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Time To Abolish Software Patents?
gnujoshua writes "Has the time come to abolish software patents? Fortune columnist Roger Parloff reports on a new campaign called End Software Patents, which he views as 'attempting to ride a wave of corporate and judicial disenchantment with aspects of the current patent system.' Ryan Paul of Ars Technica writes that the purpose of the campaign is to 'educate the public and encourage grass-roots patent reform activism in order to promote effective legislative solutions to the software patent problem.' The campaign site is informative and targets many types of readers, and it includes a scholarship contest with a top prize of $10,000.00. We've recently discussed the potential legal re-examination of software patents."
Yes.
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1. software patents != copyright
;/) but also means you can do whatever the fuck you want to to ANY piece of program in the world, including reverse engineering the hell out of anything, installing OS X on a non-Apple toaster, freely mixing Linux and leaked windows code, and so on. I would see it as a benefit. The OSS community and the open source / free software model is too powerful for any closed-source corporation (but maybe one) to stop, so simply forking a project and closing the source will mean the fork will die soon.
2. abolishing COPYRIGHT, not PATENTS, would eventually mean that ALL the software will fall under a BSD-style license, which not only means free (but without copyleft
3. Abolishing copyright won't happen any time soon. *Maybe* if Stallman becomes the president.
Stallman does not want to abolish copyright, the whole GPL relies on it to keep the source free. If he wanted "the other kind of free", he could already have chosen to use or change to a "BSD-style" license, or release everything to the public domain.
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I don't understand what you mean by this. If I was a normal troll I'd say you don't know what you're talking about. Personally I don't like copyrights, but I do like the GPL. This is, however, illogical.
Richard Stallman wants everyone to be able to get the source to every computer program they run. He thinks this is very important, because without the source, you cannot modify the program, you can't learn from it, and you can't see what the program actually does. If you don't agree on this, then you won't agree with my next paragraph.
The only thing that stops $BIG_EVIL_COMPANY to take any GPLed open source project, add random proprietary changes to it, and release it without the new source code, is because if they do, they will break the GPL, and the GPL is only enforcible because of the copyright laws. Without the GPL, and in extension: the copyright law, they wouldn't have any obligation to release the source except for goodwill, and of course the other good things that comes with open source and free software. Some companies or individuals doesn't want or need those good things, and thus they oppose open source.
Of course, I'm not Stallman, and I know he doesn't like the current copyright system either, but completely removing copyrights without putting something else in as a replacement would be bad for free-as-in-libre software.
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There are three main problem with software patents (and business method patents as well). One is the impossibility of searching the prior art. Another is obviousness to a Person Having Ordinary Skill In The Art (PHOSITA). And a third is that many software patents don't claim innovative solutions to problems, but claim all solutions to a newly discovered problem, even one for which the applicant really hasn't provided a practical, implemented, innovative solution.
The prior art in software is the corpus of all previously written software. To see if something had been done before, it would be necessary for a patent examiner to look through all software that had been written before to determine if a particular technique claimed in a patent application had been used. Programmers don't document their work very thoroughly, much less write journal articles on the techniques they use. And a lot of software technology is just learned by doing and by copying ideas discovered by reading other peoples' code but not formally otherwise documented by them.
Open source software provides one window into the corpus of software, and the IBM Type 4 program libraries (for machines such as the 360 and 1130) have some published source code, but proprietary software is distinctly unavailable for searching in most cases.
The same applies to business method patents. What business writes journal articles about their ways of doing things, especially ways that give them a competitive edge? Again, ideas are learned by doing and copying ideas learned on previous jobs.
One example is the Amazon "One Click" patent. That patent combines the cookie with the open account. You couldn't tell that by looking at the obfuscated language in which the patent is written, but that is what it does. Evidence of the open account as a business process can probably be found by looking in records written in Babylonian cuneiform. However, the USPTO doesn't search records in Babylonian cuneiform to look for evidence that a business process has been used before.
A second example is the patent for which Verizon sued Vonage. Any programmer with a brain would know that to hook up a VOIP system to a telephone switch would require some information and that the best way to organize the information would be in a database. The rest is legal obfuscation. If patent applications had to be written to a level of plain understanding, most would fall away because of obviousness.
Finally, patent applications should be required to include a working model or implementation or some kind of other evidence that the applicant wasn't just patenting the problem but actually had a solution. There was a discussion some months ago on Slashdot about a patent that covered all ways of doing something with graphics. The recipient clearly had discovered something that needed to be done in a graphics system. What the patent claimed was all ways of doing what was needed. IIRC, what the patent actually provided may have been one way of doing it, or might not have provided an actual solution. This is the software equivalent of patenting the electric light without figuring out how to make one that worked, a process that took Edison a lot of time and effort.
Many lawyers have a difficult time understanding technology. Some became lawyers because they weren't good at math and science. When those lawyers become judges, they don't suddenly gain an understanding of technology. They stick to their comfort zone. That is the reason the CAFC required documentary evidence to prove what prompted a PHOSITA to do something obvious. If it wasn't obvious to a lawyer, why should they treat it as obvious to a PHOSITA? Fortunately, the Supreme Court saw otherwise. Perhaps the courts will come to their senses on software and business method patents as well.
But you can patent using a mathematical algorithm to do something. I mean, at some level everything becomes a mathematical algorithim. The arrangement of chips to optimize [don't know enough specifics] is based on a mathematical algorithim.
So, the math behind GIF comprssion may not be patentable, but an image file format compressed in that way would be.
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