Slashdot Mirror
British Government Comes Out Against 'Pure' Software Patents
uglyduckling writes "The British Government has issued a response to a recent petition calling for 'the Prime Minister to make software patents clearly unenforcible'. The answer is reassuring but perhaps doesn't go far enough, and gives no specific promises to bring into line a patent office that grants software patents (according to the petition) 'against the letter and the spirit of the law'. The Gowers Review that it references gives detailed insight into the current British position on this debate, most interestingly recommending a policy of 'not extending patent rights beyond their present limits within the
areas of software, business methods and genes.'"
The way european democracy works is that if the non-elected european commission chooses to have SW patents after some hollidays sponsored by big american SW compagnies, all the european countries will have to implement them fast or be fined.
The government response is not reassuring. Read the wording of the response again. They are careful not to deny the dangerous distinction that they have been maintaining between "pure" software and software which is implemented to achieve a "technical effect". It is the same sneaky "backdoor" that the UK and EU Patent Offices have been using to allow what most intelligent observers would call "software patents". Even worse, the response makes it clear they are proposing to implement the recommendations on patent law. That will be precisely the occasion for approving the "technical effect" ruse under the guise of an official scheme supposedly merely to "clarify" existing patent law and to "limit" the applicability of patenting.
There are a number of other petitions on the same site that might be of interest to slashdotters:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/OpenDocument/ - petition for opendocument to be used by the british government.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/teach-oss - petition for teaching in schools to be vendor neutral, instead of promoting microsoft products
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Dont expect too much of the petition system.
There was a very well publicised petition on the new proposed road charging system that got 1.7million supporting votes cast, it had little noticible effect on the goverment. Infact all it caused was alot of publicity and condemnation in the Labour ranks that some 'prat' (direct quote) had created this tool that could be used to bash them.
To put it in perspective the whole population in the UK is 60million in total, so 1.7million is ALOT of the driving adults.
see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6354735.stm
I think Labour saw it as a exercise in good relations and checking the boxes. Certainly there is no sign of them doing anything about the petitions that people actually support.
You and a friend are driving along a scenic dirt road, when all of a sudden the shoulder gives way, and you are tumbling over and over, until you are on the edge of a precipice, roaring white water gapes below.
Your friend is shaking with terror. "We're going to die!" he says.
"Well, then," you say, putting on the parking brake,"I don't think we should go any farther in that direction."
----
Almost every practicioner I know thinks that software practices are a nuisance and a hindrance. Certainly they are useful in startups when you are considering your exit strategy options, but I have personally never seen a technology that was developed because it would be sold as IP, that would not have been developed otherwise.
Overall, the best word I can think of to describe software and business method patents is "fiasco".
The government response made me think, with affection, of ironic humor of the late, great Douglas Adams. He loved characters to say sensible sounding, politic things that were nonetheless patently insane. Adams humor was not surrealistic, it was hyperrealistic. One thing he comes back to again and again: if anything is really large, really important, and really obvious, people will find a way to ignore it completely.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Except that patents only provide financial benefits to big corporations. If a small company or individual has a patent that a big company wants, the big company will simply use the patent without paying licensing, and if the patent owner challenges them in court, they'll be bankrupted before the case is over.
On the flipside, big companies claim patents on obvious things like double clicks on hand held devices, one click purchases, digitally timeshifting recordings, etc. and can defend these obvious patents in court because they have deep pockets.
If the patent system is going to help spur innovation it needs to prevent deep pockets from being able to abuse the patent system, and right now it's failing at that.
"The Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software."
That seems pretty clear to me. Why is everyone moaning about this being vague?
"Although certain jurisdictions, such as the US, allow more liberal patenting of software-based inventions, these patents cannot be enforced in the UK."
If anyone was thinking about starting a GNU/GPL project on something patented then find someone British to be your front man. Open Source patents problem solved.... for now.
The original US patent (5,440,676) that opened the door to patenting software was for an anti-aliasing feature in an oscilloscope display. Because it was shown that it could have been done in software or hardware, but the result was a physical mechanism, the patent was allowed. Once the foot was in the door, everyone just started adding boilerplate "device is an electronic computer comprising software to do X" and the battle was over.
Anyway, the original was on a device, not pure software. UK believes that they can enforce the same rule that the US PTO failed to enforce.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Who wrote this? Kudos for starting the petition, but folks! Its hard enough to get a relevant response out of a politician at the best of times, without asking them if they have stopped beating their wives.
No political advisor worth their salt is going to let their charge tacitly support that unneccesary little swipe at... who could it be?... tacked on to a not-directly-related issue. Any slim chance of getting a politician to respond directly to the issues raised (instead of the sort of bland re-statement of policy seen here) goes straight out of the window.
The patent issue is a lot wider and deeper than our favorite convicted monopolists... who risk Mutually Assured Destruction by last-century's favorite convicted monopolist (and others) if they finally stop the FUD bombardment and launch their missiles at Linux. Darn, that's another metaphor not to try on a politician at the moment :-)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I thought it was the Diamond v. Diehr case, where a vulcanizing process for rubber used computer program to control.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Subtle difference, Diamond v. Diehr was the case which allowed processes which include a computer program as a step to be patented. In re Alappat , the case I mentioned, was, AFAIK, the first case to allow a patent on a computer program.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
The original US patent (5,440,676) that opened the door to patenting software...
That's bogus information. Software patents go back much further than that. The first software patent was filed in 1965, issued in 1968, and expired in 1981. It's Martin Goetz's U.S. "Sorting System", Patent #3,380,029, the sorting algorithm that broke the O(N log N) barrier. That's the technology behind SyncSort, and it powered mainframe sorting for a generation.