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."

Comments

Main Page

[zoobab]

Would be nice if this article can move to the main slashdot page, and does not stays only in the YRO section.

The History of Software Patents

[Mstrgeek]

This is a great site dealing with The History of Software Patents

http://www.bitlaw.com/software-patent/history.html

It has some great information hope you enjoy it and find it to be a help in supporting the need for software patents

Trolls? TROLLS!

[Dark Lord Seth]

Intel's [chairman] Grove derides such patent holders for showing little interest in producing goods with their inventions in favor of demanding licensing fees from others. "We call them trolls," he said.
The Washington Post

As an occasional troll ( Think of it as a hobby ), I am insulted. >:(

Go Software Patents!

[Creepy Crawler]

Patent mathematics.
+ is .0002$ per use
- is .0002$ per use
* is .001$ per use
/ is 1.00$ per use
mod() is 10$ per use
sqrt() is .009$ per use

We acknologe that these mathematics are the only ones you can use, and all derivatibe works are subject to this cost times amount of operations done. EG: Limits are infinite +, so you are incessantly in the hole.... (enter lawyer BS)

Software patents not inherently evil

[Rufus88]

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.

Best anti-patent argument I've read

[dk.r*nger]

I've been searching for a really good argument against softwarepatents, and they all seen to center around some semi-marxist anti-large-corporation basis, such as "GIF and MP3 is patented and OBVIOUSLY that is bad". Really, that isn't obvious in any sense or way. Neither GIF nor MP3 is trivial, and PNG and Ogg Vorbis took years to emerge and mature. This may og may not be a good counter-argument, but nobody cared to explain why LZW and MP3 is trivial ..

Anyway, the argument, as presented:

Patents on software are just as wrong as expanding the patent system to literature.
With patents on story elements, no movie could be published without having to firstly check whether there is any general idea in the storyline that someone patented during the last 20 years. Here's an example: At first sight, Dirty Dancing and Titanic are two very distinct movies. However, if there were patents on story elements, then the makers of Dirty Dancing could have sued the studio of Titanic. Both movies have a scene in which a poor boy takes a rich girl from a party of her social peers to a dancing party of his group, and she enjoys it. Dirty Dancing came out only nine years before Titanic, so any patent would still have been in force. No one knows whether James Cameron had that Dirty Dancing scene in mind as he wrote the Titanic script. Maybe Cameron never saw Dirty Dancing but the patent (if it existed) could be used against him anyway.