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Red Hat Files Amicus Brief In Bilski Patent Case
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Red Hat has filed a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court in regards to the In Re Bilski case, which has become incredibly important due to the possibility that it could redefine the scope of patentable subject matter in a way that affects software patents. In the brief, Red Hat argues that software should not be considered patentable subject matter because it causes economic harm due to patents being granted with vague subject matter, which makes it impossible to say that a given piece of software doesn't arguably infringe upon someone's patent. They also point out Knuth's famous quote that you can't differentiate between 'numeric' and 'non-numeric' algorithms, because numbers are no different from other kinds of precise information." Read below for the submitter's thoughts on an earlier amicus brief filed in the Bilski case by Professor Lee Hollaar.
It's a pity, though, that they don't seem to directly address Professor Lee Hollaar's brief that gave a hand-waving excuse about the Curry-Howard correspondence being merely 'cosmetic' (whatever that means), even though you can turn ZFC into a program (ZFC being the axiomatic framework in which almost all math is done) and you can turn programs into math in order to verify them. Of course, this is the guy who called the successor function 'essentially nonsense', presumably because he doesn't think that mathematicians can differentiate between assignment and equality the way computer scientists can.
It's a pity, though, that they don't seem to directly address Professor Lee Hollaar's brief that gave a hand-waving excuse about the Curry-Howard correspondence being merely 'cosmetic' (whatever that means), even though you can turn ZFC into a program (ZFC being the axiomatic framework in which almost all math is done) and you can turn programs into math in order to verify them. Of course, this is the guy who called the successor function 'essentially nonsense', presumably because he doesn't think that mathematicians can differentiate between assignment and equality the way computer scientists can.
I'll go buy a copy of Red Hat.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
for(int cnt = 1; cnt do_stuffs();
original code, do not steal!!!!
In some ways, CS is still tied to mathematics. It is quantifiable and therein lies its only true link to mathematics. The development and study of algorithms is what CS is all about, and to the extent that mathematics can be used to measure these things it is useful.
But real world development is much more like seatbelt manufacturing than number crunching. Systems must be developed, not algorithms. In fact, algorithms, for the most part, are already done. It's the combination of these disparate parts into a cohesive whole that is the cornerstone of CS in today's industry.
So when someone develops a way of doing something electronically that is novel, it should be just as worthy of receiving a patent as another idea that needs physical implementation. The milieu shouldn't matter.
What does matter is the quality of the idea and the quality of the process to determine the validity of the patent application. This is where the problem lies today. It's not that people shouldn't get patents for software, it's that the patents that are being granted are of such poor quality that it calls into question the whole system.
I agree that software shouldn't be patentable (either directly or through the various loopholes that applicants use to get around the fact that software, when claimed directly, is not a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter").
But in my opinion, this should be a matter of policy motivated by the fact that the rate of improvements in the software arts is far too fast to permit 20-year terms of patent protection, and such a policy has to come from Congress rather than the courts. Current law seems to support the idea of granting patent rights for programs in the context of a "general purpose computer programmed with software" or a "computer readable storage medium embodying software", and I seriously doubt that SCOTUS is going to change that.
Many, many people in the OSS area deride RedHat for many reasons. I have never yet heard an argument against RedHat which made sense.
RedHat is the only vendor who puts their money where their mouth is. ALL of their software is opensource, as evidenced by the CentOS project, which makes the RedHat Enterprise system available for free under a different umbrella. Ubuntu is based on Debian, and while it is more current than RedHat, their software has (IMHO) more bugs than RedHat. I speak from experience, being both an RHCE and using Ubuntu at my job on a daily basis. I also had similar experiences with Mandake/Mandriva.
I don't see Canonicial, Mandriva, or any of the other commercial Linux vendors spending money to legally protect software which doesn't even belong to them!
RedHat stands head and shoulders far above all the other vendors.
Laws have been struck down on the grounds that they were too vague to enforce.
The basic concept of patents is you share your discovery/insight with society at large, and in return you recieve a short term monopoly. Society is advanced by your knowledge, you are rewarded. Good for both parties.
I would not object to software patents if they actually provided the complete functional source code in the patent. You want a patent, you provide full disclosure.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Knuth's argument misses the point. The distinction is not between mathematical and non-mathematical algorithms, but rather between an algorithm in the abstract and an algorithm as applied to a real world problem. An algorithm, in and of itself, lacks the utility required for patentability. Once applied to solve a problem, however, the invention is no longer the algorithm per se but rather its useful application, which should be patentable.
Suppose one invents an algorithm for efficiently solving systems of non-linear equations. Alone that algorithm should not be patentable because merely thinking about equations in the abstract is not useful. But if one applies that algorithm to, say, efficiently simulating the motion of fluids or forecasting the weather, then it becomes useful.
To avoid charges of 'thought-crime' one can always institute a requirement that the application of the algorithm be implemented on a computer, but that's a mere formality. Few new, useful, and non-obvious software algorithms can be used effectively by the human mind alone, and it would be virtually impossible to prove infringement. Furthermore it would be a PR disaster.
Red Hat's argument is also very weak. Software patents are often of low quality primarily because the Patent Office long resisted hiring patent examiners with computer science backgrounds. In fact, it is still much more difficult for someone with a computer science degree to become a patent examiner, patent attorney, or patent agent than it is for someone with a degree in chemistry, physics, biology, etc. As a result, the Patent Office is understaffed and many of the examiners are underqualified.
Another reason software patent quality suffers is because patent examiners often first look to patents and patent applications as sources of prior art. Because software has only been patentable for a couple of decades, there is a much smaller body of readily accessible prior art. Examiners can and do look to journal articles and other sources, but time and budget constraints make thorough searching difficult.
The problem Red Hat describes is not entirely confined to software, either. Patents of all stripes have dubious or overly broad claims. The answer is not a patchwork of allowed and disallowed subject matter or different rules for different kinds of technology. Better answers are to either eliminate the presumption of validity that patents enjoy or to tighten the rules on enablement and written description, which would mean that applicants could only make narrower claims closer to their specific implementation and not to the broader class of invention.
There's really no difference between software patents and other non-design patents. They are all effectively declarative and/or algorithmic descriptions of an idea. The only real difference with software patents is that there is usually no physical capital required to produce, reproduce, or copy it. But the degree of non-obviousness and utility may be no less than a new fuel technology. Furthermore, one can argue that all matter is simply a program of atomic and subatomic particles. It's just that particles are a scarcer resource than bits, and less malleable. But once we have the technology to manipulate these particles as bits, the world is just a big program. I say we should be consistent. Either software is patentable, or just abolish patents altogether.
Intuitively we think of patents as applying to designs which man creates, but not to designs which man discovers. That system grants engineers compensation for their work of designing and provides them an incentive to design. So you can patent a telephone but not a fish. That "discovered or created" dichotomy works until you get to math because we do not know if math is discovered or created. Is mathematics a natural phenomenon which exists and is discovered by man or is it a thing which man creates? To summarize the summary, if it is the former, and programs are math, then programs should be un-patentable.
Though a philosophically entertaining line of analysis, perhaps a better approach to evaluating software patents would be purely to consider their social utility: How much good software is created at what price with or without software patents; Does the sum social burden of patent trolls, the cost of litigation, and restrictions on using proprietary algorithms outweigh the value of additional software created a result of the patent incentive?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Patents last for 17 years; product cycles in software are about 3. In other words, software ideas (even with complete source code) are usually worth zero after 17 years. In fact, almost all software ideas have the following characteristics:
Taken together, these mean that there is no need for software patents at all: people would invent software ideas all the time, even without patent protection (they did so for decades in the past), and they would benefit from them monetarily. Moreover, disclosing your software idea "for free" doesn't lose you much (this idea is not what makes your product unique) and gains you a lot -- it gains you all the ideas that everybody else discloses. The incentive to keep software ideas secret is so low that there is simply no need for patents to force disclosure.
Any argument loose enough to classify algorithms as mathematics is necessarily loose enough to classify *all* patentable subject matter as "mathematics". I'll see your Howard-Curry isomorphism and raise you algorithmic information theory.
The Howard-Curry argument is essentially that anything that can be described on a computer is "math". Unfortunately, there is no patentable subject matter that does not have this property.
Even ignoring that, the part that is disingenuous about the Howard-Curry argument is that it also is directly applicable to electronic circuit design and chemical process patents in the same way it is applicable to a computer algorithms. I would find the argument less shady if it was not applied selectively by opponents of algorithm patents.
You sir a valialting pattent 123abc Please kindly pay me $1,000,000,000,000 as damges allow me to do this. Thank you Pantent office and law.
I understand that Red Hat was within their rights to protect their trademark, but they could have been much more pleasant about it.
Please help metamoderate.
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To paraphrase from the Groklaw article:
The Federal Circuit says a process is patentable if it "transforms a particular article into a different state or thing"
Shit, if that 'article' is just some data (like you or I work with every day) then any manipulation of that data is patentable isn't it?
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As far as trolls go (and stereotypes) this one was quite spot on fun to read.
Anon for obvious reasons - political correctness sucks...
Last time I thought that I bought some shares instead and downloaded CentOS.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
They've been patenting sandwiches for a long time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealed_crustless_sandwich
"Spray paint everything in sight with scribbles that mean nothing to white people but mean things to fellow niggers"
I admit, everytime I have to stop for a train, I notice the grafitti on the cars and wonder... "what the hell does that say?" I can almost never make out a single word.
All inventions can be described by math - that is nothing unique to software.
However what is unique to software is that it describes math. That's what software literally is: A symbolic representation of math.
What's the difference between a rock tossed into the air with a certain initial velocity, and the following characters on your screen: "y = y0 + v0*t - g*t^2"? Well, one is a physical object behaving in a certain way, and the other is symbolic language that describes the mathematical relationship.
What is the difference between the characters "y = y0 + v0*t - g*t^2" in your algebra textbook, the exact same characters in your text editor, and the binary output by your compiler when it processes those characters? Absolutely nothing, except that the last one is in a language that is conducive for machine interpretation. It is still nothing more than language describing math.
That's the difference between software and every other kind of patentable invention. The others can be described by math. Software is math in exactly the same sense that "1 + 2 = 3" is math.
The enemies of Democracy are
"you must remember that without the DRM you wouldn't be able to do anything with those formats on your computer at all"
Really? You mean, they would decide not to sell to a huge set of potential customers just because they wouldn't agree to cripple their computer to see a bit of entertainment? Do you think BluRay is so entrenched that they would just prefer people sit in their living rooms and ignore what most people see as a huge mobile market for entertainment?
I've never heard of anything like that happening before.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
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> All inventions can be described by math - that is nothing unique to software.
No. We can model them, but not accurately. Heisenburg uncertainty alone keeps our representation from being true, not to mention the unfathomable number of numbers you need to actually represent something. Not to mention that we don't actually know all the laws of physics, or there'd be no question about which interpretation of QM is correct.
Anyhow, the claim isn't that software can be described by math. The claim is that software is math. Or to be more specific, any software can be converted into a mathematical statement (this is hard, but thanks to Curry-Howard, it is possible). Further, any math can be converted to software (see this project, which is converting the main axioms of math into software).
Because we can transform one into the other, we call them equivalent. So patenting software patents the equivalent math. There exists math which you can no longer do without a computer (e.g. computer proofs of the four-coloring theorem). So badly written patents can exclude the use of math (unless they are invalidated on precisely those grounds).
What is a physical object? Its a collection of atoms obeying the "fundamental laws of nature" - specifically quantum mechanics - i.e. math. So if software *is* math, then objects are math too.
A physical object obeys the laws of nature.
Symbolic math describes in language the laws of nature.
Software is just another language for describing math.
It is completely different than a physical object.
The fundamental problem here is that the Supreme Court likes to say that "you can't patent ideas".
But that is just silly. You can ONLY patent ideas. You can't patent a physical object - only the idea of a physical object.
But to make use of such a patent, one must create a physical object, because that's what the idea is about.
Software is not a physical object. It is literally an abstracted description of math.
Everything is math.
Some things are described by math, some things describe math. The distinction is clear.
"This is not a pipe."
The enemies of Democracy are
I think Red Hat finally come around and realized that distros like CentOS and Scientific Linux are like gateway drugs. Companies and organizations get hooked on them when they are small, and if they flourish (hopefully by saving IT money and gaining productivity) and grow, those organizations become their clients. If they die, they where never going to be good clients for RH anyway.
Scientific Linux is likely their quickest turn over as it geared toward organizations and research labs that already are their clients, just they do not need to pay Red Hat for testing stuff out or students playing around (really don't know what they do with it).
My own small company runs a couple mission critical servers with CentOS. If I ever got really rich or wanted to retire, I know I can contact red hat to provide the service. More importantly, if I ever wanted to sell my business to someone with no IT skills, I would just refer them to Red Hat.
Those distros are free advertising. I don't think any other distro's child distros can do that. PClinuxos for instance likely does not send very much biz up the chain to Mandriva.
Living in Chile
If I hear one more Windows user say Linux is hard, I'm going to punch them in the face!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
While Prof. Hollaar is completely wrong that the Curry-Howard isomorphism is "cosmetic", I don't think it's actually relevant to this case.
C-H shows (handwave handwave) that types are the same thing as theorems and programs are the same thing as proofs.
So consider a program that sorts integers. It takes a list of elements (int list in ML, or [Integer] in Haskell) and returns a list of elements (same). So the theorem that sort proves is, in Haskell-like notation:
[Integer] -> [Integer]
Any program that has this type signature serves as a proof of the theorem, including the identity function and the function which ignores its argument and returns the empty list.
So patenting software does not prevent you from proving certain theorems. At most, it would prevent you from using certain proof techniques. But that's a tautology.
The more crucial argument is what RedHat and the SFLC brought up: Software patents prevent the "little guys" from competing with the "big guys". The Internet is only as functional and innovative as it is because the "little guys" were allowed to write functional, innovative software. Lock them out, and the speed of innovation of the Internet slows down to a crawl.
This, of course, is on top of the undeniable point that any other conclusion would be flatly contradictory to every other ruling of the SCOTUS on this point.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});