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RMS On How To Fight Software Patents

Posted by timothy on from the by-virtue-of-virtue dept.

rimberg writes "Richard M. Stallman has a article on NewsForge talking about ways to fight software patents. It mentions the Public Patent Foundation (and why it's a good idea), but argues that fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria." (Newsforge, like Slashdot, is part of OSTG.)

1 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Make more prior art by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    At the very least, PUT A DATE ON YOUR STUFF. If you have webpages from college where you explain what you did for your senior project, make sure it is clearly dated. If you have a PDF of a research paper you wrote, freaking date the thing on the first page. If you maintain a FAQ for a ubiquitous software concept, keep a "updated on: " line in each section.

    You won't know it when you're cited in an examiner's rejection of a patent, but I promise you that many times an examiner finds a great piece of art on the internet that they would love to use except it isn't dated. There are mountains of people's research papers in PDF form that are on the internet but do not clearly display a date. If it doesn't have a date, it's useless to the examiner.

    This is the number one thing that "everybody" can do to help prevent questionable patents and it only takes a tiny bit of time.