Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
the problems faced with software.
What problems? I see no problem with having no patents on software.
Nobody seems to ask the question, "What problem does having software patents solve?"
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
"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
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>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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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."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.
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.
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
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*
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.