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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...
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.
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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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. :)