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IBM's Supreme Court Brief Says That Patents Drive Free Software

Posted by timothy on from the corellation-is-not-causation dept.

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "For the Supreme Court's upcoming review of the Bilski decision, IBM has submitted an amicus brief claiming that software patents 'fueled the explosive growth of open source software development' (!) (p38 of linked PDF). EndSoftwarePatents, for its own amicus brief, is looking for help building a list of free software harmed by software patents, and a list of companies that distribute free software and are taxed by patent royalties."

10 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. WTF IBM by Microlith · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Good to see that IBM has no clue what they're talking about. Patents most certainly have not fueled the explosive growth of open source software, the open nature of the licenses and community have. But go ahead and misrepresent the open source community IBM, for your own sake.

    Patents sit as an ever present threat that threatens to push development outside of software patent permitting countries, and makes software that is known to violate them into seriously gray territory. I also don't see how a patent, something with the sole purpose of denying use of the described mechanism to others, could possibly aid open source.

    1. Re:WTF IBM by Sloppy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Patents most certainly have not fueled the explosive growth of open source software

      Would libpng have been written, if not for the LZW patent? How about all of xiph's codecs? We wouldn't have Vorbis if it weren't for the MP3 patents.

      All that's really left to debate is whether this project, that project, etc all add up to something that counts as "explosive growth." And at that point, it's just not an interesting question.

      Saying patents fuel software development (both free and proprietary, since both types are actually harmed by patents) may be a distortion, because it (misleadingly) implies that the patents help the overall situation, but on its face, the statement is literally true. Patents force people to work around patents. It's economically inefficient (just as hurricanes fuel the construction industry) and therefore probably not desirable, but it really does happen.

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    2. Re:WTF IBM by Microlith · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There could be aspects of the Vorbis codec that are patented, but no one knows as no one (for good reason) is looking. VP3 was written well before it became Theora, and unfortunately is in the bad position of being inefficient.

      But let's consider what we don't have because of patents? How about wavelet compression, and the adoption of JPEG2000? Completely ground to a halt as one company holds a slew of patents over it.

      Yes, patents force people to work around them. They're stuck reinventing the wheel, poorly, and remain at risk of patent suits. The problem with software patents is they're either so stupidly simple that everyone runs over them (and strive to remain ignorant of having done so, to lessen any possible damages) or are so vague that they cover huge swaths, denying entire fields and crippling compatibility.

    3. Re:WTF IBM by Abreu · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Isn't this reasoning similar to the Broken Window Fallacy?

      If MP3 didn't have patents, we wouldn't have ogg, true. Which means the talent used to REINVENT THE WHEEL in the ogg codecs would have instead been used to improve the patent-free MP3 instead (or to work on other projects).

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      No sig for the moment.
  2. Here's how it works: by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1. Stupid patents piss off techies
    2. Techies grow to despise corporate-produced software
    3. Techies motivated to make open-source variants to take sales away from evil corporations
    4. Profit! (Well, okay, I added this one out of habit.)

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    Table-ized A.I.
  3. Re:Put's the lie to their open source claims by sconeu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IBM is on IBM's side.

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    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  4. Re:Just a thought... by H0p313ss · · Score: 5, Funny

    Aren't open source license agreements also enforced by patent law?

    Your task today it to look up the words "patent" and "copyright" and when you are done give us 100 words on why that was a stupid comment.

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    XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
  5. Re:Junk patents by mayko · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The same problem is happening in the biotech industry. Patents are being given out for individual proteins, which is not only stupid, but there is no pressure for these patent holders to actually DO something with them. This kind of shit only helps to hold back legitimate progress.

  6. Misleading quote in TFA by OhHellWithIt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    TFA says:

    patent protection has promoted the free sharing of source code [...] which has fueled the explosive growth of open source software development.

    Here's the quoted footnote from the Amicus brief:

    See, e.g., In re Alappat, 33 F.3d 1526, 1571 (Fed. Cir. 1994) (Newman, J., concurring). Given the reality that software source code is human readable, and object code can be reverse engineered, it is difficult for software developers to resort to secrecy. Thus, without patent protection, the incentives to innovate in the field of software are significantly reduced. Patent protection has promoted the free sharing of source code on a patentee's terms -- which has fueled the explosive growth of open source software development.

    The emphasis on "on a patentee's terms" is mine, and the phrase omitted from TFA is vital to the meaning of the sentence as a whole. I believe Adobe's release of the Portable Document Format specification is a case in point. Adobe made the specification available with the stipulation that it not be used to develop products that compete with Adobe's products. The open specification allowed the development of all kinds of open source tools (as well as closed-source tools) that make PDF much more useful to everyone, yet Adobe is protected from having its development investment and future business stolen.

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    "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
  7. misplaced arguments by macraig · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Would libpng have been written, if not for the LZW patent? How about all of xiph's codecs? We wouldn't have Vorbis if it weren't for the MP3 patents.

    Lemme fix that for ya:

    If not for the LZW patent, libpng would never have been needed to be developed. Were it not for the MP3 patents, we wouldn't have needed Vorbis.

    Necessity might be the mother of all invention, but in this case it was artificial necessity. The inventions were only necessary to get around the brick walls created by the patents. Tear down the unnatural brick walls, and the innovation could have focused on incrementally improving those existing techniques instead rather than essentially reinventing the wheel just to bypass them.