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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.'"
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.
IBM is the main reason why Microsoft started filing software patents. The story goes like this. Microsoft was blissfully unaware of the importance of software patents until one day Bill received a piece of mail from IBM lawyers telling him that Microsoft owes a rather large amount of money to IBM and there'd be consequences if they didn't pay up. They did pay that year, but they also mandated that each group files patents on anything significant they do. If they don't do anything significant, they file bullshit patents anyway, because there's a requirement to file and if they don't file enough their VP would be fucked. And VPs usually don't take buttsecks from the superiors lightly.
These days, by sheer numbers Microsoft is one of the biggest patent producing machines, able to go medieval on anyone who tries to enforce patents against it.
There's just one kink to this, as Eolas story amply demonstrated - if the plaintiff is just a hollow patent troll that does NOT infringe on anything Microsoft does and simply holds a patent to a core technology, he can get mega-millions by suing their ass.