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.'"
An audio version of the talk can be found at:
http://www.odl.qmul.ac.uk/stallman/
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
Patents promote a developing market. It encourages you to get your ideas out in the open.
Just because they are abused doesn't mean they should be abolished.
Do you like eating sound with your bare hands? I mean spoons could be weapons and abused!
From what I gather the biggest flaw with patents are the clerks not the laws. They allow things with blatant prior art or generally vague claims pass through. That is not in the spirit of the Patent office and shouldn't reflect on it.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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
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
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?
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"
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.
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...
I hate to be the first to call "Bovine Excreta!" but you are so full of it it's a wonder it doesn't come out your nose.
How about the obscure legalese in which patents are written? The lawyers who draft these things are desperate to minimise the amount of useable information contained in a patent, with a great deal of success. Slashdot runs many stories claiming "XYZ Patented!" followed by hundreds of comments by qualified engineers who have scrutinised the patent and come out completely confused as to the scope of the patent claim.
Of course, yet again, all this is covered in the main article. Why don't you read the main article? Read the article, you pathetic apologist.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
It seems to me that what they do is strike fear into the heart of all but the richest inventors, the legal fight to prove that you are not infringing a patent is more than most people can afford even when they are right. Patents encourage the small inventors to scrap the whole thing and just keep their day job, then everybody loses.
This is not an effect we need in the software industry where so much progress is made by individuals.
From what I gather the biggest flaw with patents are the clerks not the laws.
Software moves so fast that no prior-art system is ever going to be able to keep up. The only way to fix the clerk problem is to slow down the entire field to the point where they can cope. Sacking the idiot in charge of the USPO would help, too; paying clerks on the number of patents they approve is hardly professional or responsible.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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
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.
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
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
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.
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:)
The fact is that big corporations want patents so that they can control everything.
Fact: corporations don't patent things, individuals patent things. If an individual is contractually bound to assign control over the patent to a corporation, that's between the individual and the corporation, no-one else. This is enshrined in the way patents are granted.
A patent doesn't say that no-one else can use an idea. In fact, it mandates publishing your work so that others can benefit from it. Patents merely provide a legal framework that says that you can publish an idea that has cost you time and money to develop into something useful, you can still get some benefit from it, by licensing other people to do things based on your idea. Also, one of the conditions of getting a patent is that your idea must not be one that is obvious to any reasonably experience practitioner in your field - loads of patents have been shot down as "prior art" because a practitioner had already used that idea, but simply not bothered to patent it themselves.
The concept of a patent is all good - it is the current implementation, with the US patent office granting patents where it shouldn't.
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.
the US, which taught us the meaning of freedom, and the free society
There's a nice little article here you might want to read, called "The History of Freedom in Antiquity" written in 1877 by Lord Acton. Read it. You might learn something.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
u tilexmguide.pdf.
There are some very serious problems with this viewpoint. The first is factual - it is not possible to patent a human genome sequence in the US. http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/notices/
The second aspect is that patenting of naturally occurring materials is a long established and important incentive for invention - for example most antibiotics are naturally occuring materials.
What is key is that much of R&D is based on finding new uses for materials that already exist in nature - and in reality this is highly beneficial because otherwise we would be rewarding the development of only new materials that do not exist in nature - and as we well know through hard lessons the introduction of new materials into our biosphere often results in very undesirable unexpected effects.
It would be very bad public policy indeed if we were to ban patents on naturally occurring materials as it would incentivize only the development new synthetic materials.
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.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
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.
Actually yes you can.
See you have probably never invented an algorithm before but breaking new grounds is always important.
Look at the RC5 block cipher or JPEG compression codec. RC5 is the product of years of research and at the time was very unique as far as ciphers go. It was a welcome addition to the field of cryptography. Then JPEG, before that sending photorealistic images meant sending 100's of KB of data at the least.
In utopia patents are never filed, but unfotunately we don't live in utopia. You have to make money to survive and that means securing your legal rights to make money off ideas or inventions you yourself researched. Actual money was spent to design RC5 so why shouldn't RSA have the right to secure it for the purpose of licensing?
I always find it ironic that people want to make money in software, but find that when others charge for it its off-beat.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
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."> Fact: corporations don't patent things, individuals patent things
Fact: you need patent lawyers to apply for and to protect patents. Applying and protecting patents is extremely expensive. While the legal patent holder, in name, might be an individual (well, usually a few individuals), patents are virtually unattainable and unprotectable unless you're a corp. So, by the letter, you're right. In practice, nothing could be furthur from the truth. Note that this is not due to the US patent office granting patents where it shouldn't. (Although it could be argued that some of the cost of interfacing with the patent system is due to the large volume of patents in the US patent office collection, although I contend that its a classic example of how unchecked capitalism leads to the 'creation' of industries and 'middlemen'.)
> In fact, it mandates publishing your work so that others can benefit from it.
Can you explain to me how making the world aware of your idea, but a slave to your licensing terms for the next 20 years, benifits people? As RMS pointed out, people shared more often before all this IP furor began. While patents may mandate publishing, the fact is, there is plenty of historical evidence to show that most people will share their discoveries with others regardless of any 'inventor protection' system put in place.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Thats not true (though in fairness you had no way of knowing that from my post, so your criticism is valid).
:) )
The particular idea was only workable if distributed with a particular type of hardware. If it had to be seperately obtained and installed, it ceased to be very useful. I can't go into much more detail then that (the IDEA was not mine, and not mine to give away regardless how unmarketable it turned out to be).
As I stated in the post, I had an idea of MY OWN, that I did publish open source. It is used by a small number of people, but they do find it useful. (see backburner on freshmeat). I did it because the idea was mine to give away (I came up with it), I had the time and interest available to do the work, and I wanted to give back to the community.
Software does indeed have to be better then the rest, I agree. But copyright and patent law do have a place to enforce contracts and to foster innovation. When Linux was released, it built upon a well established architecture and used a widely available set of tools and resources, so a gifted hacker from Finland could throw it together in a year while in grad school. We are lucky he did.
But it was not innovative, and was not a lot of research and development, it was mostly implementation.
If a company wanted to develop the next huge paradigm shift for computers and computer use, and it required new hardware, new software, and completely new ways of thinking, and required thousands of staff and tens of years and millions of dollars in investment, they would NOT DO IT unless they had some legal protections to recoup their investment down the road.
That's not to say some "open" group could not go together and do the same thing, but it is a lot less likely, especially on the hardware end of things where the capitolization costs really start to eat you up.
And that does not even begin to consider how much of the open source movement is actually funded by "the evil corporate empire". Had I not been working for "the man", or by government funded by taxes taken from "the man", I would have been far more worried about where I am going to get my next meal then worried about writing a tool that facilitates backing up software across widely varied mediums.
In hindsight, I would say Microsoft DID aggressively improve windows constantly, and that was the only reason they stay one step ahead of everyone else. It's just that their idea of "improvement" is to add features, not to improve stablity, portability and interaoperability. Not the direction I would have gone as an engineer, but sure as heck the direction the stockholders (the people funding the work) wanted. It sold.
And with that same hand on your heart, where would software be in general, or for that matter the hardware we run our beloved Linux operating system on, be today without patent and copyright law? Would Linux exist at all if AT&T could not have made a business case for funding an "idea incubator"?
The whole hardware versus software thing as being fundamentally different is a flawed argument as well. Is software worth "nothing" because it can be easily reproduced? Why is that different then an integrated circuit, which can be duplicated for pennies if I don't have to design it. I asked Stallman this question personally, and he refused to even address it, and proceeded a few minutes later to sexually harass (by any definition I have ever seen) a member of the local Linux Users Group.
In Stallmans case, M&M's should be free, unless you are an attractive blonde, in which case he may publically pressure you to eat them from his hand, shortly after expressing how marriage is an exploitive and oppresive patricharical institution. Sheesh... talk about exploititive.
(but I digress
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
Can you explain to me how making the world aware of your idea, but a slave to your licensing terms for the next 20 years, benifits people?
Sure, they benefit in the case that renting a wheel from you is cheaper than re-inventing it for themselves.
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.
The best case I ever heard against patents occured when my older brother was working for my dad. Dad works in an optical physics firm, designing a sort of wide-area digital microscope. They were brainstorming solutions for the problem, and my brother, who was new to the business, made a suggestion.
Dad's response "thats perfect. Unfortunately, its exactly what our competator uses, and they've the patent." So the competator took a naturally occuring idea and patented it giving them that much closer to monopoly in the industry.
I don't have an alternate solution, but its obvious something's broken here.
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.
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.
No its called being second. If the idea was truly obvious e.g. took zero effort to come up with, then ya, but lets not mistake things
Look at RC5 [sorry I'm a crypto nut so I have to pull from what I know]. Its a trivial looking cipher and doesn't look like much design was put into it. You might think that was "an obvious design" e.g. not worthy of a patent.
Don't let simplicity be mistaken for obviousness.
In your case you might have a legitimate claim, but you have to realize that its no the spirit of the patent system to lock out obvious ideas. I'd say get others on your side of the story and see if you can invalidate the patent.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The problem with software patents is that reinventing a software "wheel" is often cheaper than renting it. Such a patent produces a net loss in overall economic efficiency.
The especially annoying part is that people often unknowingly reinvent somene else's "wheel", only to be harassed later.
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.
(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.)
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.
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
Patents promote a developing market.
So we are always told. Very interesting theory, but practice disagrees. That's the problem with this patent mess. It just seems so counter intuitive to think that in reality many patents have the absoulte opposite effect from the one that it seemed so obvious would happen.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Here is a link to Melancholy Elephants.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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*
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
US6353928 03/05/2002 First run installer
US6353923 03/05/2002 Active debugging environment for debugging mixed-language scripting code
US6353433 03/05/2002 Digitizer interface
US6349343 02/19/2002 System and method for providing interoperability among heterogeneous object systems
US6349295 02/19/2002 Method and apparatus for performing supplemental searches over a network
US6347398 02/12/2002 Automatic software downloading from a computer network
US6345386 02/05/2002 Method and system for advertising applications
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Jpeg is not covered by any patents, or at least not any enforced ones.
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.
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.
All you need is proof, and a few hundred thousand for the lawyers to show the proof to the court.
Plus risk that the decision will go against you anyway.
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.
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.Yes, but the bit you missed was that his brother was 'new to the business'. So, it's not like the idea was super-complicated or anything. The competitors had simply got to the patent office first.
The patent office don't care whether it is obvious or not; they just write down what other people say in 'patent speak', do a few checks to see if it is already covered by another patent, and then collect their paycheck.
How do you measure obviousness anyway? What's it measured in? Measured in forest gumps or something?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I'm not so sure. If you can only think of one good way to solve something, you probably aren't trying hard enough.
Trivial example: Splay tree? Skip lists? Heaps? These all have big overlaps. Many times you can reuse or refactor code in the same system and save time... you don't even need to be optimal most of the time, and often the local optimum isn't the system optimum.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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).
This statement is, by definition, uncertain and unprovable. Two comments:
1. Inventing a wheel is a fixed time act. Once it's invented, its up to you to judge whether the returns you see were worth the fixed cost of inventing it. Its entirely possible and common that 'inventing the wheel again' is cheaper than renting it.
2. If it really is cheaper, why does the law need to force people to 'rent' that wheel? It seems to me that people would 'rent' the wheel in the first place, without even trying to invent the wheel themselves (behaviour that is totally at odds with what I see in my little corner of the software development world) if it made economic sense to do so. Why would you need a 20 year ban on 'reinventing it yourself' when it makes more economic sense (where time is almost the ONLY money required in most streams of software development) to do it yourself?
Dont get me wrong, I think patents in some shape or form are needed, but I have far more problems with the expiration dates, and cost of admission to the patent game than the droves of inapprorpriately approved patents being handed out. I can't help but think that long lease patents actually remove the impedus for a developer to innovate (once he has gotten one patent), because you can cruise on the success of a patent you got approved 5 years ago, as opposed to having moved on to develop and innovate more stuff. Those who continue to innovate and develop within the lifetime of another patent that they are seeing good royalties from are obviously in the game to innovate regardless of what 'motivators' are put into the law, and thus pretty much represent the case that patents are not designed to protect the inventor, but rather simply to force innovation that one seeks to profit from into the public domain. In so far as that goes, I think it shows that when you give patents longer life times, you are benifitting companies who can capitalize on enforcing and protecting royalty fees, discouraging would be inventors from bothering to patent work (and thus keeping that persons ideas from being published to increase the knowledge base of a society), and beginning to encourage, as we see plain as day today, the art of patenting novel technologies to be pushed on the market, simply for the sake of having another patent to add to your revenue stream.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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.
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
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.