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NoSoftwarePatents.com Industry Campaign Launches
Halo1 writes "The NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign has officially launched today. It has industry support from 1&1, Red Hat and MySQL AB. The website is already available in 12 EU languages (more to be added soon), and contains a ton of information about the dangers of software patents, including the myths that surround them. Hopefully, more large companies will join this campaign in the future."
Would be nice if this article can move to the main slashdot page, and does not stays only in the YRO section.
I'll be if we required software makers to publish the source code of any project containing patented code, that software patents would die a quick and decisive death.
It's not that software patents are, in principle, bad. It's that the idiots in the USPTO are letting trivial ones through the syste. Some software patents are completely legitimate. Take, for example, this patent on the "Marching Cubes" computer graphics algorithm. The paper describing this algorithm made it into SIGGRAPH's Seminal Graphics collection of most important papers in computer graphics. Not all software patents are trivial and obvious.
I posted links in my original reply to you. For clarity's sake:
That's the theory, yes. In practice, not all types of IP are able to meet that goal. There is no economic law that says "more and stronger exclusion rights per definition result in a healthier economy". And there's also no juridical law that says "lawyers will always defend what's in the best interest of the economy as a whole".
One person's rights are another person's limitation. You always need a proper balance to get good results on the whole. You cannot look at single entities in the market and conclude from that it must be beneficial on the whole (or harmful for that matter).
Case in point: offering one company a monopoly on selling things via the internet, makes investment in all online shopping companies a lot less attractive.
Indeed, there is also one economical study in the entire world (that I know of, I really don't know any others) that claims that software patents are generally beneficial, and that patent thickets are a myth. You can find it here. And here's a rebuttal.
Yes, but that's not productive. In fact, every time such a transfer occurs, you extract money from the software business and invest it in lawyers. Something like that is only defensible if the effects on the whole are positive, e.g. if such transfers are necessary to spread knowledge throughout the industry. That is not the case with the software sector (see the studies I pointed you to).
My argument was simply that small companies do not have the means to enforce software patents, and that therefore arguing that they are beneficial for small companies is at least very doubtful. That's not even specific to software patents, it's a general recognised problem of the patent system.
However, in some sectors this negative effect may be offset by other, positive effects that patents have (e.g., if you need tens of millions of dollars to even start doing your product development, the cost a few patents on top of that can be disregarded).
You keep talking about "property rights" as if software patents are the only form of property rights in the software industry. They're not by a long shot, as you probably know. I'm also not asking for abolishment of copyright or trademarks or anything else.
I fail to see how you can weaken an industry by stopping to invest in something which hampers that same indust
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AIPLA believes that Congress, and not the PTO or the courts, is the proper authority to consider economic theory and competition policy-oriented principles. For the reasons discussed below, the PTO and the courts should not inject these theories and principles into their decision-making.
They are talking about uncertainty in the law, which is a blight. Uncertainty restrains economic behavior by increasing risk. The statement states that allowing the PTO and courts--rather than congress--to inject economic considerations into their decision-making would be bad, because it would not be in actual legislation, but in rules promulgation--making it ad hoc and slightly arbitrary. But their point is definitely not that patents hurt economic activity. Their point is that uncertainty in rule application would hurt economic activity. And I agree with them.
You also cited the IPO statement:
6. IPO does not support the FTC recommendation concerning considering potential harm to competition in deciding upon the scope of patentable subject matter. 10. IPO does not support expanding economic considerations in patent law decision making.
#6 seems to contradict your position, because the IPO is arguing that considering the scope of patents should not take "potential harm to competition" into account. Your position is based on the idea that patents harm competition. So they seem to directly contradicting you there.
#10 reiterates the AIPLA argument made above, which does not apply to this discussion, as I explained.
"There is no economic law that says "more and stronger exclusion rights per definition result in a healthier economy". And there's also no juridical law that says "lawyers will always defend what's in the best interest of the economy as a whole""
I am not arguing that patent protection should be extended to absurd levels; I haven't even argued the current level of protection is best (I don't think it is--patents in software should be harder to get than currently). I did argue against your point that "software patents do not help the economy and innovation at all."
Case in point: offering one company a monopoly on selling things via the internet, makes investment in all online shopping companies a lot less attractive
Your example monopoly is a bit broad, and would indeed stifle the market; however, patents are not nearly as broad. You essentially describe a patent on the entire industry, an absurd example, and the only one in which your point holds. But the fact that monopolies can be obtained at all provides great incentive to invest in those companies which have monopolies.
Yes, but that's not productive. In fact, every time such a transfer occurs, you extract money from the software business and invest it in lawyers. Something like that is only defensible if the effects on the whole are positive, e.g. if such transfers are necessary to spread knowledge throughout the industry. That is not the case with the software sector (see the studies I pointed you to).
You are focusing on the monopoly aspect, and accurately pointing out the downsides; but you're ignoring the upsides to property rights. The software may never have been written to begin with without an investor to pay the programmer.
And your idea that "every time such a transfer occurs, you extract money from the software business and invest it in lawyers," ignores the fact that the licensee gets to sell the product too--which makes money for the industry and employs programmers. Consider Apple's refusal to license their product. You don't see many Macs around today compared to IBM and its clones. That's because IBM licensed their technology out, while MAC refused to. Licen
Anyway, the argument, as presented: