Software Patent Demonstrations Taking Off

feklee writes "The preparations for the rally against software patents on Wednesday are running at full speed. Thanks to announcements in DWN, on KDE, in the Register, and elsewhere, the Online Demo has already more than 600 participants such as Savannah and KDE.de. Now, what about your project?"

And flagboy writes "A group of economists from Europe and the U.S. specialising in patent questions have published a letter to members of the European Parliament calling on them to reject the proposal, accompanied by an analytical paper which casts severe doubts on the reasoning behind the directive and on the methods employed by its proponents." Here's the FFII Press Release.

Comments

Analogy

[Mark_MF-WN]

How cases of DMCA prosecution have their been? Hardly any, but that doesn't make it any more just.

Unjust legislation must be fought. It is insufficient to simply hope it wont be enforced, like some sort of naive child.

Re:Say what?

[rastos1]

Er ... so you don't mind your company beying sued by someone because you clean-room-implemented something they did 30 years ago and now use only to sue everyone left and right? You don't mind spending money on lawyers? You don't mind paying UniSys money for your program that generates gifs which is known format since 19xy? Where have you been, man?

Re:one way street the wrong way

[warrax_666]

Suppose you labor extremely hard to create something, it took so much of your time, might have cost you a marriage, every single penny in your account, and someone comes and swipes it from under your feet what would you do? Without patenting there wouldn't be much you could do now could you.

As long as we are imagining things, how about this: You labor very hard (and independently!) on a graphical app only to find that a large corporation has a patent on "a method for conveying the intention for an action to occur on a graphical display" (ie. clicking your mouse). Who's fucked now?

Remember that corporations can trivially afford to patent anything which does not have prior art whereas your small inventor cannot.

In short: Read the fucking protest page and think. Please.

Re:Say what?

[jeti]

The European Patent Office has already granted ~30.000 patents on software, logic and the like, totally ignoring current law.

The majority of those software patents are trivial and overbroad. There are patents on tabs, progress bars and archiving emails.

Developing software will become an uncalculateable risk for smaller and even medium sized companies.

How far do you think computer sciences would have progressed if there existed patents on things like parametrisation of functions or on stacks?

OK, short

[Pflipp]

I'm rehearsing this for when I jump into the camera's tomorrow :-)

3 issues:

1. General patentability issue

Do patents protect and encourage the new inventor, or do they protect large businesses and monopolies? Practice would sometimes point out the last.

2. Software patent issue

If you invent a phonograph, you make it, sell it, done. Not so for software. Software is a stack-up of tons and tons of previous "inventions" (algorithms, or ways of doing something). You can't write a piece of software without "inventing" something along the way, but you also can't avoid to use previous "inventions". Software inventions should be seen as common field knowledge that needs to be shared. And I say needs; we would not have come past the MS-DOS age without this.

3. Free Software issue

Free Software doesn't only share the ideas of software, but also their implementations. Again, we would not have been far without Free Software of any kind (you can at least forget the Internet and Mac OS X, but there are more detailed examples that will tell you that you can forget A LOT of software). Simply put, Free Software relies on open (unowned) algorithms and program ideas, but has no model (like businesses have) for buying licenses to use "owned" ideas. IOW, the Free Software world would ultimately disappear as a result of patent law.

Summary: while patents MAY stink for business in general, they would simply DESTROY our software world as we know it, and replace it with something where our normal everyday innovation is very hard to find.