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Richard Stallman: Limit the Effect of Software Patents

Posted by Soulskill on from the system-and-method-for-arranging-0s-and-1s dept.

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.'"

4 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. The lawyers themselves are just soldiers for hire by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Right on by Sloppy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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:

    Second, the U.S. already has many thousands of computational idea patents, and changing the criteria to prevent issuing more would not get rid of the existing ones. We would have to wait almost 20 years for the problem to be entirely corrected through patent expiration. And legislating the abolition of these existing patents is probably unconstitutional. (Perversely, the Supreme Court has insisted that Congress can extend private privileges at the expense of the publicâ(TM)s rights but that it canâ(TM)t go in the other direction.)

    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.

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    As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
    1. Re:Right on by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I dislike him because of his beliefs. It's his way or the highway.

      That's everyone's beliefs by definition. If you don't have a sense of right and wrong, or how the world should work, then you're not human. Reminds me of the friend who tried to convince me that a certain economist was an "ideologue". "He has some fixed concept of how the world works and predicts things on that!" Leaving aside the fact the economist in question had, actually, very publically revised his view of the world several times when results didn't fit the models he used, the comment was utterly stupid: what he was describing were models, and economists use models. The good ones revise their models when reality doesn't match them, the bad ones pretend that their models always work and ignore reality, but the allegation was stupid.

      Your allegation against Stallman is especially stupid. You just described a belief as, well, a belief. And used it as a criticism.

      But leaving that aside, what Stallman has a habit of is converting his beliefs into a set of pragmatic projects and proposals that everyone can live with. Two extremely prominent examples are the GPL, a license that a developer can choose to use, if the developer wishes the software they release to always be part of a free software infrastructure, and the GNU project, a body of free software that enabled the bootstrapping of an entire free software ecosystem.

      Those pragmatic projects benefitted everyone, regardless of whether they shared Stallman's belief or view of the world or not. Linus Torvalds, who is famously not an enthusiast of Stallman's ideals, used the infrastructure Stallman's work produced to build what's probably the world's most popular and widely use operating system kernel. And he'll be the first to tell you that.

      But, hey, he's a dirty smelly hippy or something, so let's ignore what he actually does and use word games to pretend he's totally teh eval.

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      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  3. Re:The lawyers themselves are just soldiers for hi by N0Man74 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.