RMS On How To Fight Software Patents

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.)

Comments

It's very easy, actually.

[Pig Hogger]

Just make sure your legislator aren't bought by big croporations in the first place.

This involves watching public affairs and politics closely, however, not an easy thing to do now that croporations have managed to make democracy look bad during the last 20-25 years...

Re:It's very easy, actually.

[flossie]

Just make sure your legislator aren't bought by big croporations in the first place.

Even that isn't really enough. Many of the people who will be voting on this don't really understand the issue. Furthermore, the people who are pushing for software patents are being very deceptive. I have had correspondence with politicians who seem to honestly believe that they are voting for restrictions on software patentability when they are doing no such thing.

The important thing is to educate the politicians. Make them understand why the issue is so important and make them understand what the legislation before them really says.

A great battle was won when the European Parliament amended the Commission's directive, but there is still a lot more to do if we are to see final victory.

Get writing!

Re:It's very easy, actually.

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW if you live in America you live in a REPUBLIC, if we lived in a democracy we would directly elect the president.

In a *real* democracy, you wouldn't need to elect a president. The citizens would vote on the issues directly, just as the ancient Athenians did.

Re:It's very easy, actually.

[smittyoneeach]

The important thing is to educate the politicians.

More important still is to educate the electorate to vote for educated politicians.
A younger me thought politicians were the horse, and the electorate the cart.
We do far too little to promote leadership of any kind in _any_ party, as evidenced by the lack of any substantial debate from anyone in the US presidential farc^H^H^H^Helection.

Re:It's very easy, actually.

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Canada (which is in America, by the way) is a -spit- monarchy.

Parlimentary monarchy. A wee difference between the Queen being an all-powerful tyrant and a mere figurehead. For your information, we happen to have 4 major political parties and a few small ones. Minority governments are possible (we have one presently). Although people always complain, I take this system any night and day over the "one two-headed horse race" you got going over there since ... well ... basically day one. Which seemed to bother noone, only until recently, when it is became apparent that both of these entrenched choices are getting desperately lame. USA was extremely fortunate for most of its history that this Democrat/Republican farce did not go bad much earlier.

Re:It's very easy, actually.

[nickco3]

if you live in America you live in a REPUBLIC, if we lived in a democracy we would directly elect the president.

It's only an either-or proposition when you're playing Civilization. Here in the real world we aren't restricted to a single adjective when describing governmental systems. The US is a democratic republic; the UK is democratic, but not a republic; China is not democratic, but it is a republic.

In the ancient world, the citizens of a democracy voted on laws directly. No one practises this anymore, pretty much every one of these early democracies ended by voting all their powers to a charismatic tyrant. The Ancients Greeks even had a word for it: the Kyklos.

What the Western world uses today was called a mixed constitution in the ancient world. They have an element of tyranny (the head of state), an element of aristocracy (the parliament, or senate) and an element of ordinary people (regular elections, not to often).

It's actually even easier.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shoot your local politicians and establish anarchy.

What, I'm just pointing out the easier option;)

Software patents

[Lank]

are what happens when our legislators make laws about things they know nothing about. It seems utterly ridiculous to me that someone could claim that, without a doubt, they are the first person to have come up with a certain algorithm. I mean, only brilliant people actually come up with anything that's worth patenting, yet somehow some lines of code, a for loop or some such stupid thing, ends up getting patented which sums up ranges of numbers. It's beyond me why any software patent exists unless it is a truly outstanding piece of work (i.e. cryptography algorithms, non-obvious sorting algorithms, etc).

Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing this brief note says is unique to software. Stallman might as well be arguing that any time you design a machine, you might infringe someone's mechanical patent without knowing.

The patent system didn't cause the collapse of the entire Industrial Revolution due to patent infringement, so it seems more than a bit like crying wolf to assume it will be any more harmful with software.

Other than that point, the article is empty of content other than "Software patents are bad; we must have zero of them". No useful tips on how to go about achieving that goal, as the summary promises.

Re:Nothing to see here

[flossie]

Nothing this brief note says is unique to software. Stallman might as well be arguing that any time you design a machine, you might infringe someone's mechanical patent without knowing.

There is, however, a very great difference between designing and building a car and writing software. Designing a car requires some fairly expensive machinary and requires a lot of legal hoop-jumping to get it certified as safe. It is very expensive for companies to launch a new range of cars and the patent costs are relatively small in comparison to some of the more capital intensive parts of the project.

With software, there is currently no such barrier to entry. Software can be, and is, written by hobbyists and very small companies as well as the software giants. The introduction of software patents would effectively remove the ability of some of the most innovative workers to compete.

Re:Nothing to see here

[belmolis]

While RMS isn't very explicit about it in the Newsforge piece, one distinction between software patents and mechanical patents to which he alludes is that, arguably, a piece of software of any complexity is likely to involve many more potentially patentable components than a comparable mechanical device. To the extent this is true, it means that it is much more difficult to know when one is infringing a patent when writing software and that it would be much more difficult to set up a system for paying royalties.

It's true that patents don't seem to have prevented the Industrial Revolution, but there may be some critical differences. One is that, it seems to me, patents didn't come to be widely used until a great many fundamentals were already in the public domain. That meant that everybody had a large base of ideas that they were free to work with. Where very basic ideas were patented, those patents did indeed pose a danger to progress. An example is the AT&T patent on the transistor, which the US government forced AT&T effectively to give up precisely because it was such a basic thing that it would have given AT&T a stranglehold on the semiconductor industry.

The other factor is that for much of the Industrial Revolution there were generally fairly large costs and/or specialized skills needed to implement a new idea, and the means of communication were relatively slow. As a result, the duration of a patent was relatively short in comparison to the time needed for ideas to diffuse. In contrast, implementing a new idea in software costs very little and requires no skills beyond those of the average programmer, and communication is very fast. As a result, people can adopt a new idea very quickly. The time for ideas to diffuse is small in relationship to the duration of patent, so patents become a bottleneck.

If this latter idea is correct, it means that the problems with software patents should arise in other areas in which costs of adoption are low and communication rapid. I wonder if genetic technology is not coming to be similar to software in this respect.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Waffle Iron]

Nothing this brief note says is unique to software.

Except that every time he mentions the word "patent", it is either specified as "software patent", or used in a context that could only mean "software patent".

The patent system didn't cause the collapse of the entire Industrial Revolution due to patent infringement, so it seems more than a bit like crying wolf to assume it will be any more harmful with software.

During much of the Industrial Revolution, there were most likely no more that a few dozen patents per year issued that could potentially affect any particular product. It took over a century to issue the first 1 million patents.

Since software patents are typically very broad, overlapping and non-novel, each one can have a much larger impact than some patent on an improved shoelace. For the shoelace, only a handful of shoe designers have to worry about the patent. In the software case, every single one of the millions of software developers worldwide have to worry.

If RMS's figure is right and 100,000 software patents issue each year, and you assume that a typical patent has about 10 claims, then each and every day you need to check your entire codebase against more than 2700 additional new claims. That's an incredible burden on the software industry; one that has not been proven to be offset by any gains provided by software patents. The worth of software patents is especially questionable given that most of the major innovations in the software field took place either before software patents were allowed or were introduced as free public standards.

Re:Nothing to see here

[torokun]

I agree.

Not to mention, RMS suggests that one must constantly search one's software for potential infringements. Does anyone really think this is how reality works??

You write your software, and if you find out something significant you're using is probably patented, you check it out and avoid it. If you don't know of anything, you just do it. When someone notifies you of infringement, you check it out, and decide whether you want to avoid it, go to court, or license the patent.

There are so many inaccurate assumptions about patents here. How many of you know that almost all patents are rejected the first time? How many of you know that patents require periodic maintenance fees to keep, and something like 70% of patent holders let their patents expire before the full term is up? And how many know that most patent firms provide pro bono services to inventors, authors, and composers on a regular basis?

The ONLY argument against software patents that I consider serious is the economic argument that individual inventors or writers of free software don't have the funds to patent their works, or don't have the funds to fight patent infringement suits. Basically, that patents and patent litigation are too expensive to allow free software to properly flourish. If this is true, it's a problem, but I see many arguments against it, and disallowing software patents is not a solution to me...

First, consider the litigation issue. I would argue that first, if an individual coder or a free software project is threatened with litigation, he or it can simply avoid the patent. Yes. Do it _another_way_. It may not be the best way, but then again, he didn't think of it first, did he?? He can go ahead and use it when the patent expires.

And don't whine that it's impossible to work around a patent like that. If you were really sharp, you'd develop an improvement on the patent in question, file a provisional application on it, and go cross-license with the original patent holder. But otherwise, just do it the old way. You can always use the prior art. If you can't achieve what you want with the prior art, well, there must be quite a bit of value in the patent, mustn't there?

You see, patents are about making money from an invention. Most coders simply don't care about money, so they get shafted day after day, year after year. How many of you can honestly tell me that you don't know of a friend or colleague who has been taken advantage of by his company? Coders, hackers, et al., don't care about money. But they still need it. Patents are a way that they can actually interest the people who do care about money in their inventions, and avoid being shafted.

I see much of the opposition to software patents in this community as a direct result of hackers' innate disinterest in and distrust of money, and their innate tendency to get themselves shafted.

My other point, about the cost of getting patents, needs to be addressed, but there has to be some cost, and a lot of work goes into a patent. An inventor has to make a decision and take a risk. It's the same as any other speculative endeavor. Real estate, business, it's all the same. The PTO should work to reduce fees and streamline the process (and they are), and lots of organizations are pushing the PTO to improve. Hackers like to do their own thing and avoid thinking about practicalities, but there are a lot of practicalities when it comes to an agency like the PTO, and things don't move quickly. Things have gotten a lot better and they'll get better yet. That's how it works, and just because it's slow doesn't mean it should be scrapped. For those of you looking for work, think about becoming an examiner and helping them with a thankless job.

In the end, you have to think about it with a larger perspective. How many things are going to be done with software that used to be done with machines? Should an invention that would have been made of wood and iron in Da Vinci's day be unpatentable

Re:Nothing to see here

[Wolfbone]

Patents have never before been applied to works that are immediate realisations of pencil and paper work and that don't have to take into account the realities of the physical world. If machines and other artefacts could be built like programmes can, the world would look very strange, elaborate and exotic today - probably quite beautiful - unless in the Industrial Revolution of this parallel world, patents had taken hold - then it would probably look more like Basingstoke, Croydon or Slough. ;-)

It seems to me there is a freedom in programming that is like the freedom in art and that arises from the fact that the full range of abstract mathematics is available to the programmer, rather than just that which will work in the real world and because there is an immediacy of implementation and an intimacy between idea and expression like that which there is between composer and piano keyboard. Software patents are generally directed toward the utilitarian aspects of programming - it's fundamental techniques and ideas, yet strangely it is obvious to everyone that such kinds of patents if applied to literature or cinematography or music would have only a detrimental effect.

It is interesting to wonder if one day artists (or publishers of art) might foolishly decide to embark on a patent land grab as is occurring in the software world. If you think that is not possible because of the technicity/usefulness requirements of patents, consider the Pollock techniques of splatter painting at a certain constant average fractal dimension, or the Da Vinci low frequency technique of causing a sense of elusivity and enigma. (Check out Semir Zeki's book; "Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain" and much other work on the science of perception). Recent work in analysis of music too has resulted in (among other things) researchers claiming to have found techniques for generating 'hit songs' automatically. It can only be a matter of time before one cannot engage in any activity at all without infringing someone else's exclusive right to use the techniques associated with it. :)

Patent Generators

[yintercept]

The fact that the patent generation is separate from invention and discovery is one of the main things that will destroy the machine. Personally, I think the solution to the patent process is not to stage a revolution against property rights but to continue to drive the issue that the system for issuing titles for intellectual property is out of kilter.

Fighting and pointing out the absurdities of patent abuse are a very good first step.

BTW, I suspect the typical car has more than 300 patents involved in its creation and manufacture. However, the shear number of patents developers face is a good method to show the problems faced by small businesses...as it is next to impossible to design any idea without touching on a patent of some sort.

Re:Patent Generators

[Alsee]

I think the solution to the patent process is not to stage a revolution against property rights

Congratulations on defending "property rights" for mental processes.

The "revolution" here is not in opposing software patents. The "revolution" was when the dumb-ass US reversed it's own proper and well established rules and violated well established global patent rules to extend patents to software in the 80's. Virtually every patent law in the world has/had rules prohibiting patents on math and thought processes. Prior to abandoning the Mental Steps Doctrine the US patent office catagorically, consistantly, and properly ruled that software was not an invention and was never patentable.

Physical objects can be inventions. Pysical processes can be inventions. All software is in fact a math function. Math is not and cannot be an invention. Software does not require a computer - any software can (slowly) be executed through pure thought. A sequence of pure thought is not and cannot be an invention.

Lets say I select some convient software patent and actually preform a demonstration executing that algorithm mentally. I defy you to either explain how thoughts can be prohibited by law and infringing, or to explain how that non-infringing non-patentable non-invention magically becomes a patentable invention if I take the blindingly obvious step of using an ordinary computer merely to speed up that exact same calculation.

If you cannot explain at least one of those two things then you have absolutely way to claim any validity for software patents. If preforming the software mentally cannot be a patentable invention, and the obvious step of speeding it up with ordinary computer does not make it an invention, then no software is a patentable invention.

You own the copyright on software and you own the patent on an invention. There's nothing "anti-property" about that. I'm simply saying software is not an invention. There is no overlap, therw is never any double coverage.

The US screwed up when it reversed its patent rules. Not only is patenting software fundamentally broken, not only is patenting software harmful, but if software patents start getting enforced to any non-trivial extent the US will suffer an economic disaster. Not only will software development flee the country (likely to the EU), but all sorts of foriegn industries will outcompete and crush US industries because huge quantities of useful or even critical software will be infringing and prohibited in the US.

-

Make more prior art

[G4from128k]

If more people published more good ideas in the public domain, businesses would have less room for silly software patents. This publication process would need to work with, educate, and support patent examiners -- making it easier for them to deny the more egregious claims before they are issued. And if thousands OSS fanatics can't come up with the idea to keep it out of the clutches of patent-happy companies, then perhaps it was sufficiently innovative and original that it merits a financial rewards of a patent.

Re:I agree with the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Also seriously insightful.

RMS wrote (or had EM write) the GPL at a time that I and many other techies thought it was just a bunch of lawyering interfering with code fragments we were just posting on usenet with no copyright/license info. Now the GPL probably helped Linux beat BSD (since companies wouldn't have shared as much if the GPL didn't encourage them to), and may be important to protecting Linux survive.

RMS wrote The Right To Read back in 1997 at a time when DRM was a relatively new technology, and I dismissed him as being paranoid again. Note this was before the DMCA (1998). Long after, when the e-book DRM issues started I remembered his article. Now in the day of the increasing RIAA and MPAA presence, his article is more scarry than ludicrous.

If I were to read this article, I'm sure I'd think he's paranoid again; only to once again see 5 years later that he was actually just years ahead of me again.

Re:Obscure Gauntlet video-game reference

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought he was talking about the Cathedral vs the Bizzare; where he's mistakenly wrote Castle for Cathedral. To make the Cathedral-style companies safe, you have to do more than kill Linux and the other open source monsters - you have to take out the people who develop them.

Re:I agree with the article

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW - if you want people to see the parent article, we need to mod up the grandparent's funny "Even though I haven't read it." comment, cause otherwise they both show up at the end of the comments instead of near their beginning. If you didn't think 'Even though I haven't read it" was funny, look again now that the parent poster revealed a hidden irony in the grandparent making it funny.

Note that all posting involved are from ACs, so there's no karma whoring involved in these mod requests - just want more people to see the benefits that RMS brings, even though he's often dismissed as a crackpot at first (only to be proven correct years later).

Are all patents really evil?

[snakecoder]

I know I will get crucified and I am by no means an expert but I can't see how "One click", which in my view is completely an absurd patent can be held on the same level as the RSA public/private key patent which seems to hold some validity (at least at a gut feeling level)

Re:Are all patents really evil?

[flossie]

I know I will get crucified and I am by no means an expert but I can't see how "One click", which in my view is completely an absurd patent can be held on the same level as the RSA public/private key patent which seems to hold some validity (at least at a gut feeling level)

Public key cryptography might be a really good idea, but that still doesn't mean it deserves a patent. Certainly as things stand in the EU at the moment it cannot be patented because mathematical methods are not "inventions". How long this will be true remains to be seen. of course.

Re:Are all patents really evil?

[Teancum]

I have created ideas that have been "patentable" in software, and in several cases I even had the financial resources available to at least patent the idea for my employer.

The truth is that I deliberatly chose not to do so, and I fail to see how patenting a software idea would have ever made me or my employer even one cent more by going through the process of doing the patent filing. It might be valid to have patents for defensive purposes (to ward off attacks from litigous idiots like SCO) and keep the company from going into the ground due to the system, but it won't be a revenue generator. Certainly our competitors could always find a way around what ever patents we could come up with, so even the exclusivity of the algorithm would not matter, unless we wanted to sink the entire industry like others are doing (again like SCO).

The LZW algorithm is perhaps the classic, and even that was worked around. Had Unisys been forthcoming from the beginning that it had the patent and intended to enforce it, there is no way that the GIF format would have been used at all.

The point here is that as a full-time software developer who almost exclusivly makes my financial income from the creation of totally novel and original software ideas, I don't need software patents and they are much more of a nuscance that anything else, and something done by companies who can't innovate or have run out of fresh ideas. In the time and effort it takes to patent something, I can come up with a dozen or more fresh ideas and implement them in actual software where they are being used.

If somebody else who has encountered the same situation ends up writing almost identical software and came up with the same general concept (I've seen it happen more than once), why not let them try to compete in the marketplace rather than in the courts?

While I would agree that the RSA algorithm does take time, R&D effort, and considerable effort that perhaps should be rewarded somehow, I fail to see how a software patent would even then be useful. Other encryption algorithms can and are being developed using alternative methods, so the absolute value is really in question. That the implementors of a successful algorithm would be the first on the market, have (hopefully) fully debuged software implementing the concept, and using it in practical applications would make that company clearly successful financially, particularly if they sold the software implementations at a reasonable price. The more complex the algorithm, the more they would be able to charge for it simply because it would also be that much harder for a 3rd party to make an independent implementation.

Copyright law, on the other hand, is critical, and just for pure ethical reasons, if you are using somebody's software and claiming it as if your wrote it yourself, that is plagurism at best, and should be protected through existing copyright laws. That the terms of the copyright might be way too long for computer software is another issue, but I would at least like the opportunity to be able to release my stuff knowing I can defend my authorship legally.

BTW, If I were able to directly introduce legislation into the U.S. Congress, I would want to change software copyright to about 20 years. I could even live with 10 years. Life + 70 years makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.

Not again...

[igrp]

This article demonstrates one of the main problems we are facing today.

I don't have a problem with RMS and I even agree with him on a lot of issues outside of IP law (where I, in the interest of full disclosure, mostly do not agree with him).

Richard is, despite what many people say, a good speaker and a good rhetoric. That's not the problem. The problem are those analogies and euphemisms that made pretty much anybody outside of IT go 'ummm. yeah... great...".

IT is not a text-based dungeon game and this is not 1986. You need to sell your ideas, you're not helping if you focus on R&D terminology (I'm not saying there's anything wrong with R&D, it's just not your target audience).

This is one of the reasons businesses don't take us seriously. Wake up - it's no longer us vs. them. If you want to convince people to switch to Linux you need to be professionell.

Re:Not again...

[killjoe]

Right because no business person has ever played a video game and never met anybody who has played a video game and is too sutpid to know that there are video games and that video games have monster in them.

I agree with the article-Deep Root.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it's insightful to say that RMS is smart. It would be even more insightful to ask ourselves "Why do we treat him the way we do?" then.

Re:Try and patent the Turing machine

[Anonymous Coward]

The examiners issue patents according to the existing law and previously decided court cases with the idea that having their work dragged through the appeals courts is a Bad Thing

Then what is the point of having patent examiners? If you are going to leave it to the courts to decide if a claim has merit, there is not point in having someone pronounce on its validity beforehand.

Judges should not need to know the technical details. They should be able to rely on qualified examiners to do that bit of the work, leaving them to sort out legal arguments between opposing parties.

Re:Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the disaster is already here, at least in the USA- have you _seen_ the state of the US software industry lately? It's nearly all lawsuits now instead of just people writing new code.

The only reason the disaster mightn't get to europe is BECAUSE people like RMS and the thousands of europeans supporting the FFII DON'T "shut the fuck up" and DO work to fight the encroaching evil. And, being normally functioning adult humans for the most part, we can do that part-time and continue to code too, funny enough.

Re:Derailing the train

[pipka]

Hi, this is the original poster again, forgot to login last time. The open source community simply does not have the money or time to play this game, plus we will simply never win. Some of these companies hire teams and teams of people to deal with patents, and they pay developers an incentive bonus to give the company lawyers juice to work with. If we play that game, we would need to play it completely, and we simply can't. The best way to play this is to change the rules. Software patents make no sense. Patenting an idea in software is just as stupid as patenting the method of applying paint to a canvas in art. We need to change the precedent otherwise we will continually be spending our time putting out flames, and spending less time creating the kick ass software as we've been doing. Software patents threaten competition and those who have unique and good ideas, but, and here is some food for thought, many companies value their public image much more than revenue from something misunderstood like patents. I guess that a big call out to anyone being threatened by patents to be as public about them as possible is another defense. If a big company sued a large open source project for patent infringement, it would more likely backfire on them now than say a year ago. Thanks to the issues inherent in the FTA in Aus, we now have some seriously well educated legislators, who may be able to avert the kinds of disasters seen in the US. One of our biggest strengths in the open source community is our openness and our ability to work together right around the world. Lets band together to bring this out into the light and see it burn when the sunlight of public scrutiny hits it.

Re:Ask the USPTO

[maxpublic]

The examiners, as much as anyone, are in the best position to do something about it.

Indeed. The most effective thing they could do is allow anyone to patent just about any absurdity, then sit back and watch as the intentionally produced chaos starts rippling back and forth throughout the system. Done right and with enough examiners the entire system is sure to implode, probably spectacularly, in a relatively short amount of time.

If what you're looking for is a way to hopelessly bollix the system and force a complete redesign then this sort of sabotage is the only weapon effective enough to do the job. Anything else will be just a 'fix' to the current system, a fix which undoubtedly be in favor of those already at the top of the economic pyramid.

We point to patents and say "what the hell are those examiners thinking???" when, in fact, a more appropriate response might be "looks like those examiners just pulled another brick from the wall (snicker)".

Max

The system makes this impossible

[rsilvergun]

at least practically. Our current economic system is brilliant. You've got a small middle class, a huge poor class, and a sliver of Kings. The system encourages the poor to waste their energy becoming middle class and the middle class to waste their energy on not becoming poor. Meanwhile the rich are laughing all the way to the bank. You don't need to look far to see the evidence. People are too busy living their lives to care about patents and copyrights. You don't spend 50+ hours a week getting by and then the rest of your time mailing letters off to your congressman. You spend that time relaxing, or with your kids, or your hobbies. The key is to always hold out the promise that things will be better, if only you'll just work a little harder....

You don't get it.

[hopethishelps]

The important thing is to educate the politicians.

That comment reveals a major misconception. You assume that if the pols knew what was best for the country, they'd do it.

It's very difficult to get elected to Congress. The rewards for getting elected are huge, so there's a lot of competition (at the stage where it matters - getting nominated by the incumbent party). You have to be very smart to succeed.

You may be thinking, "But pols are always saying stupid things, so how can they be smart?" Understand the answer to that question, and you will understand a lot about modern politics.

What a politician says has nothing to do with what he/she believes. A politician says whatever is most likely to result in re-election.

Educating pols is pointless. They're smarter than you, and better informed. Your only chance is to persuade voters to vote for better pols. That's extremely difficult, because corporate dollars are always against you. But it's always harder to do something effective than to do something pointless.

The best way to fight software patents

[beforewisdom]

Is to make ordinary people who aren't involved with IT care about the issues.

RMS started the free(dom) software movement because he was losing a lifestyle he cherished.

Big money corporate players are starting to use their influence on the goverment to curb open source. The only way the free(dom) and open source people can stop this is to get strengt in numbers......ordinary people.

Ordinary people are not acquainted with all of this stuff and if they were they don't have a non-abstract reason to care. It is just not part of their world.

The best way to get them to care..........enough to yell at their representatives if the government pulls a fast one..........is to give them software that they love.

That means easy to use.........not what a geek considers to be "easy enought"....and user support communities without an attitude about people who have no desire to make computers their avocation.

The best defense is ...

[Anonymous Coward]

A good offense. The free software movement should apply for patents on methods used in its own source code.

When threatened with legal action for violation of a software patent, having a portfolio of our own patents would provide a means of defense. The company threatening us could be told to lay off, or we will search our own portfolio for patents that their software is using without a license.

IBM, Microsoft, Sun, et. al., use this defense themselves. For-profit vendors of software are in a constant state of violation of one anothers patents. None of them seek enforcement, because it is a situation of mutually assured destruction.

It is not logically inconsistent for the free software movement to oppose software patents and at the same time patent its own methods as a means of defense, so long as software patents continue to exist.

Re:Derailing the train

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not try the opposite ? Instead of fighting software patents, the OSS community should establish an organization which patents all new ideas in Linux, Mozilla etc.

Because we don't agree with even the basic principles behind software patents. Software methodology should not be patentable period. Software should be copyrightable only. This means: if I were to create a new program that uses circular buttons instead of rectangular ones, nobody else should be legally able to copy and use my source code to make circular buttons (without my premission), but anybody else should be able to write their own code to use circular buttons (with or without my permission).

Re:We must fight them.. otherwise it will come tru

[slimyrubber]

Tinfoil hat alert. Better get yours now. Oh, and buy gold.

Right now it seems that everything on that article has come true except for banning open source software.

Did you even read the parent post?