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Talking Software Patents with a Politician?

Posted by Cliff on from the communication-with-a-different-species dept.

agent dero asks: "I'm currently trying to land an hour or two of my local representative to the House of Representatives so I can talk about software patents, amongst other things. I'm looking for the best way to describe the pitfalls of Software Patents to somebody who hasn't the slightest clue what Open Source is, let alone how software patents will hurt it. How can a computer geek relate the evil in patenting algorithms to a non-computer geek to where it will have an effective impact?"

2 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. The basics... by tekiegreg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Congrats you managed (or will manage) to get some face time with a big guy in govt. Just remember the following points:

    1) The guy is a busy man with lots in his mind, keep it brief and to the point at all times, in fact if you have an hour of time, present for 30 minutes and give the rest for him to either ask questions or politely take leave as he needs, prepare to present to not just your rep, but maybe his staff and other reps that might choose to join in (it's possible).

    2) Impassioned emotional pleas are no good here, construct a good well founded argument and you will do awesome. Do your homework throughly before going in. Also if you happen to know a lawyer that's willing to help you, ask him to help draft your statements before going in (better still ask if he can join you in presenting to the rep).

    3) Prepare oral arguments (the old fashioned Powerpoints or whatever your favorite pesentation software is will do here), as well as a brief (no more than 5 page) written argument to leave with him.

    Having little knowledge in particular about open source software patents in particular other than what's on Slashdot, I'll leave the rest to you to reasearch and form up.

    Try this and you might just be amazed at your reponse. I look forward to seeing your arguments drafted into a floor bill at the House :-)

    --
    ...in bed
  2. Here's how I would put the argument by Tom7 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Here's how I would put it.

    Patents exist only in order to encourage innovation. This much is essentially in the Constitution, because the right for congress to create patent and copyright laws is preceded by "To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts..."

    The way that patents encourage innovation is to provide an incentive to expend resources to create an invention. The incentive is the exclusive right to use that invention. Many inventions take millions of dollars to create, so the patent plays an important role for those inventions, at least with the way our society currently operates.

    Here's the rub: most software inventions do not take millions of dollars to create, since the resources involved are almost always simply a guy and a computer (or pencil and paper). We've seen this many times, as fairly obvious ideas are re-invented, or old, overly generic patents are applied to unrelated inventions years later. Here, patents stifle innovation instead of promoting it. There already exists an incentive to invent, and since it is so easy to do so, patents just provide an unnecessary friction.

    There are also many specific problems with software patents. The term is too long considering the pace at which the field moves. The patent office is woefully underequipped to evaluate software patent applications. Patents are often incompatible with free software, which has shown to provide a huge amount of value (for the Progress of Science and the useful Arts!), probably more than software patents ever have.