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India Quietly Introduces Software Patents
bain_online writes " The Business-Standard of India reports: The Cabinet is expected to clear the promulgation of an Ordinance for the introduction of a product patents regime, which will also cover embedded software and hardware, next Wednesday.
There are other news sites reporting the same. Unfortunately, the majority of the Indian people are not the least bit concerned, resulting in very low coverage for this important development."
the outsourcing industry of India...
The US Patent system, had it worked correctly, would have saved a number of budding software companies from Microsoft.
Make sure the whole of 'ibiblio', all of 'debian', and the Knoppix DVDs are filed with the Indian patent office as prior art to any patents that may get filed. Please !
It seems that the only country left who don't want patents is China (and Don't forget Poland!) Jobs were outsourced to India but Indians' jobs are even outsourced to China. Will these laws render this outsourcing process faster now?
Even if you are not Indian, consider doing that - for the sake of another country with a 3% population of techies.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I agree, most software developers have 'a clue' about software patents. But most 'normal' people and MPs or government officials really don't (do you remember some of those whacky government schemes to introduce 'dont spam me' whitelists?).
The last thing India needs right now is for software patents to be introduced, this for one will mean that large american/european corporations will be investing in patents in India, whereas most small Indian software firms will be locked out due to the legal costs involved.
I was expecting to see a major growth in software innovation from India over the next 5 years, but now I'm having second thoughts about who will really be controlling the industry
-- :)
My £0.2p
Having just spent an entire month travelling through India, I am not at all surprised at the low media coverage. The vast majority of the population is extremely poor... the (on average) dozen beggers that approached me daily, don't even ask you for money, they ask you for food my friends! *That's* how you know they are really poor and what's really on their minds.
The vast majority of people don't even know how to turn on a computer, and many haven't even seen one in their lives, so it is not surprising that the media would think their people would not care so much about patents; they have far bigger logistical and core problems than caring about software patents.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
I think they're about to hang themselves by introducing software patents. It should be an interesting case study over the next couple years to see if the introduction of software patents has any impact on the growth of the Indian IT industry.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
India enacts software patent law... nobody seems to care.
... nobody seems to care.
... nobody seems to care.
/. even by AC's is that we direct our energy away from our respective governments and toward our friends and neighbors.
/.er as anything more than a wanna-be pirate. Legislators look at those who have the knowledge to tinker but are not corporate engineers being paid to testify with suspiciion. They must surely be self-serving software pirates worthy only of scorn.. at least until the timer needs to be set on the VCR. Geeks are not a voting block.
The United States enact
Poland blocks IP law
The common thread here is really a lack of concern by the masses about what the law is in this area. Is this really an issue of law being made only for the big corporations, or is it a question of lack of education & information among the rest?
Perhaps the real solution to the problems of IP law, as almost universally recognized on
That officials enacting IP law will seldom see the
The solution then, is to explain to Grandpa why software patents are bad. Grandpa is no dummy. If we can survive working tech-support over the telephone, we can explain IP to Grandpa in person when we visit for Christmas.
It will be easier than it sounds. People love to have rights, even if they don't fully understand them. Show a man his rights are being violated and the righteous indignation begins to swell. All Grandpa needs to really understand is that, when IP laws are toughened, when copyrights are extended, that takes away something from HIM... then he will speak up. When granpa speaks, the government listens.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
If you are familiar with the Bhopal case and the Indian government's *embarrassing* complacence and prostration before corporate interests (the *government* doesn't really care that 60K people died of poison gas - so long as investment keeps flowing). The fact they are allowing software patents looks pretty insignificant.
This is the country that gets upset when someone in Texas patents basmati or use of the neem tree - exclusively because of the potential for unrest amongst the agricultural "peasantry". No o ne cares about software so they cave in to pressure from northern corporate interests in 25 seconds. On basmati they had to fight.
The government of India has been basically dysfunctional for decades and makes all policy decisions based on the potential for rioting in the streets.
A lot of automotive companies paid a good bit of money for patents like that...Then proceded to sit on them for decades, defeating the whole purpose of inventing something.
By 2010 corporations will have patented every possible thing that humans have done so by 2045 when they all expire we can get on with progress.
India is one of the world's largest producers of generic drugs. Whereas American companies want to charge starving Africans $10000/yr for AIDS drugs, an Indian company has promised to provide the equivalent generics for $300/year.
Indian companies have also started applying for FDA approval and/or patent protection for new molecules (as drugs are known).
Stop drinking the Koolaid and start doing some reading (and not just the GTA manual ;-) ).
"However, things like the recent Microsoft "IsNot" patent should not be patentable. That is an attempt at a land grab. Also the patenting file formats in order to try and collect "tax" revenue from the internet should not be permitted."
Patent examiners do not and cannot look at patent applications and say; "Oooh! Naughty! - this guy seems to be engaging in an attempt to impose a bit of extra taxation on internet users - we'd better deny this application." They are not the morality police and if you understood the patent system at all you would know that they cannot objectively discriminate between "clever" and "trivial" inventions either. Since it would be unethical and unworkable to leave it to the subjective deliberations of individual patent examiners, they quite rightly do not attempt to discriminate in this way at all.
In other words, once you have allowed patents in a field, you have automatically allowed all the 'bad ones' too. In traditional fields of technology, based on physical objects and material processes, this does not necessarily lead to an unacceptable diminution of the rights of individuals, a perverse attenuation of innovation in those fields and other costly side effects. In the abstract field of technology of computer science or computational mathematics, I would say that it can and does.
The question has never been and can never be about the 'quality' of patents or patent examination - it is about which whole fields of human endeavour should be made subject to patents - and that boils down to deciding in which fields they are necessary in order to generally promote innovation in those fields. The trouble with patents on software ideas and algorithms is that the field is inherently vast, touching all other fields of human endeavour. It is naturally rapidly and incrementally progressive and - like art, music and literature - it is the natural domain of individual creators or authors, independent of the financial resources of business organisations, just as much as it is also the domain of those engaged in essential economic activity.
As for the RSA algorithm: Presumably you learnt Pythagoras's theorem in school? If so, would you consider an algorithm to determine the length of one of the sides of a right triangle, given the other two, a legitimate and patent-worthy invention? What of Euclid's algorithm or Taylor expansion or the Fourier transform and it's variants, or wavelets and filter banks or the Viterbi algorithm and various Monte Carlo methods etc. etc...? I can assure you that in their mathematical contexts, the RSA^H^H^H Cocks's lemma and the Pythagoras theorem are of equal 'inventive' height. You will find one in elementary number theory textbooks and the other in elementary geometry textbooks. The cleverness is in the mathematics, not in the programmatic realisation of the algorithm.
Once the mathematical theory is known, I would suggest that any professional programmer who is then unable to produce a program that enacts the implied algorithm without introducing new ideas in computer software or hardware technology should find something else to do for a living. The case of R,S and A is always brought up because they were both the rediscoverers of the lemma and the patentees of the algorithm, and that seems to confuse people into conflating the mathematical advance with the algorithmic 'invention' derived from it. So when you say that the RSA algorithm is inventive and should be patentable, what you are really saying is that the RSA lemma is inventive and consequently that the algorithm should be patentable. That is a very different statement.
Some PTOs, 'IP companies' and the holders of large patent portfolios may agree with you. I do not and I would hope that anyone half numerate would be capable of seeing the implications and that they are not good for either mathematics or software. Indeed in Europe, the proponents of software patentability explicitly state that they wish to avoid such an egregious
Do we (USA) allow patents on a recipe (a set of cooking instructions)? Nope. How is that any different then software (a set of computer instructions). Why should the multi-billion dollar food industry be forced to give out their ingredients and instructions while the software industry is allowed to lock away their ingredients (API, protocol, etc) and instructions (source code)?
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
He would have been unable to copy _any_ idea that had been created before. Multitasking? Nah, is patented. Commandline? Same. GUI? Same. Memory protection? Virtual devices? Filing system? All patented. Good luck coming up with alternatives to some of these. And don't tell me a poor finnish student could have afforded licensing fees for hundreds of diverse technologies.
Imagine if Bill Gates had used his genius to code more and clone/buy less.
For Bill Gates very little changes. He just needs to spend some money on patents _and_ software.
But if software patents had been in effect since the early 1980s, the market would've had a lot less simple repetition and much more true innovation or actual improvements on existing products.
I strongly disagree. The first guy to realize that he owned a vital piece of the action (just imagine a patent on "interactive IO") would (or at least, *could*) have leveraged it to own the computer world. Simple software would bear pricetags comparable to cars (to pay off all the patent holders).
For any class of application, only one version would exist, unchanging no matter how bad it is for the first twenty years. Computers would never even have entered the home, since noone could afford them and there would no interesting software anyway.
And the same would be true for the tools we use to work with computers. There would be no Java or Perl or C++ (who could afford to develop a language when the compiler-patent is still valid?). In all likelyhood we would be program in assembler, _maybe_ using a terminal, but possibly still using punchcards. Which is no big deal - computers would only be available in specialized environments such as research institutions. I'll leave the knock-on effect to other technologies (cars, planes, telecommunication, etc.) to your imagination, but it will be huge.
In other words, we would be at the same technological level of development that we were in the sixties. Some people would no doubt consider that a good thing, but frankly I like our current level of development. At least now I can engage in stimulating discussion about various subjects with people from other continents (ok, that was a euphemism ;-) ).
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Well, they wanted a chunk of our economy, and we wanted to make sure we didn't ship all of our money over there in terms of off-shoring. Now "everybody wins".
The economic colonialism of the US will "take back India for the West" and while tomorrow is India, we may get the rest of the world sometime shortly there after... if not for Poland... 8-)
The facts are simple, countries can sell off their economic future for small cash bribes today, and they seem willing to do so. They _believe_, because they were told, that these software patents are how the US got our IT industry. That belief needs must be cold comfort in the years ahead.
You can't really blame the US or its most important corporate citizens. They understand at a visceral level that the "software patent" is a huge mistake, but their two choices are to admit that the money spent so far needs to be tossed out and the software patent regime overturned OR they have to get the rest of the world to make the same mistake to re-level the playing field. The patents represent tangible power so they are unwilling to un-make the mistake, and instead have, by anonymous consent, decided that the best bet is make sure the rest of the world is equally plagued.
I am put in mind of the monkey trap. You build a box that a monkey can barely put its hand into, then put a nut in the box, the monkey reaches in and grabs the nut and then cannot get its nut-filled fist back out of the hole. The monkey could be free if it just let go of the nut, but it is biologically incapable of doing that. Its instincts are not wired up to sacrifice the nut to save its life. Its a short-comming in the whole essence of monkey-hood.
In our scenario, the companies are the monkeys, the law and its trappings are the box, software patents are the nut. Unfortunately the "IP Holding Company" is the guy with the gun who is coming to shoot the monkey dead if the monkey doesn't just starve to death first.
We have these other countries just begging for us to tell them how to put nuts in their boxes, and for no apparent reason too boot.
If you let the stupid people here get away with it...
All your software future are belong to U.S.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press