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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.)
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...
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).
Gotta get me one of these!
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.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
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.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
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.
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.
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.
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.
Freedom isn't just for geeks Software Freedom Day http://softwarefreedomday.org
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....
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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.
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. :)
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.
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.