Slashdot Mirror
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.)
Even though I haven't read it.
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...
To make a part of the castle safe, you've got to do more than kill the monsters as they appear -- you have to wipe out the generator that produces them.
But you'd get a lot more experience points if you leave the generator running and ambush the monsters one-by-one as they emerge.
And this Stallman guy thinks he's a geek. Sheesh!
- The patent is accepted and you can invalidate all patents that follow (as they cover ground your patent now owns). No more software patents!
- The patent is rejected because of prior art. Subsequently, all software patents that follow that piece of prior art should also be invalidated. No more software patents!
The only thing you have to prove is that your patent for the turing machine describes all other possible software patents....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.
Some guy even proved using lambda calculus that because of this property, several assumptions about the patent system are in contradiction with each other when applied to computer programs.
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All patent attorneys know that they can take an application to the board of appeals (or higher) if they want to bother. The only reason they wouldn't is if the examiner builds an airtight case that convinces the attorney that it would be a waste of his time to try. The attorneys know that the people who sit on the board of appeals are patent law experts but not software experts.
If you want to stop software patents, you need to lay off the examiners (they agree with half the stuff said on Slashdot and the other half isn't even close to accurate) and focus on the patent attorneys and the appeal process. Any examiner who has been at the USPTO has issued patents for ideas they believe they have rejected but the board doesn't agree that "simultaneous" means the same thing as "doing two things at once" or some garbage like that. So the patent gets issued and from a legal standpoint, it's a perfectly valid patent. The examiner hates to do it, but the examiner doesn't have a choice.
If you want to fix software patents, focus on the attorneys and the appeal process. The examiners are just trying to do their job without being burnt out by the moronic arguments they deal with on a daily basis.
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.
It is also important to take a two pronged defense/attack on software patents. Giving the analytical arguments against patents, educating developers, and trying to give businesses a real business case why patents neither protects them, nor helps them competitively is the first approach, and a very important one. The second approach is the quantative and qualitative approach giving real figures and projected outcomes. A scientific approach. Here in Aus we are trying to set up a patents watch, now that we are locked into US style patents legislation. This means that in a year, or two years, we have real data on the amounts of trivial patents being attempted, and can realistically speculate on the impact of suh patents if they had been granted. Plus we get the open source community working directly with the people who need help in filtering patents.
:( We can't convince them just with argument, we need to give them proof they can't argue against.
A good eg of what is current in Australian patents:
> Australian Application Number 2004205327
> Title Programming interface for a computer platform
Through this we can hopefully prove that patents should simply not apply to software methods. It makes no sense, stifles innovation, and is an anti-competitive too of the most scary dimensions
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.
Is it possible to use the patent system against itself, in the same way that the GPL counteracts the principle of copyright using copyright law itself?
For example, a public foundation dedicated to holding patents in the public interest. Anyone with an idea could submit it to them; they would then obtain a patent on it, and license it freely to the public, with the exception of companies who use their patent portfolios offensively.
Also, as an attack against software patents, would it be possible for a free developer to patent their own algorithms/widgets etc, and license it *only* for use in GPL'd software?
Is the above legally possible? There's an obvious problem in that most FOSS developers have neither the time nor the expertise, nor the money to apply for patents, but if an organisation could be formed to do that part, I have no doubt that the intellectual citizens of the world can out-invent the corporations obtaining patents.
[I am personally convinced that patents per se are a very bad thing, in any field of endeavour. They run contrary to the spirit of scientific endeavour, and they create a "tragedy of the commons" on a global scale. They also lead to monopolies. Pragamatically, one might make a special exemption for pharmaceutical patents, on the grounds of the huge investment required up front, but even then, such patents should be unenforceable in the 3rd world on grounds of humanitarian necessity.]
The patent system didn't cause the collapse of the entire Industrial Revolution due to patent infringement
But it may have concentrated power into the hands of very few and slowed it down, and changed its direction to favour the interests of the establishment of the time.
As a mechanical engineer, I detest all patents, not just software ones. You wouldn't _believe_ the stuff engineers aren't allowed to do because of patents, particularly sealed patents (patents that have been indefinitely extended and simultaneously removed in whole or in part from public records for reasons of "national security" - (i.e. corporate cronies requested it) This is intensely irritating - the patent still applies, so you can still be stopped from creating whatever it is you have rediscovered, but unlike with an ordinary patent, you don't know when/if it'll expire (typically when a citizen in another country independently reinvents it and _doesn't_ also keep it secret), and because there's little public record, people think you're being paranoid if you try to fight it.)
*Sigh* RMS isn't that undiplomatic. While AFAICT the rest of the article is a verbatim copy, this is a good reminder of why you shouldn't trust these "in case it gets slashdotted" copies.
Right to read
This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2).
(from "The Road To Tycho", a collection of articles about the antecedents of the Lunarian Revolution, published in Luna City in 2096)
For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.
This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates would do.(poisoning of our school system, remember BSA?)
And there wasn't much chance that the SPA--the Software Protection Authority--would fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment--for not taking pains to prevent the crime. (DRM-OS! Any takers for palladium?)
Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books. She might want the computer only to write her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a middle-class family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her reading fees. Reading his books might be the only way she could graduate. He understood this situation; he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the research papers he read. (10% of those fees went to the researchers who wrote the papers; since Dan aimed for an academic career, he could hope that his own research papers, if frequently referenced, would bring in enough to repay this loan.)(Per use licensing! Bill Gates and the RIAA hoos probably masturbate to this every day!!!)
Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.(The OTHER 1984)
There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.(Well well.. INDUCE ACT?)
Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.(Up to 10 years for downloading a mp3 today under the PIRATE act, 'nuff said!)
Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
RMS speaks quite carefully with respect to focusing on patents that cover algorithms used in computer software. If you read what RMS says about software patents, you'll see that he recognizes how, for example, automobile patents don't have the same social effect as software patents. Software programmers don't have to deal with all the complexities of physical product designers all the time.
Part of what he says about patents in other fields versus software patents:
He doesn't think the same things about all patents. Read more or hear him talk about patents in other fields and you'll find that he focuses on his expertise.
Digital Citizen
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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Frankly I still don't understand any of this. Why was it legal to create the JPEG format, which obviously does the same thing (from a user perspective) as GIF, when it was not legal for Barnes and Noble to implement their own version of one-click?
My gut feel is that all software patents are bad because computer science is just too young a field. The government doesn't need to encourage basic research in software, it will happen anyway.
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. :)