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Letter To Abolish Software Patents In Australia
Ben Sturmfels writes "Over 500 members of the Australian software industry have have signed an open letter urging their government to abolish software patents. Signatories include free software luminaries Andrew Tridgell and Jonathan Oxer. In 2008 the Australian government began a Review of Patentable Subject Matter. While we missed the 2009 public consultation period, we hope to influence the government's response to the Review, due in February 2011. The letter will be presented to Minister Kim Carr in early August."
I don't know the Australian rationale but I wonder when Americans discuss the need for patents and copyrights. Why do content creators want to abolish patents? America is rich today because of patents and copyrights. If every second guy could rip off a great idea, we'd have nothing left to offer. We cannot compete on prices. The innovation and creativity of Americans is what has made US powerful...
That's funny. I always though one of the reasons that America was rich today was because when they were developing, they did not respect patents and copyrights, specifically foreign copyrights, such as books from Europe. They just copied and reproduced the content they wanted at will. Oh, and slaves. You can get rich pretty easily when you don't have to pay for the stuff you need/want.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Because it prevents new cultural creations as it makes them totally dependent on the patent holders willingness to provide their particular patent. Effectively it creates blocks on economic activity, as people are not going to provide their patents for others who will disrupt their business models, or alternatively it imposes a patent troll tax on doing business (this depends on if the patent holder is an entrenched market player, or a leech). Given the economic costs, and the high rate of change of software, it is better for the economy as a whole (but not current individual patent holders) for the abolition of software patents.
It will be interesting to see if the Australian government leans towards the U.S. model (with the U.S./Australian Free Trade Agreement) or New Zealand no-software patents model (with the Closer Economic Relations agreements between the countries). I suspect that mainly hinges on who wins the upcoming Australian election.
Because of the business ethos of those who were made rich and powerful with American innovation and creativity. Much of which came from public sources such as American universities and the NASA program which are now under funded so those same businessmen can get taxpayer money to pay for their mistakes.
They aren't thinking beyond the next quarter, screw the future if there is profit to be made now.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Firstly you need to understand that there is a limit to how far the rest of the world will protect US Copyrights and Patents and that limit is "until there's nothing in it for them". At the moment the US's only big incentive is access to their markets and free trade agreements, this doesn't always work. You can already see the effects of this in Africa where the Pharma industry has had to make big concessions to stop African governments simply ignoring their patents, you can't trade if you're dead. A more interesting example is Asia where you have rampant piracy. The reason why the US has to turn a blind eye here is simply that they NEED Asia for cheap goods for their own economy. You need to be reasonable about IP or it really will become imaginary, this game only works as long as everyone follows the rules. If it gets too biased in your favour, then they simply won't play.
Secondly you need to look at why software patents are different. There are two big problems that software patents create here because of how different they are to normally patentable innovations. One of the big problems is because of the sheer speed of progress and time to market compared to pharma and physical inventions. Pharma innovations normally have a considerable time to market because of the testing they need to undergo, as a reward they get a monopoly for a few short years, whilst competitors are encouraged to find the alternatives which usually exist. Physical inventions likewise have the advantage of a large number of alternative ways of doing things. The problem with software and algorithms in particular is that quite often there isn't an alternative that allows you to perform the same task and maintain compatibility etc. And this is leaving aside the problem of ill-trained examiners, patently obvious subject matter and the problems of patent pools.
There are several problems with this letter. It suggests that only free software does not use patents, so it sets itself up for being labelled a typical anti-capitalist rant from long haired hippies who hate property in all its forms.
They should have noted that Microsoft Windows, Office, Excel, PowerPoint became world dominant without a single patent being filed. That there are clear economic studies that show that software patents cause innovation to stop (Bessen et al), that the original premise behind patents was to reduce competition, and that the only provable value in a patent (any patent) is the documentation of knowledge in return for that toxic temporary monopoly. The reason software patents fail so badly is that we don't need patents to explain how software technology works.
All patents are toxic to their industries but at least we can reconstruct steam engines using the patent archive. That cost 20 years of progress during the industrial revolution.
There is never going to be anyone who 100 years from now reconstructs how to build a multithreaded web server from the patent archive. This is the fraud, and that is the reason software patents must be killed.
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