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Red Hat Seeks Limits on Software Patents
eldavojohn writes "RedHat went to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals asking for limits on software patents yesterday. They have not uploaded their full brief yet online, but promise to post it soon. Here's a tidbit: 'Given the litigation risk, some open source companies, including Red Hat, acquire patents for the sole purpose of asserting them defensively in the event they are faced with a future lawsuit. Red Hat also provides open source intellectual property protections through our Open Source Assurance Program that protects our customers and encourages them to deploy with confidence. Our strategy is a prudent one and mitigates the risk of patent lawsuits, but it would be unnecessary if the system itself were fixed.'"
I remember hearing once that companies like IBM often build a stockpile of patents, not so much to litigate, but so nobody else can tell them what to do with patents they don't have. Even if you're infringing on somebody else's patents, if you have enough patents of your own, you can probably find one that they're infringing on, and you've essentially come to a stalemate, so everybody's happy. Only works for the big players, though. The little guys get screwed.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
RedHat is essentially that son who does everything the family needs, but is rarely acknowledged because he isn't 'cool'.
More on topic, I hope this works out, if only so it would reduce their costs as I like their services.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I'd tag this as "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense", but given the source, something tells me this isn't exactly unexpected or sudden. So, keep up the good work, ya red fedora-wearing nuts!
(assuming, of course, this actually GOES anywhere...)
It seems to me that the US in particular sees it's future income not to be based on selling physical goods but rather to be based on the sale of abstract knowledge. With that in mind the whole area of "intellectual property" and the motivations to protect it become in my own mind at least clearer. Information suffers from the attribute of infinite goods. I give it to you and at no cost you can undercut me and give it to millions of others without loss. That's the problem. It's hard to centralize profit when an idea can be replicated forever over the wires. On the flip-side, open-source in particular shows that instead of benefiting the top of the pyramid, wealth can be spread around much more evenly giving everyone the benefits and moving the area of competition to a different market. But this situation while good for the many does not currently lie within what the leaders of the United States of America see as in their strategic interest.
As much as I hate it, some great software has been developed under the patent system that otherwise might not have been made. A solution? I don't have it.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
The article managed to spell "Red Hat" correctly almost 20 times, and the summary couldn't manage it once.
This is a step in the right direction. Hopefully the US patent system realizes that it's messed up, and now that companies (especially ones that hold as many patents as red hat) are asking for limits on those (which would inevitably annul some of the ones redhat holds) it might be the push that's needed to spark reform.
FTA:
Today the patent system is, if anything, a hindrance to open source.
Sure. Absolutely. The patent system is so out of control that it is, if anything, a hindrance to start-ups, too.
In the words of Dick Cheney, "So?"
What it comes down to is which interest owns more Congressmen. (I'm aware that this is a brief in a court, but any sufficiently broad decision rejecting the idea of software patents would no doubt immediately come under legislative fire).
Also note that even if the scope of "what-is-patentable" is narrowed substantially, there's still hundreds of thousands of bogus software patents out there that aren't going to be deleted with the wave of a gavel, and that would most likely need to be litigated indvidually -- at substantial expense -- before they could be revoked, one-by-one. If they even can be revoked (I'd settle for being rendered officially unenforceable).
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
They have not uploaded their full brief yet online, but promise to post it soon.
TFA now has a link to a PDF of the brief.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
is here
With Ubuntu in the market, the big corporation have starting considering Linux as a threat. They're scared because it isn't a regular competitor; they can't buy it out. The GPL ensures this. So now they are trying to get involved and try to commercialize things. Recent developments such as -
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/08/202227
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/31/1359204
show what the commercial players are upto. In such a scenario, anybody would be scared, and hence seek legal protection.
And the history of Microsoft is in any case, enough for any company to be afraid of them.
RutSum.com
You could remove "open source" from the sentence above and it would be just as accurate.
While I despise software patents just like most of slashdot, I hate seeing the solution being legislation from the bench.
Software Patents are just about as silly as can be. If one thinks about it, anyone can use patents for PERSONAL or CORPORATE use, that patents should only apply to items being sold/marketed as a product or an improvement to an existing product for sale.
Lets just look at how this works, using some ancient tech, Stills. Lets say that I came up with a process or improvement that increases still production or the quality of the spirits being distilled. I can then market that improvement to all the other still makers, or start marketing stills that have that improvement built in.
However, if Joe Whitelighting makes his own stills, for his own use, and he happens upon building a still with said improvement, built by himself, then the person with the patent has no recourse.
The point of Patents is to get them into use as efficiently as possible. Not to horde patents to ideas and inventions that never get built.
In the case of software patents, Amazon isn't distributing, selling, or otherwise offering for license "OneClick". It is using this patent to keep others from using it, even if the others are building it (or something similar) themselves.
In this case the Patent is being used not to reward Amazon for something they are selling, but rather to punish anyone using a similar or related idea.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Kudos to Red Hat for this. However, arguing that software patents are harmful for open source falls short of the mark. In the end, they are harmful to everyone. In the best case, they raise the cost of software development for everyone, open source or otherwise, including anyone who does in-house software development. In the worst case, they make the development of certain programs impossible for anyone.
I think Bill Gates called it right years ago, when he wrote that patents would bring the industry to a stillstand, but I don't agree with his "solution" to acquire as many patents as possible: doing so only buys the patent holders a bit of additional time, i.e. they will be amongst last to be paralyzed by them (which of course is not without merit). But the patent creep will eventually catch up with everyone, leaving us with a software industry that can't do anything useful without paying toll to the patent trolls who won't do anything.
"While I despise software patents just like most of slashdot, I hate seeing the solution being legislation from the bench."
Software patents were created by legislation from the bench. Probably the broadest extensions of software patent case law were done by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to which Red Hat is presenting their brief. So Red Hat's approach is practical in the sense that that they have the opportunity to present our case to a body that is capable of deciding the issue in our favor.
It would be better if we could get a law passed by Congress abolishing software patents because the Congressional law would take precedence over case law. The courts could no longer decide that the current laws, while not mentioning software patents, logically imply that software patents are legal.
I have lobbied Congress to abolish software patents and got nowhere. I came to the conclusion that to be successful we would have to hire a professional lobbyist and join the fight in the Judiciary Subcommittees' hearing rooms along with all the other lobbyists fighting over the patent reform issue. I think that Red Hat spending the money to jump on this opportunity to possibly abolish or curtail software patents is money well spent. It is probably cheaper and certainly faster than spending money on Congressional lobbying and the opportunity is immediate.
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Steve Stites
Comment removed based on user account deletion
While this seems a great windfall for the unscrupulous, the capabilities of machines keep advancing at a great pace. As soon as machines can reliably walk, styles of walking can be patented. As soon as machines have reason to breathe - sniffers, for example - breathing methods can be patented. As soon as machines can think, forms of thought can be patented.
The lawyers who created this bad case law in the '90s simply didn't understand the potential of general purpose computers. They envisioned screens, keyboards, and printouts - and thought the genie they created was pretty well contained. They were wrong.
I don't see Red Hat's brief listed, but here are links to most of the amicus briefs filed in this case, along with a short summary of each.
No, it's Red Hat doing with patents what GNU and FSF are doing with copyrights.
A patent on hash tables in 2006. There is nothing terribly special about the data structure. Wtf?
Richard Stallman points out how this works, and the specific value of cross-licensing, in his talk on "The Danger of Software Patents" or "Software Patents—Barriers to development". He's given this talk many times and recordings and transcripts are readily available (thanks to all you recorders and transcribers). He references an article in "Think" magazine, #5, 1990 (IBM's promotional magazine) which says that IBM gets "perhaps an order of magnitude" more value from cross-licensing than they do from licensing patents they own. The linked article quoting "Think" and the points raised there are well worth reading in their entirety—for IBM (the world's largest patent holder for many years running, by the way, thus compared to IBM everyone is "little") the trouble software patents create is hypothetical, for everyone else (including users) it's very real.
Digital Citizen
My software freedom is too high a price to pay. I'm certainly not willing to go along with an alleged relationship between exclusionary power over ideas one can use in software and the speed with which those ideas are used to make software (where exclusive power is said to provoke people to develop these products). I remember computer software developing at a perfectly fine pace when software patents either didn't exist or were rare. What we're seeing today is more likely a power grab than anything to do with a justification for product development.
Digital Citizen
The Red hat brief as posted by one of the later posters on this thread is absolutely excellent. Red Hat just calmly goes through the points of law about why patents on abstract ideas should not be allowed.