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Torvalds Joins Anti-Patent Attack
canuck57 sent us a story about Linus
Torvalds has joined the chorus of voices speaking out against software patents. Talks briefly about the recent patent releases by IBM & Sun, and notes that there are 'an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 registered software patents in the U.S. alone.'
"why is it news"
My thoughts on the whole article. This is one frigging guy we're talking about. Nothing about him makes his opinion special or important, except to fanboys.
And if you're about to post a snide rebuttal, then YOU are one of those fanboys.
Because I'm right, and you're not.
Patents and copyrights aren't some kind of privilege granted by the government or the people. They're an inherent right.
There is, in fact, only one right-- the right to own property. Your body is your first piece of property. You have the right to control it as you see fit.
If you develop a valuable idea and figure out how to reduce it to practice, you may choose to disclose it to others, or not, according to your own judgement. You may choose to insist that others compensate you in exchange for disclosing the idea to them.
Patents and copyrights provide one legal foundation for these agreements. Trade-secret laws are another. By agreeing to disclose your intellectual property to the public, the public-- as represented by the government-- agrees to give you a legal monopoly on the intellectual property for a set period of time.
A business-method patent is no different than any other patent. The inventor develops a method for doing something better than prior practices and discloses it to the public in exchange for a legal monopoly. Even in your own terms, clearly business methods ARE "expressions of ideas," so why do you wish to treat them differently?
Without patent and copyright protection, there will be fewer inventions and less public disclosure and discussion of valuable ideas. This is equally true for business processes, so it's equally important to offer patent protection for business processes.
It's my personal opinion that the US patent office issues five or ten bad patents for every good patent that makes it through the system. Too many claimed inventions are not new; too many of those that are new are obvious. But these problems have to be solved some other way than just shutting down the patent system or excluding important classes of inventions.
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