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Report Says Patents Threaten Software Innovation
GORby_ writes "According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, software patents are 'a particular threat to the European ICT Industry.' Quote from the report: 'There are particular threats to the European ICT industry such as the current discussion on the patent on software. The mild regime of IP protection in the past has led to a very innovative and competitive software industry with low entry barriers. A software patent, which serves to protect inventions of a non-technical nature, could kill the high innovation rate.' The full report (pdf) discusses Europe's ICT strategy."
Slashdot users say.. "Well, DUUUUHhhhh.."
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Here is the real link
Although the preceeding comments have been largely on the order of "duh, /. users knew this for years!", we need to make sure this oppurtunity doesn't go to waste. If you've known it for years, then make sure other people know it as well. This is a good oppurtunity to spread the word. As the issue gets more press, it's going to be important to make sure it's given the gravity that it deserves.
It's not the first time we read such reports on slashdot...
:)
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8...
Now, with whatever threatens innovation, we guess if these reports were true, it should Darwinianly be extinct by now.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
There are two opportunities left. The Council of Ministers has already voted in favour of a pro-swpat text, but this has yet to be confirmed, and while uncommon, it is still possible for countries to change their vote. Given the extremely suspect way the original decision was reached (which would be scarily familiar to fans of "Yes Minister"), this could happen, but national governments must be lobbied, particularly the Netherlands and Germany.
If this fails, then the European Parliament gets to amend the Council's text, however this is much more difficult than that first time around, and so all Europeans that care about this issue must lobby their MEPs to ensure that they vote in the correct way.
We have made a difference, we can still make a difference, but only by engaging with the political process. If anyone would like to learn more, please visit the FFII website.
It really is sad for IP and science in general when we have to go to court for a while to find out if we can make a garage door opener remote. The DMCA is possibly the worst thing that has ever happened to science in general. It lets companies be anti-competitive legally under a shroud of "protecting their intellectual property".
We all(I already have) should be going to the EFF's DMCA Action Page.
Contact your senators and representatives.(USA).
Chris
The point is that they, unlike for example Richard Stallman, most surely have no axe to grind when they talk about software patents stifling innovation. When they complain about the effects of software patents, they are complaining only about their effect on the bottom line - and every informed analyst will know that. So their stance against software patents will carry a lot more weight than that of the people who've been crying out in the wilderness for all these years.
It's strange the friends we seem to be making these days ... First IBM, now PWC.
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
...that this is just the fault of the patent system, it is a flaw in the legal system, and it is a flaw in the community. Where patents are demonstratedly wrong, it should be easier for small companies or individuals to challenge that bad patent. Bad patents shouldn't just stand becasue one party has deeper pockets. And parties who are in thei right shouldn't be so cowardly as to run from these fights, if they want to change the system, they must work at it. It's all very well bitching about C&D and takedown notices, but you Americans meekly agree to do whatever they say anyway, grow some backbone.
I feel sorry for the USPTO. They obviously lack technical expertise, and can't afford the salaries to attain it. If they were getting feedback on what patents were downright bad from the court system, they could train and evolve to start granting more deserved patents.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
The dutch ministery of economic affairs.
Sig? What's this sig thing I hear people talking about?
...is that the large software companies have patented so much of the fundamental building blocks of software engineering that even if you do come up with something truly "new and innovative" they can still get you on the sub-component functionality.
This means they can effectively hold to ransome any new software venture that turns out to be succesful, regardless of what they do.
Funny.. the preface is written by Brinkhorst, Who voted FOR software patents.(Against the will of the Netherlands Parlement)
Most interesting is the fact that the Dutch parlement is trying to force Minister Brinkhorst to change his vote and that he continues to refuse to do so. The only reason he seems to be able to get away with this is that it is not a political issue, because the Dutch media not understanding software patents is not giving it any attention. The infection in the feet of our prime minister is far more interesting. (The latest rumours are that it was a rather serious infection, which might have killed him.)
duh? Well, how about CUSTOMS TARIFFS designed to bring the price of low wages countries products more in line with those in the high wages coutries??? If a country pays jack shit to it's workers, the tarrifs go back in the importing country's government's pockets who can then use it to help increase that country's competitivity. But if it pays it's workers better, in turn, THEY BECOME MORE COMPETITIVE, because the receiving countries' tarrifs drop, and the extra price they are able to get for their products stays in the exporting country as profits, instead of tariffs in the importing country!!!
Geee whizz, in the last century, Henry Ford generated quite a commotion when he raised his worker's pay; that enabled them to BUY automobiles, which propelled Ford at the forefront of the industry!
But nowadays, bourgeois have no more foresight, and the swarms of MBAs they fatly pay have no more common-sense than a brain-dead sponge (with or without square pants), so they keep doing everything in the name of ultra-myopic short-sight. Free-trade only benefits the company owners, for the rest of the population, it means a steady decrease in the standard of living!Thank you for your letter of 28 September 2004, the contents of which I note. :D
:D
In it, you are asserting that $FEATURE of my software product is infringing upon your $PATENT.
What is interesting, is that we recently received a similar letter from another company claiming that $FEATURE is infact an infringement of their $PATENT.
On further examination, it would appear that the USPTO has awarded you both a patent for the same thing ROAFLOL
If you chose to take this action no further we shall also consider this matter closed. If, however you wish to continue with a claim for breach of patent infringement our first line of defence shall be to have your patent annulled on the grounds of duplication. You may wish to consider this seriously if you are already receiving royalties from $PATENT from other parties.
Yours,
PHB.
Donate free food here
This may seem obvious, but legislators seem to forget (boy do they ever!) that the rationale for IP protections (patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc) has nothing to do with who deserves compensation for their work, and everything to do with guaranteeing that markets provide certain types of innovative goods for consumers. This is even codified in the US constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Of course, the "limited Times" phrase is there because protections prevent other types of innovation (based on immitation) from taking place. It is there so that (sadly) politicians can decide where to strike that balance for each market.
So the main question about software patents should be: to what extent has the absence of software patents negatively impacted the pace of software innovation? As far as I can tell, copyrights have been more than sufficient to strike the balance I talked about earlier, and patents would simply tilt the balance and harm innovation. European legislators should understand this and avoid going down the misguided path of the US congress in their counterproductive copyright extension route.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
I believe that if you were to look at...
Have you looked?
Until you do, your belief is nothing more than that. Your faith in the patent system is touching, but in this case it's misdirected.
Software is inherently more complex than just about anything else that individuals are able to build and expected to understand. Any non-trivial program involves hundreds of techniques that are potentially patentable under the current regime. Most programs people would consider trivial are going to contain dozens. This means that, first, determining if a program violates any patents requires first a detailed analysis by an expert in software patents to determine what potentially patented techniques are used, then hundreds to thousands of patent searches to determine if any of these techniques are patented. After this, you need to arrange licensing for the dozens of actual patented techniques that are used, and given the investment you have already made it would only be prudent to apply for patent protection on the remainder.
And that's for a program like, say, "Minesweeper".
Either that, or you just ignore the whole problem and hope for the best. Since even a company like Microsoft can't afford to hire an expert patent lawyer who is also a software developer and half a dozen paralegals for each programmer, this is all you can do.
So, since most people who develop potentially patentable techniques can't even tell if they're patentable or already patented, and a reasonably talented programmer would probably be doing so several times a week, software patents do not provide any useful protection for most inventors of potentially patentable software. They just provide a chilling effect on the development of publicly documented interfaces and protocols.
Furthermore, patent filings, which express the "ideas" of a patent, are themselves neither patented nor even allowed to be copyrighted. After all, patents were intended to give incentive to disseminate information, and restricting patent filings in effect would undermine their claimed purpose. Similarly, source code expresses the "ideas" of a given software work and certainly should not be subject to patents in part for this very same goal.
Finally, since patents are about use, when they are applied to non-tangible things where use is expression, they in effect are a legal barrier to the very right to think. Hence, for thinking about, or using an idea, even in private, is at least theoretically a patent infingement. Certainly we do not patent books, and for many of the very same reasons we should not patent software.
All in all, I would love to see an active software patent repeal movement in this country.
Patenting of software is the same as patenting musical progressions (or riffs). Imagine where music would be if the riffs were patented. Imagine if authors could patent unique expressions that convey meaning more effectively than other expressions. Imagine if artists could patent color combinations that more effectively conveyed an image.
Hopefully, by thinking outside the cubicle for a moment, you may see the ramifications of this. The music industry would starve with patents on music like software patents. The writing industry would starve with patents on writing like software patents. All art and engineering would evolve much more slowly and be much^2 more expensive with the patent system that software enjoys.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
Most software involves problem solving that is merely the means to an end, not an end in itself. Take for example the (patented) use of the XOR function for mouse pointers. The XOR function is not an invention that stands on its own as a result of long, painstaking and expensive research that eventually enabled the mouse pointer to be invented. It's the other way around: someone was programming a mouse pointer and decided to use the existing XOR function to solve the problem of restoring the graphics that the pointer passes over. This use of the XOR function does not qualify as an invention or research, it was simply a (very obvious) solution that needed to be solved to achieve the end result. It needed to be solved because these guys were the first to implement a mouse pointer, and as such they were able to patent this solution.
Simply being the first to solve a trivial and hitherto irrelevant problem should not be good enough to be awarded with a patent. Patents are designed to establish ownership of the result of expensive and difficult research, but most of the software patents protect things that were neither expensive or difficult to find, and are not worth 'protecting'
Ownership of software can be (and is) established through copyright; we don't need patents on top of that. Look at the current crop of lawsuits concerning software patents. Are they
a) An effort to defend the fruits of painstaking, expensive research that resulted in genuinely new ideas, or
b) An effort to lock out competitors, who would have spent the same 5 minutes to solve the problem under dispute without any effort, had they been there first rather than second.
Most cases are of type B. This is not surprising as another
Take Mom's Secret Recipe for apple pie. Copyright protects the entire recipe: I'm not allowed to publish it without Mom's permission. However if I decide to publish a slighty different recipe, using cinnamon rather than vanilla essence or something, I'll probably be in the clear.
Software patents are similar to patents on the various steps to make the pie: Mom might have patented the use of flour and butter to protect her particular recipe, but this means that I owe Mom royalties even if I am making apple pie to my own recipe, or even a completely different kind of pie.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
There is too much money on the pro side for software patents to go away
Possibly true. That doesn't mean that this is a two-sided debate in any sense... the pro-patent side doesn't involve themselves in the debate. They involve themselves with lobbyists. If you have a reference for the "other side" that actually addresses the arguments from this side, I'd love to see it.
Better start thinking of ways to deal with the situation
Move software development out of the US and other places with broken patent laws. Remember the "ITAR subsidy" for non-US cryptography companies?
That would hit the "pro side" in their pocketbooks.
A software patent, which serves to protect inventions of a non-technical nature, could kill the high innovation rate.
What high innovation rate? Software is doing the same shit today that it was doing back in '95, we just have prettier interfaces now. I'd hardly call that innovation.
I keep hearing that the computer world is special because of the high turnover rate of products, but outside of the hardware world I really don't see it. Most people I know have been using the same basic software since at least 2000 but have upgraded their mobo/proc at least twice during that period of time.
The only "innovation" I have seen out of software is various bug fixes which shouldn't be there in the first place, but since the software writers are held to ridiculously low standards for quality control they can release the same piece of software 5 times and say: "Look at our high rate of innovation". Perhaps someone can point out all the great software innovations that have occured over the last 10 years. Since there is such a high rate of innovation it should be a trivial excersize for the typical slashdot reader.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
RMS gives very interesting and informative talks on software patents from time to time. Recently I went to such a speech and discovered how rewarding it can be for people who want to understand better the problem with patents. (I wrote some info on my blog). People who are interested on these subjects should have a look at FSF website.
EU should never allow any kind of software patents. Such mistake would destroy the software economy and force small or mid-sized companies to spend more on legal costs rather than software research and development. Also, the patents will not protect small businesses from hungry MegaCorps (tm): These laws are made for MegaCorps, not for protecting innovation. Inventors and programmers do not want and do not need software patents; without public domain stuff you cannot build or invent something new.
I know I'm feeding the trolls, but this is a fundamental concept that few people can understand. However, I'm going to give it a go. Repeat slowly after me...
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INNOVATIVE SOFTWARE.
And there hasn't been in years. Modern software builds so much on previous work (much of it from before the days of software patents) that the amount of prior art renders the very idea of patenting it laughable. At a very high level, all software is is a means of making an existing job easier by automating that which lends itself to automation.
As computers progress, it becomes easier to automate more things. But ultimately, taking an existing business practise and appending the phrase "... on a computer" doesn't make it innovative.
What concerns me though is: if we do away with patents what will replace them?
/.ers seen or thought of a solution to this problem?
... if they did, you would probably be broke.
... a type of non-transferable copyright with manditory licensing attached, where the author is entitled to some percentage of any money made on their work (or derivative works), but cannot restrict how their work (or any derivative works) are used, with anti-plagerism statues requiring citation in perpetuity. Others have suggested shortening the length of copyrights back to their original 12 or 24 years. Reform is needed, and many have suggested all kinds of innovative approaches to replace or at least weaken the current monopoly entitlement schemes ... it is a subject that has b
You start off with a false premise: that something must replace patents (else there will be little or no innovation)
Patents do not need to be replaced with anything. The software world experienced much more innovation without them, and continued innovation in the United States only exists because they go largely unenforced.
Have any
There is no such problem. Your assumption is false.
I'm all for making software as "free" as possible, but I'm also of the mind that there would have to be some kind of IP structure in place.
I am assuming you are new to the software industry (apologies if this is not the case, but your statement indicates that you are unfamiliar with how the software economy worked in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s prior to software patents, and prior to their being widespread). Having said that, you have some interesting thoughts despite the false premise from which you begin (you very correctly identify and express unease with the monopoly entitlement the government is granting on so many basic ideas and software implimentations, and the catastrophic consiquences to a robust and free market that follow).
Software has always enjoyed the protection of copyright, which has always been enough protection for companies large and small (c.f. Apple Computers, Microsoft & Joe's consulting) to make excellent profits. Patents are in fact antithetical to this, as they lock down basic ideas. Patents only came along much later (in the 1980s IIRC) If you write software in the United States, you violate patents. You can thank your lucky stars no one has decided to enforce them against you
Has anyone run into an IP scheme that would balance the creator/user relationship? Our present system is skewed and prone to monopolism, and a total absence of ownership would entail its own set of problems.
It depends on what you mean by "IP". If you're talking about trade secrets, the current laws work reasonably well. If you're talking about trademarks, the current scheme works pretty well modulo people abusing trademark law to silence critics using their name (this seems to get sorted out reasonably by the courts most of the time).
If you're talking about patents, the best reform is to eliminate patents. Government entitlement monopolies have been shown historically to not only NOT encourage innovation, but to actively stifle it. As an example, read up on the history of the airplane, the Wright Brother's patents, and America's desperation to catch up to advanced European (non-patent-encumbered) aviation technology during world war I. For those to lazy or uninterested to look it up, the short answer is that the US Government, in a tacit admission that the Wright Brother's patent on airplanes stifled innovation and improvements, effectively seized their patent (nationalized it), paid them a flat 1% royalty, and threw the technology open to all comers and competitors to develop modern airplanes. The amount of innovation that followed was truly phenominal.
If you are talking about copyrights, some have suggested a form of non-monopoly "authorright" as an alternative
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Having software patents has benefits, not having them has benefits as well. Both cases benefit the larger companies.
That's logically nonsensical: Given A or ~A, A benefits large companies and ~A benefits large companies.
Without software patents, the instant anybody comes up with an idea, they've generated a new revenue stream for a large company. The large company simply sees and likes the idea so develops a product around it and sells it.
Except that:
(a) Implementation time in software relative to product cycle time is very long, making the value of being the first person to implement something still valuable without the need for an artificial monopoly. Traditional patents were designed for systems where ideas were pretty simple ("use a new sort of gear here") and the product lifecycle was long ("Yes, we've been making this type of plow for seven years now"). This vastly decreases the benefits of patents in the software field.
(b) Nobody uses patents as intended, in a manner that benefits the population as a whole. Large companies just maintain patent portfolios to keep people from entering and cross-license with their competitors. Little incentive to produce better products. Lots of companies have hard caps on what they'll pay for a license due to outrageous software patent litigation. For example, IIRC (and this may be out of date), Intel has a hard limit on a one-time $100K fee per patent, though they are willing to cross-license with other holders. That's not a very conducive environment to protect that little independent researcher that you're thinking of.
Sure, products may become cheaper because not having software patents allows every Tom, Dick, and Harry to have their own versions of the software, but the large companies who can employ a lot of folks can have more resources to develop the application further.
Software patents have absolutely nothing to do with encouraging companies to do research. In a corporate lab environment, real advancements don't get patented, because then all your competitors have cross-licensed access to your research. They remain secret.
Along those lines, we should do away with copyrights on software as well for the same reason. Once someone writes some code, why should it be limited in how you can use it? Why have to have someone rewrite more code to do the same thing? All code written should be released under the BSD license, then.
Of course not. Copyright doesn't have the problems of software patents (you don't have "obvious copyrights"). Copyright does a better job than patents of dealing with the long-implementation short-lifecycle approach of software.
May we never see th
I have no problem having patents for new and innovative things. The problem is that, at least in the US, most of the patented stuff is obvious to an experienced worker in his field of expertiese, or it just reimplements something from real life on a computer.
E.g. nobody would ever try to patent sorting papers on you real life desktop into stacks, but doing so on your computer desktop all of a sudden becomes worhty a patent even though the task of fixing this is trivial.
If the things patented are trivial, then we can expect that any person with a university degree and/or some years of experience is extremely likely to produce patented solutions without knowing it just by coding what naturall comes to his mind. He could do patent searches, but this is quite hard since much in software design is about general ideas with sometimes overlapping contexts, chances are that he will not find what he is looking for as he expresses the same idea in different terms.
If we let a couple of monkeys hammer away at a keyboard they will sooner or later have written the complete works of Shakespeare. Now imagine that Shakesspeare had written all his stuff in a language containing the only words if, then, else, while. The time for that to happen would have been greately reduced. Now, replace the monkeys with humans that use this very limited language to express themselves, and you will very soon see sentences that look quite Shaksperian even if the never ever read a line from the original auther.
So if you like software patents, why not patents on litterature, and art. After all if I think that I'm the first person who write a crime story where sombody is killed by a knife why shouldn't I patent it. I'm quite sure that such patent have never been filed. As I privately have a slight suspicion that sombody actually may have written such a story before me, I am happy to licence the idea to other authers for a fee slightly less than it would cost to take the dispute to court. The only one who would not go to court would be sombody that positively would know that he could prove prior art, but as that person is most likely to be dead there is little risk.
Now it strikes me, why write a book in the first place. After all, the part where sombody is killed by the knife is a very minor part of a normal crime novel. Why spend all that time. Why risk to be sued by the auther holding the patent on having characters being transported by a car, or having a conversation, or kissing, or..., In fact by actually writing a book I open myself to all kinds of liabilities. Besides I'm not much of a writer anyway.
I think I just stick to just filing the patent on the knife usage. Then I can wait for some real auther to get a bestseller using my knife concept. After all people are known to have been killed by knifes as early as Julius Ceasar, so its bound to get into a novel soner or later. So I sit back and wait unitl somebody actually write such a story and get what is rightfully mine from him. That way the risk of being sued is much less, not to mention that it is much less work. I don't have any costs for marketing either.
Now, If software patents are so important for the software industry, the same thing would be valid for other ways of expression like litterature and art. So why should it not be possible to have patents in this field as well? After all there is big money in this business just as in software. Look at the movie and record industry, or that software industry such as Microsoft buy the rights to digital publishing of classic art.
The strange thing is that you seldom hear people argue that patents on art would be a good thing, even though my guess is that there are more artists in need of some extra income than there are software developers. Why should they not be able to get some money from their way of express themselves, when the software developer can?
Or is it just that patenting peoples way of expression themselves is a bad idea?
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER