Slashdot Mirror
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.'
Unfortunately, Linus was immediately sacked for infringing on my patent: Patent 1,234,567: Speaking against software patents in a public forum.
Considering the nature of Microsoft's ongoing assault on Linux, I'm surprised they haven't tried to patent Linus yet.
Most of their patents are hardware, but they do have some software patents.
They do have a strong reliance on the open source community (Mac OS X contains a ton of open source code, as does Safari).
I'm guessing they will in the next year follow IBM's lead an open up a bit.
As to what they will make available, and what they will not, I really don't have a clue. Any guesses welcome.
PLEASE let that term just disappear and never be used again...
The two will likely merge, with today's spam list sellers producing software that is guaranteed to generate 100,000 software patents a day.
And don't dare to delete that spam. You will see a message in it that says "The methodology of pressing a delete screen button or similar control on a web form in order to ignore email advertising is covered under US Patent 4,005,544,202,499,003-A. If you attempt this, you will be charged with a patent violation."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I find it ironic that Slashdot is always slamming software patents, when at the same time, in their company's 10Q and 10K statements, they're discussing how they are going to profit from creating and defending software patents. Beautiful.
I don't respond to AC's.
I'd say any software patent is bad, simply because they're so ambiguous. It doesn't matter if the company in question is supposedly benevolent, or that they're not actively enforcing them: all it takes is a single lawyer with no scruples to cause a lot of pain. In any organization of significant size, you can rest assured they've got at least one bastardly lawyer.
Not only that, but there couldn't possibly be that many new, patentable techniques or technologies being discovered. Is it actually good practice to patent everything? While it might be "good" for open source with IBM supporting us and all, what's it do to the smaller companies that get (potentially) shafted by such absurdity? At the very least, it increases their cost of development due to necessary research.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
That's the question: when do you say it's too trivial? When do you say it's complex enough to be granted patent protection? It can be determined by the courts, but the patent office makes the initial decision, and if unchallenged, sets a precedent.
A blog like any other.
If this isn't the first time he's spoken out against them, then why is it news?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
It looks like the article picked a few lines out where Linus said that many of the software patents that have been issued shouldn't have, and added a lot of filler to make it look like he's saying that software patents are inherently bad.
I don't see anything in what he said that says that software patents shouldn't ever be issued, only that in a lot of cases, they were issued in violation of the USPTO's own rules.
"Joins the attack" is a bit overzealous, to say the least.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I'm really happy to see this article. I've had programming classes in college and you can be caught for cheating the same way software patents work, if you use the same method or logic to do something. People need to understand that when there's a better way of doing things, everyone should not be strangled for finding and using that method.
Ubuntu, the way linux should be.
Try Ubuntu FREE! --
Hmm.....now I know why my kernel patch submission to him was rejected!
The Green Party argues that the former patent criteria, which has been abandoned, is adequate in protecting innovation. For example, there's a clause that states that an idea can't be patented if the idea is obvious to a typical practitioner in the field. I recall this from a Green Party interview in a magazine, pardon me for not providing a direct quote.
I don't think we should be able to patent processes at all.
A process is the ultimate business advantage. If you can come up with it, you deserve to reap the rewards from using it. Not from selling it to or litigating against some other group.
This is where the system breaks down. Some things are not meant to be non-freely shared around society.
Patents should return to whence they came. Physical objects.
Copyrights should return to whence they came. Expression of ideas.
Processes are neither, and therefore shouldn't be covered by either.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
I am not against software patents. I think they are a good thing. However, we seriously need to reconsider what is considered patentable. Some of the approved patents are blatantly absurd, and actually hurt commerce.
Patents are desiged to encourage innovation (as ou rightly point out). But big business has twisted gov't's arm so much that they no longer serve the interests of the people as a whole. For a ridiculous example of COPYRIGHT protection: The 'Happy Birthday' song is still protected... found this out when I wanted to add it to an app I wrote... Patents are similarly absurd.
So, like most other things I fall squarely in the middle of the two camps, and get shot at from both sides.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
where do we draw the line between complex and common
The test is that the invention (at the time it was invented) was not obvious to someone skilled in the area/field of the invention. If it was commonly known at the time then it won't qualify. There are other conditions, too, described on the USPTO website. Actually, they say it better than I did: "it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention".
EricSome Vioxx spam humor
Patents would be ok, if they were inventive as required by the law. Unfortunately, there is no way on Earth to measure or judge inventiveness, so all a patent examiner can do is to judge whether the application is novel. Something which any patent application can do as long as it mixes in some new technology, like computers or the internet.
To make things worse, many software patents usually don't come with a useful description of how to actually do stuff, which is sad, since software can be documented by the sourcecode and printed.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Pretty easy, if it does not exist in the patent office, try to push it through and see what happens. About all these companies do anymore. Prior art does not mean squat.
If this trend does not stop there are going to be two groups of software developed. Those corporations of large massive power who have either bought up or squashed with patent lawsuits (and then bought up) and those developers of freeware. What will that mean for consumers? Higher prices or go running for a free alternative.
Who knows, in 20 years, if all the middle competition is destroyed, companies like IBM, Solaris, etc, could go after Linux and GNU because they are cutting into their bottom line.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
I mean, this is a political problem and I am not sure how Linus is perceived by politicians (outside Finland where he appears to be well-known).
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Well, thats the whole problem in a nutshell. If only the answer was as simple and short as the question. The whole area is something I didn't take an interest in until I started to realise the consequences.
Now, I take a big interest in it. The fact that law and particularly US law is often so vague and varying from state to state makes it more of a nightmare. One little philosophy I have: If its powered directly by nature, then get your greasy patenting hands off it because it belongs to us all. i.e. windfarms, solar power, quantum mechanics ...
Anyway, anything I ever created, I have included the GPL with it and I always will include either the GPL or something similar and at the very least, compatible.
I have to disagree somewhat.
I don't think we should be able to patent business processes or software processes at all. However manufacturing processes should be patentable.
I'll clarify that a little bit too. The process that should be patentable would be the process for say creating a specific alloy or chemical where it is not simple. Along the lines of non-obvious to someone in the field.
What shouldn't be patentable is the how do I assemble product X
Twenty years later, after a recent bumpy ride in the IT sector, investors (who generally understand little in terms of technoloy) would not invest unless they see there is some IP protection -- a.k.a. patents. Hence, the pressure for software patent legislation comming from companies that want to positively attract investor's attention. Big sharks such as M$ shouldn't really need software patents unless everybody else moves in that direction. They also probably learned a lot from big Pharma that patent everything they "discover" and then license those "discoveries" out to smaller companies. It's a different game these days, a different kind of race that, I'm afraid, the small fish (read: open-source developers) will unfortunately lose.
Yeah, it's almost like the slashdot editors are allowed to voice their own views and not follow a company line set out by the people who own the site. Imagine that, editorial freedom in a news site! What a novel idea!
It's downright unamerican!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
One only has to look at the rampant achievements and success of Free Software and Open Source to see how much the rest of the industry is being held back by software patents and other "intellectual property" restrictions.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
The point is that you should be allowed to benefit from it without your competitors being able to co-opt your idea and benefit from it also. Considering that, unless a market is in a phase of significant growth, a businesses success usually means there are other businesses failing, a new business process that gives you a competitive advantage can make the difference between sink or swim.
Torvalds was reluctant to make predictions though. "I'm the anti-visionary. I distrust people with visions," he said. "You don't see what's right in front of your face and you don't see the technical issues that face everyday users."
While I don't think he'll ever say it directly, this is as clear as he ever needs to be when it comes to his opinion of RMS.
I think the problem isn't with software patents, it's more with the quite obvious things that we allow to be patented.
Free software is an awesome cause, but for those brilliant minds out there who put in months of work to come up with some new idea, there should be other options than to have to let someone else steal the idea or to keep it completely secret.
I think ideally we'd have a patent system that protected such inventions as RSA and MPEG compression, but recognized that one click billing is not patentable.
What makes spending years coming up with an algorithm that solves the problem of key distribution in encryption unpatentable, but somehow makes it okay to patent the plastic packaging for a razor blade?
In software there as idea that problem for which is pattent solution should be presented to groups of skilled programers who have week to find solution. If one of concepts they come up with is close to patent concept, its is dismissed, otherwise it should be granted as non trivial and inovative. (Example: someone tries to patent classical fulltext search as "way to retrieve all data based on simple keyword". programers/engineers get task to find way how to "way to retrieve all data based on simple keyword" - one of them comes out with idea that you can preprocess all data ,extract possible keywords and pair then with data, then make search on them and not data. Which is exactly how patent proposed it to do. Other will simply dig on goole and will find working implementation. RESULT: no patent)
+ they will sometimes generate obscure and new ideas woth of further exploration. this could be werry challenging job and good way to get renome.
- human factor is too high - should someone sponzor whole team to make them lazy about ideas, there is no way it could work.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
a new business process that gives you a competitive advantage can make the difference between sink or swim.
For almost 20 years? Maybe when we're talking car engines here the "mindspace" in inventions is wearing thin enough that someone coming up with a better way of doing it should be rewarded by killing off all the other car makers, but lets take a look at Microsoft, our favorite bogeyman. How many thousands of patents do they have? When was the last time they were driven to innovate in the OS field? Win 3.11 -> Win 95? NT 3.5->4? Everything since then has just been a prettier 95, and 2000 was 95's offspring crossed with NT4's. Meanwhile, they're failing to innovate the features they've promised for Longhorn, and we're watching as Longhorn gets farther and farther away even as it sheds features like a mangy dog. Fat lot of good those thousands of patents are doing them in developing the next generation OS, maybe we should increase the patent length to 30 years so that while Microsoft does jack, they can at least stop other programmers from innovating faster than they can.
No Further patents should be granted until the patent issues and problems are fully worked out and brought to acceptable terms to the entire American Public. This has gotten bad real bad...and it needs to be fixed.
Companies can still submit them for review they just need to realize that it might take 10 years beofre they are approved or rejected while the system gets properly reworked.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
They will all trip over themselves at some point, and any code you write can always infringe on some software patent.
Here's a proof that any code can infringe on other code (which could be patented).
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
If software can't be copyrighted or trademarked (note I do not include patented), here is what would be legal:
I could take a companies software the day it was released, make copies of it and sell it for whatever I wanted. Think Game companies have problems now? Just wait until they can't do anything.
I could make a game called HALF LIFE 2, and sell it online and people would have to worry about buying my game vs. the original game. And the Makers of Half Life couldn't fo jack.
The GPL would become worthless as it relies on copyrights in ordeer to work. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License.
I'll agree with you on the Patenting of software (although there might be an option for using it to a limited extent, say 3 years). But copyrights and trademarks of software are necessary.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
It used to be that patents were granted because of the originality of an idea, and making sure that the inventor gets some return on their amazing ingenuity. A patent like "virtual shopping cart" issued, for example, in the year 2000, would've been completely pointless as there were countless prior art examples. I think patents are bad because of that one type of patent, not that patents are intrinsically a bad idea.
stuff |
"Anti Patent Attack" were one of my favorite DC straight-edge bands from the 80s. I saw them warm up for Fugazi and they ROCKED! Does anyone know what instrument Torvalds even plays?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Linus joined Transmeta too, and wow, look where they're at now.
If someone develops something new, technology-wise (like a new compression scheme or something), I don't see what the problem is with them patenting it if they so choose. The whole problem is with the over-generalization of some of the existing software/business "process" patents that are such bullshit.
Part of the problem is that the US Patent Office has been lax in granting patents, said Mitchell Kapor, a founder of Lotus Development and a prominent backer of the Mozilla browser. "There have been tens of thousands of bad software patents issued which never would have been issued if the Patent Office had actually been following its own rules," he said.
...
The patent laws make some degree of sense. The patent office does not. The stuff they let through is totally unbelievable.
You can either wait to be hit with an infringement case (not a lot of fun) or you can submit a reexamination request to the PTO.
The worse thing you can do is to read the patents of your competition. Once you do that, you had better react quickly. Willful infringement in the US gets you treble damages.
What a wonderful world we live in
I have often wondered how many software "inventions" would not exist today if software wasn't patentable. In other words, has the patentabilty of software resulted in any software "inventions" that otherwise would not have existed? My gut feeling (and that's all it is) is that there aren't many (any?) such "inventions". (inventions in quotes 'cause I find it difficult to think of any software as being an invention).
So, do software patents really encourage innovation? Are there clear examples of this? Or, are software patents just for the use of large corporations limiting competition from small outfits?
Where do you draw the line between hardware and software? Hypothetically, if software patents did not exist, could you implement in software a hardware patent to drive a custom built patent-free robot to create a piece of patented hardware?
Are there any ideas as to what is the theoretical difference between hardware and software?
If the difference is that hardware is or creates something physical and software is/does not, then couldn't I just easily port software algorithms into a mechanical device essentially allowing for a hardware patent?
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
So, like most other things I fall squarely in the middle of the two camps, and get shot at from both sides.
;)
Please, let me
Seriously though, consider this: I write a piece of software. I'm a total geek and a math wiz and it turns out I manage to create a really nice algorythm for [insert tech word here].
I want to make money off this or maybe share it to the community, regardless it's released and distributed and one beautiful morning I'm being sued for patent violations. Turns out some big company thought of this a good 10 years ago and has a patent on doing roughly the same thing my algorythm does.
What did I do wrong? Why am I being punished? Is this fair? This wasn't an obvious thing to patent, I'm just a bright kid and stumbled across it.
This is not a "nothing is perfect"-thing, this is a serious flaw. Patents (especially in software) means no one has any rights what so ever, *unless* you happen to be the first guy figuring something out, in which case you suddenly have *all* and exclusive rights.
I'm not taking about patenting obvious things: with patents no one is allowed to invent things unless they're the first one. It doesn't matter if you figured it out all by yourself, if someone beat you to it you simply have no rights.
How is that fair?
Life is Reality
Last Nov., Linus co-authored an appeal to the EU opposing software parents. Read it at nosoftwarepatents.com. That's about as clear as you can get, I think.
(By the way, don't forget to thank Poland.)
[Sorry buddy, but I already have a patent on the process of threatening someone with lawyers in order to get money from something.]
And I'm sure you are aware that you are infringing my patent on threats in italics.
As I have said before: since the Open Source community is not only bigger and probably as innovative as the software developers of any company, it should fully take advantage of the current system.
Open Source should find investors and patent every single patentable software solutions, developed by Open Source projects.
Open Source would be the patent holder and there is a potential market here to charge big corporations for using Open Source owned patents.
The key here, is that Open Source has a huge, very innovative, highly motivated "workforce" - that can be competitive with any corporation.
Once Open Source manage to secure patents on key new technologies, which cost a lot to corporations, we may actually see the corporations to lobby for anti-patent legislation.
While those corporations finally get the lawmakers to scrap software patent laws, Open Source could have a healthy cash-flow from patent licencing to fund even more projects.
++just an other open.random idea++
When they will grant a patent for getting a cat to chase a laserpointer
I think it should be obvious that USPTO doesn't really have the ability to judge whether or not a patent is merited. How can granting patents willy-nilly help things?
For software of all things?
You missed his point. Software already is protected by copyrights. Even without patent protections those apps you mentioned would have been created. Patents provided no incentives and at least for bittorrent it is doubtful that a patent was applied for. Software patents are generally only used to create a barrier to market so that smaller companies have a high risk in creating competetive products.
Yes, you are right. But no one reads that anyway unless they're trying to avoid being sued or something else law-related.
However, one can argue that an invention was indeed copied since it's all out there in the open. So this just strenghtens the argument that patents takes away rights (yes, it sounds a bit RMS).
Whenever a patent is granted the patent office is basicly saying "we have chosen that this invention is so great that we don't think anyone is going to come up with a similar idea in more than 20 years. We must protect society and grant this person exclusive rights to this invention so that we can all prosper from this in 20 years."
So even if someone does come up with a similar idea within 10 years or so it doesn't matter, because the patent office has decided that we as a society "couldn't take the risk of this not being invented by someone else, so we had to make him tell us the details." They decide what people are allowed to invent, or "figure out" is I put it earlier.
Protection against copying really should be handled by copyright law. If someone invents something that is so unlike something someone else invented that it isn't voilating copyright law, I don't quite see what it's voilating at all.
Life is Reality
I believe that the criterion for non-obviousness is that a team of experts in the subject area working on the specific problem for which the patent provides a solution, needs more than one day to come up with the solution.
Of course, the problem is that the patent office employees are not experts in the subject area, and still need to judge non-obviousness. That's patently impossible.
Although it seems to me that even a patent office employee should recognise that to the problem of having to click multiple times to make a web purchase, the solution of letting the user make a purchase with only one click is quite obvious.
You may be interested to note that the economist Hayek was not entirely persuaded in some respects of the patent system:
... concluded that aside from international pressure, there was no reason to have a patent system - It did no good for the public - and recommended abolishing it if not for international pressure." [http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/danger-of-software- patents.txt]
e s.article]
"I am thinking here of the extension of the concept of property to such rights and privileges as patents for inventions, copyright, trade-marks, and the like. It seems to me beyond doubt that in these fields a slavish application of the concept of property as it has been developed for material things has done a great deal to foster the growth of monopoly and that here drastic reforms may be required if competition is to be made to work. In the field of industrial patents in particular we shall have seriously to examine whether the award of a monopoly privilege is really the most appropriate and effective form of reward for the kind of risk-bearing which investment in scientific research involves."
It has also been argued that software patents in themselves are not economically useful. RMS, in a speech at Cambridge University said:
"... an Australian government study of the patent system in the 1980's
Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus Corp.) argues that software patents are inherently bad:
"Patents can't protect or invigorate the computer software industry; they can only cripple it." [http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/issu
Did he inhale?
Just copied my post from below:
As mentioned above.. you can own it on your own all you like. Don't share it.
Patents on an invention make sense because in order to realize a profit on it you have to distribute it, which allows for copying.
Patents on processes make no sense, because you do not have to distribute the process in order to realize a profit from it. If the process is so simple that any customer can see it and apply it, then by its very nature it does not pass the "non-obvious" test.
As such, there is no justification to patent processes. Those the consumer can't ascertain you realize profit from by utilization (ala Coke), those that the consumer can ascertain are not worthy of patent protection (ala 1-Click).
As an aside, you do realize that by equating business methods with "expressions of ideas" you are agreeing with me that they should not be patentable?
That aside though, I disagree that business processes are an expression of an idea. They are the idea itself. Copyright does not (and should not) protect the idea. The idea of a monster sucking blood is not protected because Anne Rice has the copyright to "The Vampire Lestat", her specific expression of it is.
If you can show me a business process where the only protection required is on the specific expression (such as the specific code for a 1-click shopping system), and not the idea itself, you may have a point.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Copyright law doesn't cover inventions, it covers creative works. Patent law is an application of the same principle to inventions. If copyright law was extended to include inventions, what difference between that and current patent law would there be that you find offensive?
Only physical things should be protected by law, so if inventions can't be physical things then I guess we don't need to extend copyright. I thought more in the ways of "this [product] is not an exact copy of our own [product], but this piece/part right here took us years to develop, so where did they get that technology if they didn't copy it from us?" But that's as far as I think the law should go, it should protect "illegal copying," and that's it. Copyright law differs between having copied something and having made an exact replica without copying (which theoreticly isn't illegal, but that's an extreme case and perhaps would be), but patents are exclusive no matter what.
I can't think of any reason why someone should be allowed to own an "idea", I mean if it's not a "creative work" (something physical) it's not owned by anyone. It's just an idea, it's just a thought. Do something with that thought, prevent others from copying whatever you made (copyright law) and everyone's fine. But others should be allowed to come up with the same thought and make a similar product (or another product entierly) out of that idea if they (can prove they) didn't copy it off you.
Thoughts can be compared to DNA: Someone will figure out what every gene does eventually, just like somone will come up with a particular idea eventually, so it shouldn't be owned exclusively by anyone. (And yes, copyright law will/should prevent copying of information.)
The patent, like other types of "IP" law, are based on the idea that invention is a whole lot of work with no physically scarce product.
This is not a definition, but it's taken from wikipedia, and it's the origin of patents as I see it:
Per the word's original definition, one theory of patent legislation is to induce the inventor to disclose knowledge for the advancement of society in exchange for a limited period of exclusivity.
It says "theory", but I'm OK with that. I think it's correct. Even if it's wrong, that would mean it's created only for the reason that people should make money off their inventions. If that's the case, why are patents publicly available? If they weren't, then people could make an original product that is similar to an existing product without having copied it (*), and if that still was illegal then it's obvious that the patent system is no good. However, since it is in the public, the good old "you could have read it here first"-argument always wins, and the patentholder always wins regardless if someone actually did copy it or not.
The whole point of owning something "just because" makes no sense. You own something because you made it, and it's protected by law to prevent others from copying off your work. But what is the law protecting if they aren't copying?
Simply because you do work, you are not automatically entitled to reward.
Well.. that's regulated by law, so I guess you're right on that one. But you kind of nailed it here:
If I don't look for a patent first, then spend time and money duplicating something that I have no rights to, should I be compensated for my wasted time?
That's basicly the problem as I see it: Everyone should have the right to create whatever they want as long as they're not copying off someone else. Doesn't anything else seem unnatural? Patents deny this, which I think is taking away some freedom from everyone.
It's a complicated topic, but I really can't think of any particulary good reasons to have a patent system. It had good intentions though. Even with a strict and quality assured patent office I still think we'd be better off without it. I hope my rambling is understood by others.
(*) And if this was legal, the patent system might just work. I believe "secret" or "undisclosed" patents exists today, and even then this still is regarded as illegal, something I can't find logical (or just for that matter).
Life is Reality
for the time being EU will remain free of software patents
:)
more info on groklaw
happy to live in EU
Uh, what about, um, whatchamacallit, Taligant and the Pink operating system?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is interesting coming from a person who is a co-inventor on three patents held by Transmeta, listed below. All of these patents claim a software component or algorithm that could hamper the process of writing binary translation software. Some of the claims are not even novel (or non-obvious IMHO). This could easily affect open source software like qemu, valgrind and various JIT virtual machines.
Linus' patents:
6,714,904 "System for using rate of exception event generation during execution of translated instructions to control optimization of the translated instructions"
6,615,300 "Fast look-up of indirect branch destination in a dynamic translation system"
6,594,821
"Translation consistency checking for modified target instructions by comparing to original copy"