Making the Case Against Software Patents?

heretic108 asks: "I'm an open-source developer in a small western nation, which is slowly starting to take interest in Open Source, but whose (still MS-dominated) government is currently considering adopting a software patents regime similar to USA. This nation boasts a smart and feisty IT community, who have been terribly under-represented in government. I have a meeting in a week with a prominent member of the legislature (who has IT portfolio interests), during which I will have the opportunity to put the case against software patents. I'm asking for help in assembling information for use in the anti-patents case. Thank you dearly for any and all help you are able to provide here."

"I'm looking for references that cover the following subjects:

• Triviality of some patents
• Patents as anti-competitive instrument
• Patents' discriminatory nature - difficulty faced by smaller developers with patent enforcement
• Costs of patent searches, and their impact on the creative flow of software development
• Clear evidence that a software patents regime is squeezing small and independent players out of the industry and creating an oligopoly for the largest players
• Clear evidence that under the software patents regime, the entire 'space' or public commons of programming concepts is being subsumed into private ownership
• Clear evidence and examples of patent law being abused and having a net anti-innovation effect
• Anything else you have bookmarked, or can google upon, which can help build the most solid case.

The most desirable materials will be those written and/or compiled by the most respected academic, business, technical and legal minds. I'd like the front page of the folder to sport a series of punchy quotes.

(Also, if anyone can find the source of the quote attributed to Bill Gates arguing that the modern patents regime, if it existed decades ago, would have slowed the industry to a standstill).

Also very desirable will be testimonials from senior staff of small to medium R&D and body-shop houses, truthfully showing the negative effects patents have had on their ability to compete.

And, very importantly, any brief testimonials from indepenedant developers who have not intentionally stolen intellectual property, but have actually been squashed under patent laws."

Comments

No 1 reason against software patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Proprietary code should be protected by a copyright, not a patent.

You can copyright a work that is a product of intellectual endevour, but you can't patent the words used in writing it, nor can you patent sentence structure and the language used, or the media used to store and distribute. And that is what software patents try to do, restrict the very language use and tools we use to contruct our bodies of work. It is so easy to accidentally discover a method used to solve a problem strickly in a clean room setting that could infringe on some patent.

Copyright is the way to protect software, not patents.

Re:And for you US citizens

[selan]

Ya know, if you want to change laws, signing petitions addressed to "The United States Government" is not the way to do it. The US is a representative democracy. Write letters to your congress people, talk to them about your issues, and, for crying out loud, primary elections are Tues. Sept. 10. Vote, people, VOTE!

Computer science as a science

[be-fan]

You might want to look at the science angle. Computer algorithms aren't really different from mathematical algorithms. Can you imagine a mathematician patenting his method for finding large primes? Patenting software algorithms is exactly equivilent. Wouldn't it be terrible if Dijkstra had patented the semaphore? Computer science would have come to an end! Computer science is a science like any other. New discoveries should be credited to the people that discovered them, but that shouldn't prevent other people from using and building upon that work. It just stagnates the whole system.