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End Software Patents Project Comes Out Swinging
Linux.com is reporting that the End Software Patents project is launching several new initiatives to help drive support for their cause. Among the new methods are a web site, a report on the state of patents in the US, and a scholarship contest promising to award $10,000 "for the best paper on the effects of the patentability of software and business methods under US law." "The project is being launched with initial funding of a quarter million dollars, supplied primarily by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Under the directorship of Ben Klemens, a long-time advocate of software patent abolition best-known for the book Math You Can't Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software, the project is being supported by the FSF, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). One of ESP's goals is to enlist support from academics, software developers, legal experts, and business executives. Its initial supporters show that the project is already well on its way to building such a coalition."
Whatever you think about RMS and FSF you have to agree that getting rid of software patents would benefit everyone, globally in the software industry. From the commercial hardware vendors, all the way down to the hobbyist BSD developer.
I can't wait for it to happen in the states as I predict it will also trigger the fall in the few countries that also allow software patents.
From a Linux desktop standpoint alone it would finally allow for built in support of DVD, MP3s, etc. Some projects such as GIMP won't have to work around patents to get the features they want built in. Open source driver support might increase..
Even from a closed source perspective Microsoft wouldn't have to worry about getting sued and having to purchase massive amounts of patents to defend itself. They could focus of providing a better user experience without restrictions that patents encumber you with.
Everyone wins... apart from the lawyers..
No, the basic arguments aren't just that but they are so general its hard not to avoid them. Think about a patent of a method of making a vacuum cleaner, its a new idea it should be patented, thats fine, but how about a "machine that uses suction to clean" as a patent with little evidence that you even have one made, the second one represents most software patents of say "a method to download songs onto a hard disk to be played back at a later date" where there are very few "true" software patents that aren't held by patent trolls or monopolies.
In short, I can get a patent for making a vacuum cleaner (minus prior art and such) but most software patents try to patent "a cleaning device using suction" and many of them decide to then go for "a *insert adjective* device using suction" and "a cleaning device using *insert word here*". And that is what makes software patents different.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
This confirms what I already suspected - it is brutally difficult to define a software patent. It's one of those problems that seems easy at the onset, but gets more and more complicated the more you think it through.
Yeah, this is what bothered me so much about the $10,000 scholarship contest. If you want to get something done give that $10K to a Senator, not some poor student! Bribing politicians is a time tested way of getting what you want. That's how we got the software patents in the first place!
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2059
Maybe we could start with the birth of, say, Unix and pick our way forward in time, cataloging the various ideas, a la Aristotle. I think a graph of the count of genuinely new discoveries per year would drop off at a brisk pace.
But I don't think the USPTO can handle that sort of truth. Truth has deleterious effects on business models, you know.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
We live in the only period of history where it is possible to get a patent on something you discovered without claiming you invented it. If I found a piece of farming equipment that did some novel thing and I went and applied for a patent on it, I would be asked to declare that I invented it and it is not the work of someone else - to satisfy the no-prior-art test. If, however, I am pulling apart a bacterium or some other living creature, the patent office will happily grand me a patent on its genes - they won't even ask me if I invented these genes because it is assumed that I am just patenting a discovery.
How we know is more important than what we know.
https://endsoftpatents.org/donate
There's a 3D shader technique called Phong shading. If Phong shading was patented then Blinn-Phong would never have be discovered which is a change in math. Blinn-Phong is faster and provides more accurate results.
All software is a form of math, one technique can have completely different looking math but produces the same results such as the prior example. You can not patent math because you didn't invent anything, you just discovered the formula which was already there.
Well fuck me with a shovel, those folks are serious.
I don't think it has to do with abstracts of truth and business models as much as it does a severely overloaded and inexperienced system that relies heavily on the applicant to find and odder prior art. Combine that with an vague and somewhat ambiguous court ruling that allowed software patents in the first place, and you can see the abuse isn't necessarily malice on the USPTO.
We have to remember, it was a court ruling that added software patents to the system, not a well constructed law laying out definitions and boundaries. Our fearless (US) leaders decided it would be better to just create a court for disputes instead of defining some things that seriously seem to be out of whack. The result is the often trolled and abused system we take for granted today.
The so called "good guys" spent too much time fighting the process in an attempt to get some sanity to the ordeal. Now it seems that they have to play catch up and suffer the role of quarterback and getting sacked in the game that shouldn't need to be played while they build up their defensive line. And seeing how no analogy would be complete without a referece to a car, they drove a red car to the game.
IMHO, what this guy has to say about programming languages is about as valid as my dad saying that no good music has been made since the 1960's.
He's trapped in the past. I'm sure there'd be an argument for why programming innovations of the last 10 years aren't really interesting or aren't as important as his Golden Age, just as there are people who think you can mathematically prove that rock was perfected in 1968. At best, you can make it work with a very narrow definition of what qualifies, just as you can prove that modern music has little innovation if you decide that only Gregorian Chant really qualifies as music.
Meanwhile, the world moves on and a generation of programming pioneers trades their vision for early admission to Future Fossil Fuels university.
No, that's not the argument.
The argument used to justify any patents is that they promote progress. Our experience with patents in the specific case of software is that they actually hinder progress. Therefore, in order to promote progress, software patents should be abolished.
http://outcampaign.org/
Take the ten thousand dollars, multiply it by ten thousand, and use that to fly congressmen and women and senators to luxury resorts; buy the kids and grandkids of same tuition to ivy league universities; get them jobs on the boards of major corporations that pay big money with little or no responsibility... etc. etc. etc. If that doesn't work use the remaining money to find the weaknesses of same and exploit them. Just like the people who are paid to advocate software patents to legislators. Then you will get rid of the software patents. You have to fight fire with fire.
Nice polite little information campaigns and essay contests talking about giving it to the 'man' won't do squat. The only people who will listen to those are the people who already agree with you.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
The baby is a baby cobra, so yes, we should throw it out.
Having no software patents at all would still be a massive improvement over what we currently have. And we don't know how to build a better system.
That's not true. Very frequently, the scenario operates like this:
Person A has a need for a piece of software to do X.
Person A creates a piece of software to do X.
Person A is now in possession of a piece of software to do X, and has gained from it - he is "paid" by having something to do X, which he did not have before. He created it purely because he needed it. But he's still got that software. He doesn't need to bury it in a hole. So he releases it for other people to use, and in no way does this cost him anything.
Person B has a need for a piece of software to do X and Y. He takes person A's software, and extends it to do Y as well.
The cycle continues. Each person involved benefits from the existence of the software that they need, which would not otherwise exist. Since they all would have had to create the software anyway (since they needed it and it didn't exist), it costs them nothing to let other people use it. And all of them are better off because they have shared the work, rather than each one duplicating it themselves: giving it away has actually gained them something, it hasn't cost them something.
Behind most successful free software projects is a cycle of individual need and gain like this one.