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Groklaw Rants On Software Patents
LMCBoy writes "Groklaw has the story of Kodak v. Sun (mentioned on Slashdot already), which PJ calls 'Exhibit A' in the case against software patents. Her analysis of Kodak v. Sun, and the larger issue of software patents, is excellent. Bottom line: the software patent 'cold war' provides no benefits to anyone, and will inevitably make the game of software development impossible for anyone to play."
for the record, I didn't use the word "rant" in the original article submission, and nor does PJ use it in the linked article.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Hello, Moderators? This is copy/paste from the Groklaw article with some paragraph breaks added.
If you'd done it once, I'd just assume that it was a typo and not worry about it. But since you did it twice, it's likely you really don't know.
It's a Turing machine, not a Turin machine. It's named after Alan Turing.
Not true. Remember that Kodak got that particular set of patents from Wang; and in a long ago intellectual debate between Microsoft and Wang, MSFT paid/invested $90 million to settle issues on a set of Wang patents that covered OLE. It's probably the case that this settlement got them a pretty broad IP cross-license including the Java patents.
Software is fundamentally a mathematical process.
Read Donald Knuth's letter to the USPTO to get a better understanding of this reasoning against software patents.
What PJ is effectively pointing out is that software patents have degenerated from rewarding true innovators to being serious road blocks to software innovation. They are land mines waiting to explode on anyone writing serious software without the resources to pay an army of lawyers to protect them.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
That misses the key trade in a patent system: publication of the idea. Your version of "protection" results in the idea being kept secret by the inventor and the public never benefiting from the knowledge of the idea, or the public can figure it out (e.g., reverse engineering) and the inventor is left unprotected. Yes, patents have a downside, but they are recognized as a necessary evil. The key to a good patent system is a proper balance between the public good and providing enough protection for the inventor to publish their idea (in a patent). Once the patent runs out the invention design is in the public domain and can be built, sold, and improved by anyone. Some people seem to miss the point that without patents there'd be fewer publically available designs.
I don't see how you think you can discuss patents and intellectual property intelligently when you don't know the difference between a trademark and a patent. You have no duty to "defend" a violated patent. A patent is ONLY the exclusive right to prevent others from practicing the invention or process described in the patent. You also don't "register" a patent -- you have to file for a new patent in every country where you want one (though some countries are combining for this purpose, or are moving towards cross-patenting agreements). If you want to patent something in the U.S., and you only want to use that patent in the U.S. then you don't have to bother with the rest of the world. BTW, the patent application fee for an individual or small company is a whopping $395.
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee200
If you think it's so easy to patent something, go to town. If you hire a high-powered law firm to write your patent, research prior art, craft your claims so that they are as broad as reasonable, and prosecute the patent until issue (which would include several rejections for overly broad claims and additional fees for reexamination under narrower claims) then you could spend $10k. If you're doing that, though, you're either planning to license to a company to produce your product (which you presumably have no problem with, provided you are rational) or you are planning to practice or produce it yourself (again, there should be no problems here).
You plainly don't understand the patent system. A patent has to be new, useful, and nonobvious. If, given Company A's patent, Company B's engineers can invent new, useful X, Y, and Z without substantial thought, research, or development then X, Y, and Z are not patentable inventions. If X, Y, and Z are not obvious (Company B had to invest substantial research etc) then they are patentable. Why? Because we want to reward Company B for adding to our global knowledge base. Your problem is that you think, many years after the fact, that X, Y, and Z are obvious, and because they are obvious now that they were obvious at the time they were invented. You can't patent "in every possible direction," (whatever that means) you can only patent related nonobvious inventions.
Your ignorant, paranoid rantings are really quite disturbing to those of use who contribute to society, and to the onward march of technology, and wish for a system that rewards largely based on innovative merit to remain in place. The system does have some problems, and determining obviousness in software patents is one of the harrier issues, but your desire to dismantle a system that has successfully promoted innovation and prevented intellectual quagmire for more than two centuries based on a problem with a 20-30 year-old industry is unfounded.
While I can sympathize with you having to read the same objections repeatedly, this information is repeated for a good reason: it is not a part of the public's common understanding of computers and it should be. Common computer users are under threat too even if they don't know it (I refer you to Paul Heckel's threatening Apple Hypercard users with patent infringement if Apple didn't see things his way; RMS talks about it in his talk on the danger of software patents when Heckel attended one of RMS' talks). Read the transcript:
I doubt most people know that they could be violating the law even though they are using purchased software. I doubt most people know that some patent-unencumbered alternatives exist (Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3, for example) and work well (even on portable digital music players). We need to repeat these stories and spread awareness of free alternatives so people won't be threatened or lose a patent infringement lawsuit.
The main way to teach people new ideas is through repetition. So it behooves us to repeat the patent horror stories to help the newcomers to the free software community learn why they won't find MP3 encoders or decoders with free software OSes, for instance. It also serves as a reminder why one should use a free software system despite occasional practical difficulties--we want the freedom to share and modify software.
Digital Citizen
This is the advice that has been given to our university (in the UK) covering all possible research areas (hardware/software engineering). A good example is the Dyson vs. Hoover patent lawsuit:
Hoover to pay 4m [pounds sterling] damages to Dyson - News - in dispute over bagless vacuum cleaner
Hoover wins court battle with Dyson
Dust settles on Dyson's long battle
Forgive my use of the word "register", but I am using it within the context defined by the following article:
Business Law - An Overview of Patents
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I have mod points, but instead I'll take this opportunity to point out that you're talking out of your ass.
Can you even define what "prior art" is? I'll even play nice and give you a clue - it's 35 U.S.C. Sections 102 and 103. What you think is "prior art" isn't worth a bucket of warm spit - what the law says is prior art is the one and only meaningful definition.
Next, can you provide a single reference where a prior art issue was clearly missed by the patent examiners - not situations where the review board overtuned an examiner's rejection? I know that "having a basic understanding of the system I'm criticizing" is completely superfluous to getting mod points around here, so let me be clear that we're ruling out cases where the review board overturned rejections.
I know this is shocking to roughly 98.7% of people at Slashdot, but basically every patent was rejected at least once - the fabled "First Action Allowance", an application that wasn't rejected at least once, is spoken of in terms like, "Yeah, I had a first action allowance once back in the 90s."
Third, "pretty much anyone can patent anything that hasn't already been patented", provided that "anything" falls into an area of statutory subject matter, is WHAT THE FUCKING CONSTITUTION SAYS SHOULD BE PATENTED YOU DUMB ASS .
And once again - I chose to post instead of moderate, partly because there isn't a "-1 Misinformed Retard" option, and partly to be helpful. Hope you were helped.
You can file a "Disclosure Document" for $10. That will last for two years. http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/disdo.html
US Patent # 5206951 Filed April 3, 1991
US Patent # 5421012 Filed May 30, 1993
US Patent # 5226161 Filed August 31, 1992
Because in the U.S. patent rights belong to the first to invent rather than the first to file, and companies often wait a long time before filing in order to maximize the value of each patent (the more you know about your eventual product when you patent it, the better you can protect it) it is likely that at least two, and possibly all 3 of these were "invented" before sun put together its green group, which eventually created Java.
For anyone interested with access, westlaw has 4 documents from this case, including rulings on FRCP 12(b)(1), 12(b)(6), and 56(c).
From the Court's Rule 56(c) decision (August 2, 2004):
I'm not sure there's a cut-and-dry case for prior art here. This seems to cover a specific method for one program to ask all other programs how to handle data -- a sort of "plug'n'play" for datatypes. While this is common (if not foolproof) right now, it wasn't in 1991 when the first patent was filed. IF the court is going to generally take this broad a view of this patent (reading the summary judgment decision I saw no reference to the specific methods mentioned in the patent) then Microsoft Office is probably squarely in Kodak's sights. Office was first released for windows (according to WIKI) in 1992 and I don't think it was as seamlessly integrated at the time as described by the patent. Further text from the decision:
The kind of integration described in this patent was to my knowledge not existant at the time it was filed and is a rather recent thing. At the very least, it seems that this portion of the patents at issue were significantly ahead of their time, or at least enough that Wang actually worked on the project first and didn't win some race to the patent office.