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Five Linux Companies Buy Software Patents
An anonymous reader writes "In order to protect themselves against patent grabbing 'trolls,' major Linux companies are buying software patents through a nonprofit company called Open Invention Network. This nonprofit company will then offer royalty-free licenses to companies and individuals that agreed not to assert their own patents."
Or can you agree not to assert future patents?
Whilst frivolous patent are inherently bad and shows the system doesn't work in the real world it might be a necessary defence to avoid future legal problems. So just hope they can stay non-profit :)
The five companies are :
1) International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)
2) Sony Corp
3) Philips Electronics NV
4) Novell Inc. (SUSE)
5) Red Hat Inc
Fresh from yesterday/a
Okay, so the way to get modded up for comments to this post, is to pick a +5 comment from the following post, then give it a slightly different spin to account for the 23 hours passed since then:
/ 1321238&tid=136&tid=233&tid=106
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/10
I guess it's not a complete dupe... the linked article for this post is different.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
The story the other day seemed to indicate they were just going to try to protect their customers from litigation. I read that as "providing legal backing" etc., as opposed to actually buying all the patents!
IBM, Sony, Phillips and Novell aren't really Linux companies - they know that Free/Open/Libre software is the only way they are going to utilize the vastly under-utilized creative urges of the hackers of the world to fight their own enemies. GNU/Linux is just a primary weapon in their arsenal and they just want to keep it sharp.
Even more sadly, the more we use patents to fight patents, the less backing the fight against software patents is going to get. To quote:Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
King Aethelred of Wessex announced that he had purchased protection from the Viking raiders that have plagued our shores. "It was really easy," announced Aethelred, "all I had to do was pay money to another bunch of pirates to protect us from the first bunch. Now the problem is solved for ever, and I can't see any potential downsides." On the news, shares in PlunderCorp rose 35% in anticipation of a rich and ongoing new revenue stream.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Color me cautiously hopeful.
Additionally, patent trolls are immune to this kind of patent pool since they tend not to create any software themselves and are therefore not vulnerable to software patents.
The real fix here is to wrestle the patent system back from the "intellectual property maximalists" and get rid of patents on software which do not motivate innovation (just try to name one useful innovation in software we wouldn't have were it not for software patents - they are occasionally a by-product of innovation, but never a motivator for it).
Patents aside, I wonder how much of current global economy is fueled by this kind of nonsense. $A_COMPANY gettin money from $ANOTHER_COMPANY, as long as $A_COMPANY's lawyers don't do $LEGAL_ACTION to $ANOTHER_COMPANY's lawyers while they are litigating $YET_ANOTHER_COMPANY about what they shouldn't have done to $A_COMPANY according to an agreement which wasn't to be disclosed except in front of $REGULATOR_BODY's lawyers... and so on ad nauseam. Maybe a lawyer could find a sense (wrong, of course) in the previous sentence, but it was intended as an example of the insanity of an out-of-control system where wealth is exchanged on the basis of what one doesn't do.
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
The patent office never wanted to grant patents for software. They were forced to do so by the supreme court in the 1981 Diamond v. Diehr.[bitlaw.com]
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
What concerns me about this is what happens when a company changes its mind.
There have historically been no shortage of bad actors (ex: SCO, Rambus, MSFT, etc). I can envision a scenario where a company might join until their encumbered tech gets into the guts of Linux, then change hands/die off/spin off divisions/etc. so that the entity bound by the agreement is no longer the one holding the patent rights.
Even IBM's affection for Linux is unlikely to be eternal - are they equipping themselves with a big 'off' switch to use later?
This plan looks to have some nasty ethical & financial failure modes. Of course, I'm not a lawyer and haven't seen the details in any case, so my fears may be groundless.
Dude A is a MicroSoft sales rep. He was foaming at the mouth about new workflow solutions pouring out of Redmond. I asserted that there haven't be any new ideas in computer science in decades; the real issues are organizational, not technical.
Dude A loudly protested that there was constant innovation.
So I asked Dude B, who is among the hardest-core propeller-heads I've ever met. Dude B thought that packet switched networks were probably the last genuinely new idea.
Clearly, as a working stiff, I have no idea about these things. The fact that the PTO keeps puking new patents for these ideas must mean that there is some basis for them, no?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The problem is, of course, that this will not work against patent trolls. Patent trolls have no use for the patents themselves, they are only interested in sueing others. So the OIN might hold off Microsoft, but it won't hold off sleazy extortionists whose only business is patent litigation.