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Richard Stallman: Limit the Effect of Software Patents
An anonymous reader writes "We can't get rid of software patents, says Richard Stallman, but we could change how they apply to creating and using software and hardware. In an editorial at Wired, he advocates for a legislative solution to the patent wars that would protect both developers and users. Quoting: 'We should legislate that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement. This approach has several advantages: —It doesn't require classifying patents or patent applications as "software" or "not software." —It provides developers and users with protection from both existing and potential future computational idea patents. —Patent lawyers can't defeat the intended effect by writing applications differently.'"
Stop blaming the lawyers and start blaming the people who ask them to file the lawsuits. It is like blaming the engineers that build an M1 tank, rather than the military that buys and operates it.
As usual, he's right. Cue the morons who ignore him because they don't like him personally.
There was one thing that stuck out at me, though:
Anyone got a citation for this, that Congress does not have the power to limit patents which already have been granted? AFAIK patent exist completely at the pleasure of Congress.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The lawyer scumbags you are protecting should have the moral fortitude to turn down these bad cases, just like the slime-ball engineers you speak of should refuse to work on said death-machines.
My issue with software patents are that inventors have the tools to create just about anything in their own home. Anyone could have created Facebook, JPG rendering, one-click purchase with simply a laptop. If software patents were music, it would be like patenting piano music. Press the keys in a certain way (which anyone will eventually do who plays piano at all) and .. oops... you just violated a patent. Press keys in an arbitrary other pattern and viola... instant patent and license to pester future composers with your "invention".
There's nothing non-obvious with just about any software. Developers should not have to worry about the dark legal cloud of patents hanging over them for something literally anyone could create with readily available tools in their own home. That very fact should make it obvious why software patents should not exist. People don't accidentally find a cure for cancer in their basement with their Junior Chem Lab Set which is why patents do have a place in general.Even worse is the fact you could be unknowingly violating a patent without even knowing it and the system purposely allows patent holders to wait around until inventors start to actually profit from their inventions and THEN start suing. The fact that patent holders can even have patents without even having a real product simply shows the system isn't about stimulating and rewarding invention but stirring up revenue for government agencies and legal firms.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
That requires voting for people who will create the required legislation. It won't happen with the current crop we reelect now.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'm not against it at all, but II really would like to understand how Stallman's proposal would apply to, say, the following example (one I've used before):
Suppose we take something like the FM demodulator in a radio. When Edwin Armstrong invented it, back in the stone age of the 1930s, I think we can all agree that (a) it was an "actual physical device," and (b) that it met all the other criteria (novelty, non-obviousness, utility, etc.) needed for a patent. It was implemented with the technology available at the time -- stone knives, bear skins, vacuum tubes (valves), and a transformer.
Skipping over details like the invention of ratio detectors, phase-locked loops, etc., the next change in implementation of FM detectors came when the tubes were replaced with discrete transistors. This required some change in bias methods, impedance levels, etc., but no major redesign. It did save cost, size, and power, though.
The next change was integration. At first, the transformer was still needed for the demodulator, and so it was pinned out of the ICs, which were still analog. This saved cost, size, and power still further.
Later, schemes were found to integrate the function of the transformer, fully integrating the (still analog) demodulator. This saved cost and size still further.
Still later, improvements in integration processes enabled the function of the FM demodulator to be performed digitally, using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a bunch of hard-wired logic gates, emulating the mathematical function performed by the analog demodulator. This saved cost, size, and power still further.
Demodulator designs were next ported into programmable hardware dedicated to signal-processing applications (digital signal processors); this required the ADC, plus the algorithm converted to the DSP's assembly language. This saved cost and size.
After that, demodulator designs were moved into hardware register-transfer languages, like Verilog, providing portability from chip to chip using standard-cell logic families. This saved cost.
Later, the Verilog designs were ported into field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), enabling one to program the hardware in the chip to become, when preceded by the ADC, an FM demodulator. This saved cost.
Finally, technology improved to the point that the FM demodulator could be made by an ADC followed by a microcomputer, programmed with software in a high-level language as part of a much larger system. This saved cost.
At what point in this development do we draw the line and say, "Below this, it's not patentable (or patent infringement)?" Where is "software"?
If you can unknowingly break some patent without even realizing its there, its a sign of a patent being awarded for something that should not be patentable in the first place.
Patents for a vague idea, or a general approach of implementing it - do not want.
I'll re-troll, since IHBT
...It's like blaming the engineers that build an M1 tank, rather than the president and congress that tells them where and what to shoot.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
The things you cannot patent, universally accepted:
Physical Phenomenon, Natural Law, Abstract Ideas and out of these we also have Mathematical Algorithms. Certainly Software can be proven to not qualify for patent-ability, http://abstractionphysics.net/ or add dot net to it for the reality of which the fictional trilogy "the matrix" characters were representations of. In other words, we all use the fundamental actions of which software must make use of in playing back what amounts to nothing more than the physical phenomenon of the natural laws of our creation and use of abstract ideas, which include the well defined abstractions of mathematics. All done on a machine that processes abstraction.
Why has this not come to light? Nature likes 3, as in three primary colors of paint or light, etc. from which you can create all other colors of that media. Software has three user interfaces. The CLI, GUI and the side door port to automating software use, including its creation. However this third user interface is kept from the general user, limiting what the general user can do. For the user to have such access is in analogy like giving users a decimal calculator when the accountants are using roman numerals. A great deal of what software patents cover today would become non-novel and invalid.
Bill Gates said the way to become wealthy is to make people need you. He was also the one to coin the term "software piracy"
And there you have the reason for the fraud of software patents.
Don't be naive - patents may have their roots in Anglo-American law but they're a global phenomenon and, given the reach and influence of the US legal system, a global problem.
This would be true if there was limitless work for lawyers, and they could simply choose the most lucrative work. But that's not the case—lawyers, like contractors in any industry whose opportunities are affected by the laws the government writes, have a vested interest in supporting laws that increase demand for their work. Diamond v. Diehr could as easily have been called the Legal Profession Full Employment Act of 1981.
The scorpion and the turtle
Damn, they have armor-piercing scorpions now?
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
Stop blaming the lawyers is the first step on the road to hell. They are guilty of something, by definition, if there is a law that could be twisted or corrupted for their profit, they will, no matter what comes after, they got their pay. And politicians, of course, that because malice or idiocy do those laws (also, some are lawyers or take lawyers advice, see previous point). In your example, is the difference between designing a gun and using it, the lawyers in this case are the ones using guns, and actively killing people with ideas.
And all of this without even going to the point of patents. The whole concept that thinking and solving problems by your own is potentially a minefield is wrong. Our very civilization and culture is built taking ideas from others, and using/copying/adapting/improving them, we wouldn't be even in caves without that.
Stop blaming the lawyers and start blaming the people who ask them to file the lawsuits. It is like blaming the engineers that build an M1 tank, rather than the military that buys and operates it.
Yeah! The lawyers are just exploited innocents! There is a demand for evil, and they are only supplying that demand. Is that so evil? Of course not!
It's the same reason why drug-dealers, car thieves, and human traffickers aren't really evil, they are just supplying a demand.
To promote the progress of the useful arts, remember?
You can look at how Shaespeare turned a phrase, or Colleridge placed a metaphor, or Stephen Donaldson put two hundred and eighty severn adjectives together in place of one noun, and learn from it.
Because you read the book.
Well, you should be able to do the exact same thing with code.
in cases where another company has produced a product covered by the patent you have 90 days to start the suit or this product is to be considered "Prior Art" unless 1 you have no way of knowing about the conflicting product 2 You have produced a Product and included a "Covered by The Following Patents : %list%" block
I believe this is already covered under laches, except that the period beyond which a presumption of intentional harm is imputed longer than that.
Stallman's idea is very compatible with a notion of reversing the reversal of the original intent of patents that has happened in the modern corporate business environment.
The main necessity of patents in the past was specifically the differential between the capabilities of the individual or small company, and the large established company, to take a concept from initial concept/implementation to large-scale production. That differential was, in large part, the reason why the market in itself was not trusted to sort out the situation. The inventor was the source of the product, but apart from an enforced "protected time period", established industry could simply take the idea and immediately outproduce the inventor, due to the very nature of mass-production and distribution of physical goods, thus "winning" via the basic nature of that market.
Arguably, in software this core rationale for patents no longer applies. Reproducing the invention (e.g. copying the files) costs essentially nothing, and so no entity has a pre-existing "unfair advantage" in transitioning a new product from the point of initial creation to the point of mass-production.
In the absence of this differential, we have the spectacle of modern patents, where it is no longer used to help the "small company" (or individual) against the "big companies" in addressing this production-capacity differential, but instead are used by large corporations against other large corporations, neither of which has any differential in intrinsic capacity needing to be addressed. The net result is preventing public-benefitting "inventions" from being used by anyone except their corporation, when it doesn't have the effect of stopping any benefit from the innovations at all--due to the risk of creating anything with armies of patent-troll lawyers laying in wait.
So... yeah. Agreed. Software -is- different. And it is different in precisely the core attribute that justified patents in the first place.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
You say the patent system is doing what it's supposed to.
My impression was that the patent system was supposed to give a strong, limited-time monopoly to inventors--in return for exposing the implementation details rather than keeping it a trade secret.
Do you think software patents do this?
My impression is that software patents (if allowed at all) should include complete source code for the implementation. Also, I see quite a few software patents of the form "do *this* in software" where *this* is a high-level description of what is happening. That seems to me excessively broad....it seems like it should need to be "do *this* by following these specific algorithmic steps". If someone else does *this* some other way then the patent has not been infringed.
No - F2F only effects whether the case where two or more inventors apply for what is substantially the same patent. Currently the patent would go to the inventor who could prove that they invented it first - next year it will go to the one who's application was received first. In either case if a similar invention was already patented or published years ago you have prior art and *nobody* gets the new patent (or the patent should be ruled invalid when someone points out the older invention)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
For your analogy to be accurate, it should be the engineer/lawyer scumbags that should refuse to write the patent to begin with.
Or, the lawyers should turn down these cases, like a soldier should refuse to fire his M1 tank at a crowd of civilians.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!