Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
The article managed to spell "Red Hat" correctly almost 20 times, and the summary couldn't manage it once.
I call bullshit. Name one category of software that would not have been developed without patents and name a few specific products.
Who is John Galt?
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.
Oh, wait...
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
Link to the brief It was at the bottom of the page. .02$ I think you should be able to patent compilers, anything else should fall under copyright.
As for my
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
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
You might argue that Frauenhofer would not have done the R&D to develop the MP3 encoding without the expectation they could get software patents and charge people for them. Then again, other formats like Ogg Vorbis were developed freely (even if MP3 came first).
Even if such cases do exist, they are more than outweighed by the cases where innovation is blocked, not promoted, by patent minefields.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
As much as I hate it, some great software has been developed under the Copyright system that otherwise might not have been made. A solution? I don't have it.
Fixed that for you!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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.
"I call bullshit. Name one category of software that would not have been developed without patents and name a few specific products."
PNG, Ogg Vorbis etc.
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.
Haha yes that was fixed indeed! As far as copyright is concerned for software, there has to be some sort of a functional equivalency protection that Copyright doesn't protect. If you have some sort of technique for compliation or something and the code is copyrighted. If someone comes along and figures out how to do the same thing without exactly taking your code, they're free to do it. I think that's where the problem lies.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
MP3 got developed when it did because scientific output on speech coding and psycho-acoustic models, using wavelet and cosine transforms (particularly the DCT), &c., reached critical mass at the time.
I just finished the brief. Of course this subject deserves more thorough explanation and analysis, but who has the time.
Red Hat is arguing that the Federal Circuit has failed to apply the standards set forth by the Supreme Court. Namely, they are arguing that software along does not fall within 35 USC Section 101 without some sort of physical transformation of something. See Diamond v. Diehr. The Fed. Cir. created a standard saying that software is patentable if it creates a "useful, concrete, and tangible" result. See State Street and AT&T. The Fed. Cir. then went on to say that a numerical result is a tangible result, Red Hat says that this is incorrect based on a Supreme Court case called Benson.
Red Hat is saying the Fed. Cir. has been improperly applying Supreme Court case law. Furthermore, they are making that argument to the Fed. Cir. The Fed. Cir. did ask for the argument, so the court might be receptive. However, most courts do not overturn themselves but instead find a way to set new precedent without overturning prior case law. Should we really expect the Fed. Cir. to overturn their own decisions from State Street and AT&T?
What Red Hat is not arguing, is whether software that controls a physical process that creates a transformation in a physical thing may properly be part of a patent. That was established by the Supreme Court in Diamond v. Diehr.
I'm willing to pay a premium to have technology advance faster.
Sure. The thing is indications are that patents make technology advance slower instead. Monopolies do not tend to encourage efficiency; Microsoft with all its resources can barely keep pace with an underfinanced rag-tag bunch of geeks.
There are various other models for diverting funds to have technology advance faster without the damaging aspects of monopoly rights; they were never intended to accomplish faster technological advances, they were originally intended as a way to enrich the friends of the crown at the expense of the populace. As such, they are serving their original purpose well.
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.
-----------
Steve Stites
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.
for software, there has to be some sort of a functional equivalency protection that Copyright doesn't protect
But why does there? What exactly is the problem? If it's trivial, then you can't have put a lot of effort into developing it yourself so what investment are you trying to protect? If it's complex, then without access to the source (or similar clues) your competitors will likely have just as hard a time developing their version as you had developing yours, in which case what's the problem? You have the lead time to (try to) recoup your investment plus profit, become the recognised (and thus hopefully entrenched) provider of the software, etc.
Software really isn't like mechanical/physical inventions. For them, the item *is* the source, you can't sell one without the other, and hence patents are (arguably) required.
It's official. Most of you are morons.