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

Donald Knuth's argument against patents

[dunham]

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.

Re:Donald Knuth's argument against patents

[GlassHeart]

Noted Professor Jeffrey Ullman also wrote a paper called Ordinary Skill in the Art. His conclusions are:

• The patenting of algorithms and the software that embodies them leads to inequities as often as it protects true innovation and genuine innovators.
• The standards for innovation set by the CS Theory community should be given more weight when deciding the validity of a software patent.
• There should be an effort to educate the courts on the distinct nature of innovation in computer software, and to help distinguish innovation from wishful thinking or the fantasies of people who are unaware of the state of knowledge.

He has been involved in many patent-related cases, and is recognized as an expert witness in these cases.

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.

Dave Winer Hate s Patents

[webword]

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

Re:Great.

[Salsaman]

Well, you do realise in most countries outside of the US, patents can't be granted on software ?

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

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!

The country is Australia

[sam_handelman]

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.

Re:Material against software patents? Easy...

[mickwd]

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'

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.