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Red Hat Urges USPTO To Deny Most Software Patents
Julie188 writes "The United States Patent and Trademark Office asked for public input on how it should use the Supreme Court's Bilski decision to guide it when granting new patents. Not surprisingly, Red Hat took them up on it. The USPTO should use Bilski and the fact that the machine transformation test is 'important' to Just Say No to most software patents, it advised. Rob Tiller, Red Hat's Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, IP, is hopeful that the patent office will listen and put an end to the crazy software patent situation that has turned patents into weapons that hinder innovation."
The USPTO isn't going to change their policies to help one small company steal ideas from others.
I'm sure that's what they will do. After all, they have a long history of putting the public ahead of big business and making sensible decisions.
Huh? Asking the public? We didn't vote for this! We voted for smart people in government and the USPTO to use their own brains and superior knowledge of the facts to do the right thing. Democracy not idiocracy. Let's go through the choices:
Option 1 - ignore it
Option 2 - apply it to all software patents
Option 3 - randomly apply it to some on a vague, arbitrary basis ("Apple App Submission" style)
Option 4 - ????
Option 5 - Profit!!!
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Love,
Mr. X
I am a software author. Software patents interferes with my right to publish texts that i write myself.
)9TSS
serves to reinforce of 4rogress. Lubrication. You well-known
I make millions from suing college students who copy my "Hello World" code!
as a holder of patents on random shit that shouldn't be patentable all I can say is that the USPTO cleans up the mess they have created.
Will be interesting to see if they act on the advice. There are some seriously large companies that share the same view now.
Patents only brought us one real innovation: litigation innovation.
You can't handle the truth.
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The proper venue for changing patent laws is congress.
The Supreme Court clearly could have decided Bilski narrowly or or broadly (as Red Hat and others would have liked). They clearly chose to decide the case more narrowly, and while this may give the patent office greater motivation to "push the law", it also motivates them not to do what Red Hat is asking.
The patent office is unlikely to make drastic changes absent clear direction from congress, or the Supreme Court.
Let's be a little honest, the patent office is filled with a bunch of "very smart individuals"!
The End Software Patents campaign also submitted a brief, a little more specific:
http://news.swpat.org/2010/09/esp-to-uspto/
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
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Before anyone shrieks "DEFENESTRATIVE PORPOISES OWNLY!!!!!11!!!", please remind me: who now owns all of SUN's patent portfolio?
What's it to be, Red Hat? Are you going to (not) put your patents where your mouth is?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Not just software patents should be denied, but lifeform patents as well. In fact, I would love to see all lifeform patents invalidated, as this would take the wind out of the sails of Monsanto.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Wake me up when U.S. citizens are ready to take back their country from the corporations.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
It has been stolen. He cannot use it any more.
There isn't a clearer case of how "Intellectual Property" can be stolen than that. It's even more clearly "stolen" than plagiarism, where at least you're still allowed to use your own work.
But here your ideas are now the property of someone else.
They may let you on it, but this is no different than if it was your land or your car or your house.
If someone claimed ownership of your car and let you drive it if they paid you, would that not be stealing any more?
If not, what would it be?
Did you decide not to market a program after discovering that it was covered by a software patent?
I have decided not to market a program after discovering that the boot process on the program's intended platform was covered by patents, enforced by the courts of at least one major country.
I have also decided not to market a program after discovering a look and feel copyright whose owner is notorious for waving it around as if it were a patent. And yes, the owner of this copyright has threatened me and several of my beta testers with DMCA takedown notices about videos demonstrating the use of my program. I'm not sure I could afford a competent lawyer to argue Lotus v. Borland and Capcom v. Data East (precedents against look and feel copyright) against this copyright owner's likely claim of Atari v. Philips (precedent for look and feel copyright).
"... hopeful that the patent office will listen and put an end to the crazy software patent situation that has turned patents into weapons that hinder innovation."
Hindering innovation is exactly what patent is for, and that's what it's always been for. There's been enough written on the topic over the past few centuries; you'd think that people would understand this.
The only thing you can do with a patent is to take it to the courts to prevent someone else from using it in something they're building. If this isn't what "hinder innovation" means, what weird definition of "innovation" are you using?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Why would a patent on the boot process of the platform affect a program running on the platform?
Such a patent, worded to claim the software card used with this boot process, lets the maker of the appliance sue makers of unlicensed software cards for the appliance.
a PC or Mac
Comparing the boot process of a PC or Mac to the boot process of a mainstream video game console or handheld is very much apples and oranges.
Further, do you reside or have assets in the country in question (patent jurisdiction is generally not transnational)?
I am not aware of such lawsuits targeting United States-based resellers of blank software cards for this platform, but the maker of the appliance has sued publishers of unlicensed software for its previous platforms, successfully in some cases and unsuccessfully in others. Besides, I would likely get a chargeback from my payment processor for each unit stopped by customs.
Did you contact the company about a license?
I did not because documents published by the company indicate that applying for a license would be a waste of time. The company has a blanket policy of not making licenses available to entities that don't already have a dedicated office and a successful product on another platform. Quoted from the application form: "Home offices are not considered secure locations." I have also read news coverage, which I can cite if you want, about another developer working from home who was rejected for exactly this reason.
Copyrights are a vastly more powerful form of IP than patents, at least in the US.
The U.S. Code also has 17 USC 102(b), which appears to exclude methods of operation from the scope of copyright. For example, I believe LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice.org) doesn't infringe the copyright in Microsoft Office 2003 because of this statute, and Quadrapassel doesn't infringe the copyright in Tetris because of this statute. It's called the "idea-expression divide", and as I understand it, it's roughly equivalent to the "functionality doctrine" of trademark law: just as a trademark can't be used as an ersatz patent, nor can a copyright. But good luck for a startup company to pay a lawyer to convince a judge of that.
Did you ask about pro bono or reduced rate representation?
I was not aware that this was available to people who intend to sell something.
Did you contact law schools in your area about free representation through a clinical program?
I was not aware that this was available. And where would I look? The local branch of the state university (IPFW) offers pre-law but no doctorates.
Having attempted to read a number of patents in the last N years I am convinced that the boilerplate much increased the signal to noise ratio. It might be a good thing to remove such junk.
More apropos is that patents need to be published on the date of filing. Too often patents are edited over a period of years... and the initial patent is fully lost in the edits. If the idea is not in the initial filing well it is not there.
Software patents have come a long way from the AT&T patent on the SUID bit. That patent included both a hardware (physical model) and a soft model. They may have put it in the public domain because it was 'obvious' and in the design of existing systems but that more than makes the point that patents are a weapon.
Patents are also designed to provide a monopolistic advantage so the holder can produce their idea in a protected context. Patent trolls that produce NOTHING do not meet that fundamental component of patent law.
To that end for a company to prosecute a patent they must specify what product they produce that depends on it if they wish to claim damages.
i.e. the law was designed to enable productivity -- legal activity that inhibits productivity should be disallowed.
Sorting comes up over and over and makes an interesting touchstone for thinking about patents.
Start with a bubble sort. Patent that method then patent a quick sort. The quick sort if held by the same company could/ should/ would eclipse and "free" the older bubble sort as it provides an advantage. A company that held all patents could wield a very heavy hammer: Insertion, Selection, Bubble, Shell, Merge, Heap, Quick, Quick3...
But note well (N.B.) that sorting itself is not a novel idea as any child learning the alphabet and alphabetical order should be able to attest.
At another level a mathematical proof while novel does not prove the underlying conjecture/ idea to be novel. Today many algorithms are like proofs in that they validate and clarify the underlying idea or conjecture.
Now back to the AT&T SUID patent and the infamous one click patent. How many historic vending machines have a one click/ one button model?
It seems to me that physical models TRUMP software models and that it is obvious that modeling the physical world is a natural thing to do with graphics. Folk do it all the time playing "solitaire".
There are a few inaccuracies in the NetworkWorld article. The applicable test in the Bilski patent litigation is the "machine OR transformation" test. An invention doesn't have to include both, in order to be patent-eligible. Also, I don't think the machine involved in the test has to be "specifically invented" for a certain process. That's why software has remained patent-eligible; as long as some machine -- e.g., a computer -- is used in the process, then any software is potentially patentable. OR, if a process is transformative, then it may also be patent-eligible.