project cast this in doubt.) In computer science and computer engineering, the line is not clear at all.
I've been tossing this idea around for a while, and I think it works.
Solution: The length of patent protection is equal to the amount of time it took to develop.
So, if you spend 10 years perfecting some technology, you get a 10 year patent. If it took you 5 minutes (ie 1-click shopping), you get a 5 minute patent.
Of course, you have to PROVE how long it took you to develop it. Some type of verifiable documentation should do it. Anyone seriously interested in getting a patent for something should have no problem keeping accurate documentation. The patent period starts from the date of first sale. If someone else sells the same technology before you do, no patent (prior art). This will prevent people from artifically extending the development period to get a longer patent.
Note all the benefits. Software patents will pretty much disappear, since it doesn't take THAT long to create it. And it seems fair. If you spend a year developing a piece of software, odds are after about it year it will be pretty much obselete anyways.
Will they ever implement this policy? Of course not. It goes in the bucket with all the other reasonable patent-reform ideas. *sigh*
None of which is discernable by the end user from the outside. To protect such things from your competitor, just keep them secret - there should be no need to patent them.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
One thing I haven't seen mentioned so far is that many times (all the time?) writing software is like discovering the one best way to solve a problem. There are thousands of ways to solve a problem in software, but the solutions are either slow, bloated, or hard to maintain (the latter I see a lot).
Many times in my programming experience, I feel like I've simply settled on a solution which was there all along for me to arrive at. Certainly I put in the work and effort to arrive at that solution, but it's as if I discovered it, and so how can it be patented?
In the end, it's almost as if people are patenting the truth, or the The Right Thing To Do, as Carmack says.
Mip
According to Delphion, here's the 20 most recent of the 4426 owned my Microsoft.
US6363499 03/26/2002 Method and system for restoring a computer to its original state after an unsuccessful installation attempt
US6363433 03/26/2002 Method and mechanism for client-side handling of extensions originally written for servers
US6363409 03/26/2002 Automatic client/server translation and execution of non-native applications
US6363404 03/26/2002 Three-dimensional models with markup documents as texture
US6363371 03/26/2002 Identifying essential statistics for query optimization for databases
USD454878 03/26/2002 Advanced game pad
US6360280 03/19/2002 Method and system for accessing shell folder capabilities by an application program
US6360272 03/19/2002 Method and apparatus for maintaining a unified view of multiple mailboxes
US6360230 03/19/2002 Method and system for uniformly accessing multiple directory services
US6360217 03/19/2002 Method and computer program product for calculating event occurrences
US6360214 03/19/2002 Automatic database statistics creation
USD454567 03/19/2002 Game pad
US6356866 03/12/2002 Method for converting a phonetic character string into the text of an Asian language
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Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
First of all, we grant patents on these public health products to the demise of poorer third-world nations who would be producing generic drugs instead.
I don't see how whether something is research or commercial efforts has any bearing on whether patents are good or not. In both cases, we apply patent law the same, and we as a society get the same result from such patents of either type. The only time there is a possible difference between the two is that patent giants such as IBM are able to coerce smaller patent holders with litigous threats (this is described in Stallman's speech).
Hence, I'll say the funding has little to no importance, and even go on to saying that with commercial interest, the problems patent system is are exasperated even further.
What is important is whether society benefits from granting such a patent. Since, as Stallman explains, software is so different from other fields, these differences incur a greater cost to society with each granted patent, without anything in return. With a greater commons society and companies as a whole benefit.
Your time frame is too short. Of all the software or software-related patents that have ever existed, the vast majority are still in effect. You can't say that software patents don't do their job of releasing knowledge into the public domain if you don't consider a sufficiently long timeline.
Stallman doesn't have a problem with people making money. He's not out to make programmers starve ;-)
;-P
What he doesn't like is the way that someone can patent an idea for software, and prevent software designers from being truly innovative. This is not something that microsoft worry about due to no innovation
I guess the range of experience is pretty broad. In my experience, the process of designing and building a big software application is pretty similar to designing and building a big physical thing, like a car. You have the same people doing the same sorts of jobs. The difference only comes in the manufacturing. When you release a car to manufacturing, huge factories full of people work to build them. When you release software to manufacturing, CDs get burned, usually in a big duplicating machine.
But the stuff that happens before manufacturing-- the designing, prototyping, testing, marketing, and so on-- is almost identical. The difference being that building a car involves making technical drawings which act as the schematic for manufacturing. Writing a big software app involves making source code that acts as the schematic for the compiler.
In short, if RMS is trying to apply his analogy to commercial software development-- as opposed to one- or two-person efforts-- then I think he's just plain wrong.
His prose may have been thought-provoking, but I'm afraid I don't buy his arguments in the slightest. Pretty much nothing he said actually argues against the concept of a patent, nor does it knock down the standard arguments in their favour. His counterexamples are really attacks on the rather absurd way that the (US) patent system currently works, principally due to the incompetence of those responsible for granting them, the length of time for which they hold, and the problem of enforcement for the small guy against the big corp. We all knew this lot was broken anyway, and nothing he said really makes any difference to that.
The fact remains that, as a professional software developer, I have seen a number of clients in different industries invest massive sums of money in researching genuinely new algorithms. Being first-to-market in these industries is worth similarly massive sums of money, and the patents granted (in the UK) protect the investment in research they made. If their competitors were allowed to take advantage of that research for free and immediately, the research wouldn't happen.
I've been exposed to this stuff for years, and I have an informed opinion. I have been to a client just today, whose patent-protected research has led directly to improved quality control for cars, amongst other things. Next time you see a road accident where ABS saved lives, remember that.
Oh, and when someone knee-jerk responds and calls me an apologist, please don't pretend that Joe "Open Source Developer" Schmoe would have developed the advanced metrology algorithms concerned himself instead, or that these patents are harming him in any way. He wouldn't, and on the contrary, they protect him every time he drives to work. In this case, and many others, patents are a genuine and vital contribution to maintaining research standards, they're between the big corps who can do that research in the first place, and they don't do jack to harm the common guy. He just benefits from the results. Now, me personally, I don't see anything wrong with that principle.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Disallow patent cross-licensing.
Patents cannot be sold or transferred to anyone except the original patent holder
Grant patents only to individuals and not to corporations
At the time of granting the patent, define "reasonable" compensation criteria in case someone wants to license the patent
Force patent holders to license their patent to anyone who desires to, as long as the "reasonable" compensation criteria is met
...
IMHO, enforcing the above would make sure the original patent holder is "reasonably" compensated (and not some big corporation) while at the same time, keeping the playing field level enough for anyone to get in.
Just my thoughts
What? I really can't tell exactly what you're trying to say. It sounds as if you think patents are granted on individual components, like pistons. Nobody owns a patent on pistons; if anybody tried to apply for one it would get rejected because pistons have been used in many ways for thousands of years. Somebody may own a patent on a particular type of engine that incorporates a piston in its design, but that doesn't mean they have exclusive right to use pistons.
Basically I can't really figure out whether your post makes any sense, but is just obscured, or whether it's just nonsense from asshole to elbows.
No need to patent them? Of course there's no need to patent. A patent is a right that the government grants if you choose to apply for it. It's not necessary. It's an incentive.
Look, the government makes a deal with you, the inventor. You can choose to get a patent on your invention, which will grant you the right to prevent others from making something like what you've made for a certain amount of time-- usually 20 years. But in order to get that exclusivity, you have to describe your invention in detail and make that description available to the whole world.
This serves two purposes: on the one hand, it gives your competitors a fair opportunity to keep from stepping on your patent, because you're telling them exactly what you own the exclusive rights to.
On the other hand, at the end of the term of your patent, the whole world knows exactly what you did and how you did it.
So at this point you have a choice. You can either try to keep your methods and ideas secret and see what happens, or you can take the patent and get to be the king for a while before turning over everything to anybody who wants to look it up.
Of course it's not necessary to patent your invention.
the use of that pure knowledge to achieve commercial gains is something else entirely.
Yes it is. And if you read Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution, you will find the legislature empowered to do as you said:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, not to promote financial gain. You seem to agree that the scientific model works well, so I guess I'm not understanding why you think corporations deserve distinguished status. Are we talking strictly about promoting progress here?
Maybe it boils down to you feel that there is more and better commercial software, and I feel there is more and better free software. For the amount of energy expended on producing it, that is. I can't back up my gut feeling about this with irrefutable emperical data, though. Perhaps we'll just have to wait and see. If we can, that is. There's a real danger that in the not-so-distant future, free software will be illegal. Now that would truly be a shame.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
RMS is right about several things: the pace in which this happens is too slow and too fraught with opportunity for honest mistakes to happen. It's also filled with conceptual ideas which are so broad that they have no business being there. However, it's far too expensive for the little guys out there, or even someone trying to defend an open source project.
As to whether it's like a symphony or not --who cares? That's just a vehicle to try and explain the situation to those who don't know the difference between an algorithm, a concept, or a functional block of code...
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
You seem to agree that the scientific model works well, so I guess I'm not understanding why you think corporations deserve distinguished status.
First of all, corporations deserve, and are legally entitled to, the same consideration as individuals. Corporations are, in the eyes of the law, persons, with standing distinct from their stockholders. For tax purposes corporations and individuals are treated differently, but that's a different matter entirely.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, not to promote financial gain.
The end result of the patent system, as you so ably quoted, is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. We promote progress by offering incentives. These incentives include, and have included for over 200 years, grants of rights of exclusivity.
One leads directly to the other. "Get rich by being inventive!" benefits both the inventor and society.
Software patents barely if at all fulfill that role. By the time a software patent expires, it is usually not useful at all.
I think you just proved the original poster's point. The reason they're not useful at all anymore is typically because other things were innovated that were better. Let's take LZW for instance. When that patent expires, will it be overly useful? No, not really. Why? Because gzip, which is a better compression method, was developed. PNG, also a better method, was devloped as well. Would these have been devloped if LZW wasn't patented? Who knows.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the PTO is that it persists in granting patents for obvious ideas.
An example is the Mark Williams patent for a solution to the "endian" problem... you know - big endian machines store integers in a different order than little endian machines.
As it turns out I am able to provide prior art. But perhaps the most important fact is that the whole issue of a patent for this is bullshit. The simple observation is that if the order is different, then change it. Similarly one can convert between notations as well - IE. If the notation is different then change it to the best approximation.
Using this idea one can convert between IBM mainframe floating point and IEEE floating point as used in the PC or even to CDC floating point.
None of these conversions are worthy of a patent.
Similarly, suppose some bright engineer had decided way back when the computer was first developed to patent the "JUMP" instruction. Where would this have put the industry?
The harm that patents do is underestimated. But if one takes a longer view then it becomes clear that we're dealing with the criminalization of the art of computer programming.
What one would hope is that the USPTO would look at that, see the absurdity, look back on some of their past decisions, and resolve to be less foolish in the future. <SlashdotJadedMode> What would actually happen is that they'd issue the patent, and the next week we'd all be paying license fees for the privilege of thinking. </SlashdotJadedMode>
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Let's use the car for example. How many parts are in a car? 10,000? 100,000? I don't think it's 1,000,000, but I could be wrong. Let's just say 100,000 for argument's sake. How many people are involved in the development and production of a 100,000 part car? I would think that it's safe to say at least 1000 people. But you might know better than I.
If we assume, for the sake of argument, that each line of code is a "software part". How many people are involved in a 100,000 line software project? Using a program called sloccount I was able to count up the number of real lines of source code in qmail 1.03. This project is basically a one man project. It contains approximately 17,000 lines of source code.
If these are numbers are to believed as reasonable numbers. Then it takes about 5-6 people to produce the and assemble a software project with the same number of parts as a physical item that requires upwards of thousands of people to produce.
The offshoot is that, part for part, software is easier to develop. Consequently we make software much more complicated, with many many more parts than we make in physical objects. This leads to a situation that to make any useful software at all, you rely on techniques used in previous software. To prevent a developer from using those techniques (as software patents do) is to prevent any further innovation in software.
I think RMS puts forth a pretty compelling argument.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Yes, Microsoft is our only hope! Bill Gates is the risen Savior!! Hallelujah!
Normally, you're a pretty good troll. But that was a gay troll if I ever saw one. Stupid, not funny, not enlightening, looks like you're running on empty and still desperately writing. Take a break and refresh your trolling skills. You suck right now. *Quality, not quantity*. Anti-GNU has been done to death and is just tedious now. And others do that troll so much better, like Brett "the anti-GPL Troll" Glass, for instance.
Unless you're one of those paid Microsoft shills assigned to troll Slashdot - in which case, carry on. It's your job to be a lamer trying to hurt free software, so I can't really fault you for that.
Billg.
You are supposed to describe the invention in a patent application in a way that it will allow another person to use it. But often it does not work out that way, because people give written descriptions, instead code, and some times those written descriptions are insufficient.
Your logic is severely flawed. The development of a new car can't be reduced to a count of the number of parts. Vast amounts of effort from large teams of people, and huge amounts of money, go into the design of a new car before the first part is designed. The sheer number of pencil sketches-- and, more and more often, digital paint sketches-- that get produced, revised, reused, or discarded in the early design phase can't be underestimated.
Likewise, software is far more than the sum of its lines of code. The last big project I worked on-- a flight simulator for USAF-- was three years in development before the first line of code was written. There was a ton of work done on design and architecture, building concept demonstrators and mock-ups of the operator interface, and on and on. Practically every detail of the system was figured out on paper and in meetings. Once the time came to code it, it was almost just a matter of writing things down in Ada and C++.
There's no question that GM's designing of a new car and some guy's writing of a mail daemon are very different things. But when you start comparing apples to apples-- large-scale mechanical or civil engineering to large-scale software engineering-- I think you'll find that the two are more alike than they are different.
Suppose that someone had patented the wheel. Then people would have to come up with weird "inventions" like "a square wheel" to be able to build carts or anything else that used the wheel (or something wheel-like). If the wheel hadn't been patented, people could just have used the wheel to build new innovations.
I guess what I'm not understanding is that on the one hand you seem to argue that progress occurs just fine without the incentives that patents provide, but then argue that corporations require patent incentives. I'm not asking what you think about the legal status of corporations, I'm asking why do you think we should limit people's rights so that corporations will have an extra advantage? If corporations are less efficient and less productive than other types of organizations, why should they get special treatment?
;)
I'm not questioning the motivations underlying our constitutional provisions for patent protections, I'm questioning why we should put the cart before the horse. The objective is progress, not financial gain. I think we agree about this, but just to be clear: the right of exclusivity, as stated by the constitution, is a means to an end.
Therefore, should patents actually impede progress, as many think they do, then they should not be permitted. I have to say, the burden lies with people like myself, who oppose the status quo, to demonstrate incontravertably that patents impede progress (note: I'm just talking about software. I don't know how I feel about the subject beyond this.) I think the best way to demonstrate the harm they cause is to compare the productivity of commercial vs. free software developers. Like I say, I don't have that data. I'm just being another modern-day activist - "Somebody should do something!"
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
The current state of the US Patent system aside, there's no real difference between a creation in software, and a creation in hardware. People often make the argument that software is like music, or that it's just a mathematical expression and therefore shouldn't be patentable. This is neglecting the fact that anything you make in the world is exactly the same, it's both expression and and math. Calling software pure expression, like music, is misleading because music has no constant function that it performs. It does different things to different people. Sofware or Hardware perform exactly reproduceable tasks each and every time. What do you think an internal combustion engine is? It's the application of a bunch of pipes, some processing, and an interface. So is your word processor. You can talk about any piece of software or hardware in the same terms. Just because we don't normally start out with the mathematical representation of an engine when we build one doesn't mean that it's any different. It just means that the domain that you work in is different. The reality inside a computer is not the same as the reality you work with outside. Outside requires you to work with physics, which is just a layer of abstraction for math. Computers have their own abstractions and rules. And yes, there should be separate rules to get a software patent. It should be a lot harder in my opinion, because the amount of work to do something with software is a lot less than it is outside. One has to keep in mind the different levels that the two systems work at. Right now it seems like the current level of software patents are like if we tried to patent a drinking glass, or some basic form, like a wheel. We're still learning the basics. So, in granting a software patent, the artifact in question should be something Way Out There. Or it shouldn't be trivial changes to basic ideas.
If we had the patent system back when we were inventing wheels and levers, we'd have retarded our progress by not allowing the critical mass to develop, where the basics of the world around us were made apparent to everyone. I think we're at the stage in computer development of wheels and levers. We need to let everyone in on the secrets that we stumble upon. I'm not saying we shouldn't have rewards still. We can still give limited monopolies or other benefits, just for shorter periods and with fewer rights.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, not to promote financial gain.
What you might be forgetting is that there are lots of different types of people and organizations. Some of these aren't motivated by financial incentive, but many are. The capitalist mantra is that profit motivated people and organizations have contributed far more to the current state of the economy than they have sucked out in royalties and legalized monopolistic restrictions.
A patent is a lotto ticket that might bring in a lot of money in the rare event of a commecial success. If you know the number of failed R&D projects, music compositions, etc. there have been, it's pretty obvious that the lotto payoff has got to be big to keep many companies and people gambling by making a sustained effort to create.
The UK has already done a consultation and rejected software patents. A couple of weeks ago the EuroLinux Alliance won in Europe and the new EU Directive now also rejects software patents, meaning every European country will have to by law. I would love to show you all the fascinating sources but the Slashdot rejection box refuses to show you the body of text you submitted :-(
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
By this standard, code would not be patentable, although task-specific firmware would be - assuming you custom design all the silicon.
This would mean that anyone can implement your process - they just can't implement it in exactly the same way as you do. If your process is such that it can only be implemented one way... well, thats a reason to write your patents as specifically as possible.
Naah... you're right in that my post above was pretty gay, but I think I'll just post more seriously for a while and get new ideas.
The owls are not what they seem
Better yet, can you give us the patent #'s so we can look them up ourselves, and do searches for any case law or reporting about the patents in question?
Or are you actually doing what Stallman is talking about and assuming that the patents actually provide your relatives with protection rather than considering the likelihood that some "much larger" competitor could use their own (presumably correspondingly "much larger") patent portfolio to force your relatives to cross-license and lose all of the competitive advantage of the patents?
If you have examples like the ones I cite, do you also have some concrete statistical data to inidicate that this scenario is the rule rather than the exception?
If you can't provide these examples and statistics, I'd suggest that the term "baseless" applies quite well to your own assertions in turn, don't you agree?
Now we're getting to the crux of the matter. If asked, I will argue in favor of the status quo. You argue against it. This is our topic. I debated in college; I'm comfortable with this.
In arguing to change the status quo, we must first establish that the status quo is worth changing. We can do that in two ways: one would be to demonstrate that a different circumstance would be markedly better than the status quo; the improved circumstance must be sufficiently better than the status quo that it merits making the change at all.
The other method is to demonstrate that the status quo is simple unacceptable in and of itself, by some arbitrarily assigned criteria. If we, for instance, all agreed that butterflies are wonderful, and we could demonstrate that the status quo implies the extinction of butterflies, then we have a prima facie reason to change the status quo.
I'm not hearing either of those arguments expressed very clearly, though. The "patents stifle innovation" argument doesn't really mean anything without a compelling "but for" case. Can you assert, in some reasonable way, that innovation would be better served in the absence of the patent system? That seems to be what RMS is arguing, but his assertion isn't really backed up by his examples.
On the other hand, is the patent system somehow morally wrong? Should we change or abolish it, not because there's a better way, but just because the status quo is so completely unacceptable?
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't see anybody advancing any good reason to consider another way of doing things.
LOL!!
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Yes, yes, RMS asserted that patents don't encourage what he called "incremental innovation." I don't deny that. I'm saying that reading the whole article left me with the impression that what he was calling "innovation" was nothing of the sort.
Back to the example of LZW compression. If you wanna use LZW, license it from Unisys. There's nothing wrong with that.
If you wanna improve on LZW, go right ahead! The algorithm is documented, fully and completely, in the patent application if nowhere else. If your improvement is significant enough to merit it, you'll be granted a patent on it yourself.
If you oppose paying Unisys a licensing fee-- which RMS clearly does, on (for lack of a better word) moral grounds-- then don't use LZW. Use another algorithm, or develop your own.
Through that process, you weren't prevented from innovating. You were prevented from making use of somebody's patented innovation without complying with that somebody's terms. It's not the same thing.
That may very well be the case. The problem that I have with what you're doing, though, is that you're defining "large scale" in both software engineering and civil/mechanical engineering by measuring how much effort goes into them. The thing that makes something a large scale software project is if it takes about the same amount of effort as a large scale civil/mechanical engineering project.
I'm trying to assess how much complexity goes into each of those projects, and then relate the complexity to the effort. I hypothesizing that in building a physical thing, the amount of effort, for the level of complexity, is dramatically higher than for software projects. Which means that for the same amount of effort, you can build dramatically more complex things in software than you can in a physical thing. The ability to build complex things in software depends on our ability to leverage the techniques we've learned already. Otherwise, we are not able to build any new complex software.
Remembering that the point of this is to discuss software patents, it seem pretty intuitive to me that innovation in software depends enormously on the ability to freely use previous ideas. And that granting patents on software imposes such a large restriction on the use of previous ideas, as to discourage innovation, negating the entire purpose that patents were invented to fulfill.
Take the other example that RMS uses: a word processor. If software patents existed for word processors, then we'd still all be using WordStar. Why? Because in order for someone to improve on WordStar, they would have had to violate the patent granted to WordStar. Perhaps the patent on "cut & paste". No one could write a better word processor, because to do so would imply the violation of patents from the first ever word processor - who would write a word processor w/out "cut & paste"? And that's just one simple example. There are probably about a thousand unique things that define what makes a word processor a word processor.
Imagine that in your flight sim for the USAF, that you had to go and check the patent status of every technique you used in that project. I remember that Microsoft wrote a flight sim almost 20 years ago. How much more work would your project have been if it also required you to license patents from Microsoft?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
You are wrong that it's the same as software. If I code up some subroutine and it's not right, I don't have a pile of deprecated parts stacked up somewhere.
Mind you, if you are supporting software patents, I see your point- because you're trying to set up a situation where I can end up with a pile of purchased INTELLECTUAL property that was slightly off-spec or didn't end up fitting the design! I could end up having had to pay for intangible ideas, spending money just to TRY OUT a software design, and then ending up with a pile of NOTHING for my money, rather than a pile of surplus parts.
You will forgive me for not being enthusiastic about this prospect...
I didn't mean to imply that people don't need financial incentives. I was only trying to say that they were intended to be the means to an end, not the end in themselves. I should have been more clear. I believe in the free market, capitalism, yada yada.
But I don't believe that software patents promote progress. Quite the contrary, they impede progress. Complicated software projects are an edifice, made of many components. The effort involved in making sure that you are not inadvertently stepping on someone's patent is enormous. And if you find patents in your way, you must route around them. You may not create incorporate one-click shopping into your web site, for example. And this promotes progress exactly how? How does compelling everyone to do things in some obscure nonsensical way because someone else has a patent promote progress? Software patents compell people to reinvent the wheel over and over and over and over.
Again, the evidence against software patents is empirical. The quantity and quality and pace of development of free software is testimony enough that imposing patent restrictions is not necessary to promote progress. Software patents benefit few, at the expense of the many. Since this is unnecessary, they should be abandoned.
I understand how, theoretically, patents are supposed to promote progress. Now show me some real-world examples of how patents at work in the software industry. I can think of lots of examples of patents in the software industry impeding progress. Show me some examples of how they have done real good.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
None of this crap about patenting processe. You don't patent "a way of propelling a ground vehicle", you patent "this engine right here", and "this specific drivetrain".
Hmm. Have you ever read a patent? The language is written by lawyers, which makes is hard to sift through, but also very, very precise. The title of a patent might be, "system and method of propelling a vehicle," which I'm sure sounds unacceptably vague to you. But the actual patent consists of a dozen or more pages of details: the what, how, and why. I read a patent this morning that describes an API; it was 70 pages long.
For example, Amazon's controversial patent (5,960,411) is entitled, "Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network." That's vague as all hell.
The abstract offers more detail in the form of a paragraph. The rest of the 19-page document describes Amazon's method in resounding detail, including where the cookies live and how single-item orders are consolidated into multi-item orders to reduce costs.
It's very thorough, and it's not obvious at all. I think the USPTO was entirely justified in giving Amazon a patent for it, in and of itself.
There are other factors, of course-- should Amazon have gotten a patent for a technology that others developed around the same time?-- but in general, the idea was specific and unique enough to warrant patenting.
So generally I think you might consider reading a few patents before you pass judgement on the whole system.
A patent is a temporary monopoly on a process granted in exhcange for a description of how it works. This means that software patents ought to include source code for whatever program is being patented, and pass into the public domain after 20 years (or however long the patent is valid).
Imagine that in your flight sim for the USAF, that you had to go and check the patent status of every technique you used in that project.
We did. You wouldn't believe the things the Department of Defense makes you do when you're contracting for them. You have to deliver to them, as a condition of their acceptance of your product, the evidence of your research into patents and copyrights and so on that might have an impact on your work. I wasn't working on that, of course, but I got to hear about it. Everything we did fell into three categories: COTS (commercial off-the-shelf, which is exempt from background checks because the responsibility is the vendor's), non-commercial licensed (like licensing the onboard computer microcode from Motorola and Boeing), and in-house developed. Everything we did in house had to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb.
Without patents, ABS may also have been formed as a joint project of several auto comanies, or by one company that wanted the PR. How much do auto manufacturers spend on Superbowl commercials and community grants annually? Is providing ABS without patent protection so far out of this range?
Just don't say that it woulda never happened without the USPO.
I'm just shocked that you seem so unequivocal about the moral rights of entities who are obliged by fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to be as immoral, malicious, unfair, greedy, litigious and uninventive as the law and market conditions allow!
(And yes, corporations are bound by fiduciary duty to *not* innovate if the cost of innovation is greater than the cost of *not* innovating and the market doesn't offer an innovative competitor)
No, as the parent poster understood (though you may not) that's goal, not the end result. Whether or not it is also the end result in the case of software is what we're debating here, and you've shown no concrete evidence it is.I can't speak for the specific Amazon one, but I'll take some time to read it this weekend. I should point out that "where the cookies are stored" isn't controllable by the server, and combining single item orders into multi-item ones is hardly non-intuitive.
Main problem I have with software patents: Software doesn't DO anything. It's a description, a set of instructions, that can spur the proper machine to do something. Software patents, when taken to the logical extremes, cover all possible implementations of the process they describe, which certainly stifles innovation and upsets the the social contract on which patents are founded (imo, I suppose).
It wouldn't be reverse engineering if you looked at the code.
The company I work for files for patents (I'm in the process of 4), but largely only uses them as a marketing tool (look! we have a big ip database, we're cool) and secondly -- and this is not to be understated -- as self-protection. If we patent our thing, no one is going to fuck with us by patenting our thing and then coming at us with an injunction order. If our patent says we can do that, there's just no way outside of spending $1-2 million minimum, they are going to stop us from doing what we're doing (i.e, writing and using software based on our patent).
In considering all of these software patent issues out there, please think this over. There are numerous perfectly ethical companies filing for software patents (acknowledge: perhaps otherwise unethical, IMO) that are doing so for a perfectly ethical reason: to protect themselves from sharks. We can all collectively hope these motivations don't later turn sour.
Just some perspective,
C//
- is solely mathematical in nature;
- was Patented in one implementation (RSA) developed with public funds, then made available in the US only to those who would pay, at licensing terms which could hardly have been described as RAND;
- the holders of the patent innapropriately claimed that their patent covered every known method of PKI;
- the holders of the patent were alleged to have use harrasment infringement suits and bogus patent claims to stifle competition (by their own business partners and by Roger Schlafly -- the latter of whom lost his suit through an unfortunate combination of choosing to represent himself, poorly, in court and through a -- to me and plenty of other observers -- rather dubious interpretation of the appellate court of what constitutes "pure math");
- the result of all of which certainly included the lack of security in software for any but the deep-pocketed, and conceivably lost economic opportunity and theft because of that, though the latter I can't prove; if anyone out there stole credit cards or rerouted bank transfers during that time period feel free to comment
;-)
- graciously allowed RF use of the patented technology right before it would have expired anyway
Oh, and there's that small matter of the entire Internet, much of the technology for which was either developed before software patents were legallly recognized or without the protection of such. Of course, you presumeably post your slashdot comments via carrier pigeon, and if BT wins its hyperlink patent lawsuit, we may all have the priviledge of joining you in that method or paying higher fees for our 'net access.That's just a couple off the top of my head.
Your turn.
You truly have no idea what you are talking about. Patents are required, by law, to teach one of ordinary skill in the art how to practice the invention. If these engineers can't read the patents, then they aren't real engineers. Plain and simple. Wanna know why? Because if a patent can't be understood by an engineer in the relevant field, IT IS AN INVALID PATENT. If the patent owner tried to enforce this "incomprehensible" patent on you, you could just get your experts (engineers who can't understand what the patent teaches) on the stand to testify that the patent makes no sense. If the other side can't show you engineers who claim, under oath, that the patent DOES make sense, then they won't be able to enforce the patent.
There were plenty of other ridiculous assertions in the article too. Like the idea that patents don't promote innovation. For one thing, guess how these patent owners would protect their ideas if there were no patents? They would keep as much of it trade secret as they possibly could. Patents MUST be published, by law. This creates a repository of technical knowledge to which the public has access. Many engineers I know regularly read patents to keep up on innovation.
A second point on the idea that patents don't help innovation and growth: Investors measure a company by its assets. IP is an asset. If a company can OWN its research, and can exclude the free rider from making using and selling the product ofthat research, then the research is worth money. It can be effectively exploited. This means that the company has something of value. This means that investors are more likely to invest in that company. Which allows the company to continue its research.
Are you understanding these BASIC economic principles yet?
I don't deny that IP laws are abused, JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER LAW THAT HAS EVER BEEN MADE. But you should realize the benefit of the system before you pick at its flaws. The benefits are large scale, they keep our economy going, they keep technology in the marketplace. Sure there are abuses and bad side effects. But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Don't miss the forest for the trees. Don't gut the goose that laid the golden egg.
You may want another egg someday.
Tim (?), will you email me? I have some questions about the iButton setup in your home (from a previous story). Tried to email you but your mail server isn't accepting it, and have no other way of contacting you but replying to your latest post and hoping you'll read it. (And yes, moderators, I know this is offtopic. Get over it.)
My email address is ryan at ryanwright dot com.
Thanks...
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Thank goodness I live in a country without software patents
-- and they call america free,
Please do us the favor of enlightening us with the identity of this wondrous land in which you dwell.
I have a poor theory or analogy: The rise of communism was driven by the exploitation of workers in the 19th century. Would communism not have a good second chance given that big corporations and their lawyers exploit everything and everyone for money? The huge rise of the anti-globalisation movement - enormous demonstrations everytime the bosses get together to discuss their spheres of influence - and the public waking up - even if only momentarily - after the enron scandal do start to raise the question as to when that will spread to the software world.
They successfully sued people in court (Schlafly), and settled where it looked plausible that litigation would have invalidated the patent (Cylink).
But that is precisely a huge part of the problem. Patents are presumed valid after issue, and the burden is on the alleged infringer to show (to a most likely quite non-tech-saavy court) that the patent is invalid or the plaintiff's interpretation is wrong. In the case of RSADSI, they *knew* the patent might be invalid (they settled with Cylink to avoid having that proved in court), and that it probably didn't cover *all* methods of PKI and they still sued and won suits based on their "misinterpretation."And yes, SSL was available; in Web browsers and Web servers manufactured by 2 deep-pocketed companies, and a few smaller companies selling binary only Apache-based servers.
So, you could use SSL for web browsing if you wanted to use one of only two browser implementations, and for Web serving only if you had $$$. RSARDI refused to license the *use* of the patent without licensing their expensive implementation (it was never clear to me in discussions with them and/or 3rd parties whether you could use some other implementation if you paid the $$$ for theirs), so using SSL for any purpose other than web browsing or serving in a commercial setting for a small company was virutally impossible -- legally, anyway.
So, I think my claim that the patent prevented innovation is reasonably sound and that the fault was due to the patent system which included the patent and its prevailing interpretation, correct or not.
Only slightly on topic but (IMHO) interesting anyway, a long-ago thread on openssl-users about RSADSI's indimidation, licensing, standards manipulation and other nasty practices including: this, this, this and this is available for you reading pleasure at this site.
(* xyWrite word processor once got a downgrade through the mail, removing a feature that let you define abbreviations for long words and phrases. The developers of xyWrite had tried negotiating with the patent holder, but finally decided to remove the feature. *)
Sounds almost like an "include" file. Just turn it into include files. Havn't include files been around since at least the 60's?
Example:
"Four score score and 3 years ago, #rs founded the Free Or Die Software Foundation".
Then, a file called "..../includes/rs.inc" would contain "Richard Stallman". Sure, the patent owner might still fight it, but it would be hard to claim you invented Include files. (Note, the user does not necessarily have to put the file in the Include directory. A "wizard" like gizmo could do it for you.)
Table-ized A.I.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, not to promote financial gain. You seem to agree that the scientific model works well, so I guess I'm not understanding why you think corporations deserve distinguished status. Are we talking strictly about promoting progress here?
Public access is promoted by providing incentive in the form of property rights. I agree, it sounds contradictory--promote public access by granting exclusive rights. But we must remember that the property right creates incentive for authors and scientists to create. Without this property right, the creator is not on equal footing with others who want to market the invention/expression. The creator has already invested R&D, while everyone else has not. So if teh creator tries to go to market without IP rights, free riders will take the idea and manufacture it themselves, without incurring R&D cost. This means that creators are forever at a disadvantage to others when it comes to market exploitation--meaning it is more profitable to be a free rider than a creator in a market with no property rights. This is not a sustainable model for the creation of innovation. The property rights alleviate this problem, letting the creator make some money before the invention becomes public property. Money is the incentive. Making creators rich is not the goal of IP law--it is the MEANS. Capitalism harnesses selfish action for public good. This is a perfect example.
In other words, you have to make your music sound like theirs.
So how do I avoid making my music sound like any one of the umpteen thousand songs published since 1923 and getting dragged into court?
Will I retire or break 10K?
They don't. And neither are royalties needed to encourage people to write text or software. A quick look at the free stuff on the internet will make that clear. Are ideas created or discovered? I say they are discovered because they are can be discovered independently and so are already there. What is more, I can have an idea and tell other people without hurting you, and they can have that idea and tell other people without hurting me. What gives the first guy to discover an idea any special rights over it? The gub'mint that's who in the name of rewarding the explorers of ideas for their discoveries. Why reward people for making these discoveries? I don't think we should. Companies that make patentable discoveries would tend to gravatate towards countries where they could be rewarded, so maybe itis a form of war. This would be like the who can pollute the most war that economics forces countries to fight with each other. We a global truce in the form of global limits on patents ( and on pollution, and on compulsory education for that matter ).
Eat at Joe's.
While trolling takes on many forms, many of them merely being nuisances (crapflooding, goat links, page widening, etc) you'll find the vast majority of trolling occurring in posts similar to posts such as your original. On Slashdot, well-thought out and reasoned posts have become indistinguishable from trolls. This is made all the more obvious by the dimness of the moderators who would mod you down -1 in a heartbeat if not for the length of your post (as if that were the measure of an argument).
I too am a troll, much along the lines as you (though perhaps you don't realize yourself as such yet). I used to post, IMO, well argued posts and was consistently modded down by the Slashdot groupthink moderators. This is not to say that I didn't eventually hit the karma cap, but that along the way it was painfully obvious that my pro-Windows, anti-GPL opinion was not tolerated here.
Upon the realization of that I had my epiphany that pearls are not to be given to swine (this seems to be the same satori experience you are having now). Pigs deserve slop, and now that is all they get from me.
In any case, I'm not one of the nuisance trolls as I listed above, but one of the provocative trolls such as yourself (please do not take offense, this is not an insult as it may first appear). The Slashdot feeding frenzy that follows any post that attempts to support Microsoft or attack Linux or posit Creationism is a wondrous thing to watch, much like a thunderstorm or a supernova. The one difference is that you, the troll, have total control over the experience, much like a god who views his masterpiece from another dimension.
This is not to say that Slashdot is void of intellectual content. On the contrary, you'll find quite a bit of interesting information in the Science and Developer sections. You will find *no* intellectual content in the YRO section.
It's a travesty that a good idea like Slashdot, allowing users to create their own content, has succumbed to the mindless pursuit of mental masturbation of FSF zealots.
So while this may be the end of your Slashdot infancy, I think you will find your maturation into a Slashdot provocateur quite fulfilling and fun. Isn't that why you joined the technology revolution in the first place?