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Software Patents In The European Union Continued...
Christopher Reimer writes "O'Reilly Policy DevCenter has a nice overview concerning the legalizing software patents in the European Union. From the article: 'The Computer Implemented Inventions Directive (CIID), which seeks to clarify the issue, is still being fought over in the EU and may or may not result in legalizing them. For small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and in particular, free software projects, there is much to lose.'"
For small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and in particular, free software projects, there is much to lose.
And for the attorneys much to gain...
My sigs offend the max # of people all over the world, regardless of race, religion, color, sex or creed. It's a gift.
FTA: "If more programmers and SMEs approach their MEPs and go beyond the single letter, we may yet win."
But how do we as IT people explain the general public this would be a disaster to European economy? What could start some emotion going for this issue? The customer is also going to be victimised! Low quality and low security software galore probably. But do they know?
Somehow I know this concerns everybody, not only people in the industry. Because democracy is being ignored for something a lot of people don't understand doesn't mean they can get away with it.
I know a considerable amount (for a programmer) about patent law, and I've read a fair number of patents.
I do not, however, know how one can clearly distinguish between software and non-software patents.
It is not as easy as one might think. Many things we call "software patents" do not mention software or even computers. This didn't use to be the case. They used to insist that an example hardware system be described in the patent, perhaps as a "preferred embodiment". Now many patents simply describe an algorithm. Whether that algorithm is carried out by computer, sliderule, abacus, or pencil and paper is often not explained.
A further complication arises when software is a part of an invention that also has hardware components. There are many such inventions today.
Unfortunately, "I know a software patent when I see one" probably wouldn't cut it in the courts. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I could comment on this problem.
Being a software developer myself, I'd rather go with the 1% chance that I can make a difference, than standing idly by.
You never know...
I just had this discussion with a co-worker yesterday.
Now, to be clear, I'm not a fan of software patents. A lot of these patents that I see enforced, are for trivial things that shouldn't have been patented in the first place, like "one click" shopping. And what about general things like sorting algorithms, if bubble sort was patented, it would have done serious harm to just even teaching the profession.
Having said that, I see that most people on slashdot want to get rid of software patents, but what I'm wondering is, why only software? I think you are either for patents or against, and that computer scientists basically "disarming" themselves is not a good idea.
Unless I'm missing something, it seems people value physical inventions more than software ones, and that doesn't make sense to me. Sometimes the software "inventions" are even more complex and influencial than your physical ones. If you say, get rid of the software patents, we're saying our work doesn't deserve the same protection as work from other fields? Just because our work is software? That doesn't make sense to me.
Maybe we should raise the bar on software patents, maybe we shouldn't let "business processes" be patented (one click for example), but I don't think it's consistent to say CS work is less deserving than work from other fields.
- sigs are for wimps.
Why not simply shorten the lifespan of patents to say 2 years? 20 is certainly too long. And yes, I know it would have to get past the corporations who are trying to protect their (short term) interests. But from a realistic standpoint, 2 years is a long time to have a monopoly on an idea or concept. You can get a tremendous head start, and if the patented idea is a good one, a pretty damn good market share. But the competition still has an opportunity to use the ideas and generate innovation advancement after that time period.
I know corperations in America tend to be short sighted, but if I can see that China and other countries are simply going to ignore the (software) patents and hammer ahead with technological innovation, why can't the higher ups see it?
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
The whole thing with software patents is funny to me, because it means the EU is squandering its opportunity to become the next superpower (in competition with China maybe) in a few decades when the US's technological dominance has faded completely. Software patents might cause the EU to sink just as far the US will, in technological terms at least.
The reason is that you patent an invention, not speech, and software is speech. Software, like the written word in other forms of speech, is already protected by copyright. Patent protection on top of that is redundant and problematic in its own right, for how can you patent speech?
For one thing, there's already a perfectly good mechanism for protecting actual software and source code: copyright.
And for another, the bar to entry is much, much lower with software. You don't need all the resources for mass production, manufacturing, duplication, marketing, or anything other than a web site.
AIUI, the raison d'être of patents is to protect the inventor: to stop a big company coming along, copying his or her invention, and using their much bigger resources to develop and mass produce the product and lock him or her out. But that's not a problem for software; the big company can't copy the software directly, and they don't have much of an advantage in mass production either. So why have them?
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Patents don't work for software for the same reason they don't work for literature. A computer program, like a novel, is a collection of a great many ideas taken from all over the place. The value isn't in any specific solution, but rather in the way the whole package is combined.
Imagine if a novelist had to look up every metaphore or interesting sentence structure in a patent database somewhere. On top of that, the database would be organized in such a way that the novelist could never really be sure that he'd found all the relevent patents. If you compare something to an apple, does the patent that mentions comparisons to oranges apply? They're both fruit, after all. The only way to gain reasonable assurance that a given sentence doesn't infringe would be to ask a lawyer, and even the lawyer could only give an opinion - with the final decision to be made by a court.
If novelists had to work that way, only large companies with defensive patent portfolios of their own could write books. Individuals could never afford the legal staff needed to make sure their work wasn't infringing.
Software works much the same way. You encounter a problem and you try to solve it. Every time you solve something, even the smallest issue, you might be infringing on somebody's patent. Anybody with a patent portfolio and a lot of lawyers can put you out of business.
The patent system was meant to encourage people to publish scientific discoveries rather than keeping them as trade secrets. But most software problems are such that the effort to find the patented solution in a database is more than would be required to just solve the problem yourself. There are a few rare exceptions (RSA, for example), but there's no way the handful of gems can outweigh the harm done by patents.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow