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Perens on Patents

Posted by michael on from the perennial dept.

lewiz writes "An interesting interview with Bruce Perens over at the BBC. He's up discussing the role of HP, IBM, et al and the move towards Linux. However, his main point is about software patents and how they are much more of a problem than SCO: 'We're looking at a future where only the very largest companies will be able to implement software, and it will technically be illegal for other people to do so.'"

5 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. Prior Art by hipster_doofus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the biggest problem with some of the patents we're seeing these days is that the issue of prior art isn't being taken into account. There are not many things that are totally new in the software industry - just things that are improvements upon something that someone else has already done. We see a lot of patents where companies try to patent the entire idea, when they are responsible only for a certain improvement upon the original idea.

    --
    Five Dolla Moddy-Moddy? ;->
  2. treat code like a book by swoebser · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why can't we just treat code like the text of a book? It's illegal to copy text from a book and present it as your own. It is not illegal, however, to create a similar work of your own accord.

  3. Idiocy by mikelu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Patenting of software strikes me as rather nonsensical.

    Do we let writers patent plot contrivances and literary structure? Do we let poets patent new rhyming schemes?

    Copyright should suffice to protect proprietary code.

    On a side note, this is the kind of crap we get in this country when companies can buy whatever legislation they want from corrupt politicians.

  4. CS is math by MarkusQ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the biggest problem with some of the patents we're seeing these days is that the issue of prior art isn't being taken into account.

    No, the biggest problem is that software (or any mathematics for that matter) should not be patentable. Society's first big loss was when the fast talking SOBs slipped the false notion that if you could describe a mathematical algorithm in words that made it sound like an invention then it magically was an invention into the cultural norms and started patenting software in the first place.

    (Our second big loss has been the "IP" fudge, which is blurring the distinctions between patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, competative advantages, wishful thinking, bullshit, and marketing babble into one vague pile of lawyer poo).

    Affording patent protection to discoveries in mathematics, biology, etc. or copyright protection to numbers, animals, etc. is against the interest of a free society as surely as allowing thought control, albeit the death of freedom comes somewhat more slowly.

    -- MarkusQ

    1. Re:CS is math by yerM)M · · Score: 5, Insightful
      It's these cases where philosophy can bear fruit or really confuse the issue.

      On one side if the coin there are the "platonists" who consider math as the uncovering of ideal, eternally existing, abstract objects. On the other there are the "formalists" who consider mathematics as more of a game where theorems are developed logically from axioms chosen arbitrarily.

      Then there is Rueben Hersh's connotation that mathematics is what mathematicians do. In lay-man's terms, without mathematicians there would be no math. He further implies that the math we know is decided by the mathematicians. Consider fluxions versus calculus, two different solutions to the same problem and one was superior. They came about in two different ways because the principle mathematicians were different people.

      If we follow the platonists approach then math should not be patentable because it just is. A platonist would consider patenting math like patenting a mountain.

      Hersh would contend that math is the creation of the mathematician and hence, as a product of personal endeavor, should be patentable.

      In terms of the courts view on software, we are stuck in a Hershian situation, so what is the solution? If we had known that this would be the case, the EFF (electronic frontier foundation) or the GNU project could have started patenting software twenty or thirty years ago, thereby capturing the axioms on which software was founded. THIS is what should piss people off. It pisses me off in computer science and biology. Companies are standing on the shoulders of giants who didn't have the opportunities available to them, especially when most of the underlying infrastructure was built with public funds.

      Patents are expensive, but there goal is to offer short-term incentives for development in order to release knowledge into the public domain. Sometimes we forget that patents are designed to release knowledge. However, I would favor a progressive patent law where software patents last only five years and drugs targeted at monogenic diseases that don't affect many patients (like huntington's disease and spinal muscular atrophy) last for forty.

      That's just me though.