Slashdot Mirror
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."
(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."
"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.
(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."
A copy of Donald Knuth's argument against software patents can be found on the LPF's web site. He is a very well respected computer scientist and programmer and makes a good argument.
Status of Tux2?
Before you dive into google and read the thousands of pages listed on this subject, try to think up some arguments for yourself.
Once you've formulated some arguments, then use google/google groups to look for confirmation - writings of other people who have formulated the same argument.
This will give you confidence when making your case because you will really understand what you are saying.
If you just recite somebody else's argument without understanding the proof you won't come across as very convincing.
Good Lord! Don't help this person!
It's bad enough our country is destroying its technology sector with special-interest legislation, patents and the DMCA - don't make things worse by helping some other nation get a leg up by avoiding this morass if idiocy!
Show some patriotism!
MjM
Satire Impaired? Please don't mod
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
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.
Dave has written a ton of stuff...some of it might be useful.
A day without programming?
Patents and the W3C
Killer Patents
Amazon's XML Interface
Patents, lawsuits plague the Net (Dave is quoted.)
Notes on competing
How to Download YouTube Videos
Patents as anti-competitive instrument
The whole idea of patents, AFAIK, is to grant a temporary monopoly for the patent holder, and thereby giving them a greater chance at a return for their invested R&D. This isn't a flaw of the system at all. Now how certain patents (software, etc.) are approved is another story.
Found sever google references to it citing 'Bill Gates, 1991 memo'. FWIF Here's a link to what is supposed to be the actual memo. (std.com)
The concept of a Patent was never intended to relate to computer software ; a Copyright is a much more accurate and viable protection option for individual companies rights.
With Software Patent, you are protecting an actual system of execution or problem solving. The problem is that the essential knowledge any computer programmer has is not protected (and could not be), and with software in particular there is no *system* that is not a very simple extention of commonly understood concepts. In short, computing overall is simple when you analyze software modularly.
Take for example the attempts to patent, 'click-throughs' or 'downloading software after authenticating'. Attempts have actually been made to patent these concepts, and they are not *bad* examples - in both cases the wording of the patent request was executed in such a way as to gain control over something that was seemingly legitimate because it was a simple extension of 'click-through' or 'downloading'. In both cases the patent *would have* given control over these actual acts. This is not simple wording, it is the nature of software.
My own company develops software, we have a representative for patent and copyright, and we are more than happy to utilize his services as a Copyright agent to protect our rights. We copyright the documents that explain our business, our systems, and which we feel portray us best. Over all the end result is protected business, not a protected product. It is in the representation of a product and a business that competitors gain their foothold ; that should be the real focus here.
Ace
Don't confuse patents with copyright - programs can and are copyrighted automatically by the author(s). However, in most countries you can't patent a software method. So for example, the one-click patent wouldn't stand outside of the US.
However, certain large corporations are lobbying the EU to introduce software patents. And guess who would be the only ones to benefit from this ? Yes, that's right, those same large corporations.
For more information. check out eurolinux.org
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!
Quoth the poster (heretic108):
I worked for the Australian subsidiary of Wang Labs, at the time when Wang was the #2 computer company in Australia.
You go to the user page (ask.slashdot.org/~heretic108 in this case) and read a few articles at random - you can usually find out where someone is from.
Given that you're speaking with an Aussie legislator, I recommend a national sovereignty / defense argument. You should point out that likely rivals in the region of the continent of Oceana - I speak in particular of India - have huge, established software industries that could prove a threat to Australia if Australia doesn't maintain software autonomy. It's okay to be vague, but use some everyday words as if they had some specific technical meaning in terms of "information warfare over the next century."
That ought to persuade the nuevo-Thatcherites in your xenophobic government.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Just think: someday I'll be able to tell my grandkids where I was when I heard the news that a Bill Gates quote was modded as +5 Insightful on slashdot....
GMD
watch this
Sadly, I don't think the person your are about to see is likely to be impressed by reading Slashdot.
However, I DO think they might be impressed by The UK Government's Conclusions to the question: 'Should Patents be Granted for Computer Software or Ways of Doing Business'
You're confusing the means with the end, which is the sort of thinking that got us into this mess.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
In this post, he mentions being glad to have moved out of Australia, and that he is now living in New Zealand. That post was less than a week old.
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
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.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...