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FOSS Communities Key To Managing Patent Risk
dp619 writes "Penn State law professor Clark Asay has written an editorial on F/OSS patent risk, saying, '...under the current patent system, it's entirely possible to obtain a patent that reads on software that FOSS communities independently create. Consequently, FOSS communities and their users are vulnerable to third party patent claims, even absent any sort of wrongdoing or copying on their part.' He suggests that developers collaborate to prevent bad or frivolous patents from being issued in the first place. The ongoing work of Linux Defenders and Peer-to-Patent are cited as good examples of how the FOSS community's collaborative spirit can help it counteract potential legal threats."
Can't we just let patents autoexpire every 5 - 10 years so we don't have these issues? It works great in medicine because it gives big pharma a chance to make money innovating and then the copy cats can produce generics and make their own profits, forcing big pharma to keep innovating. Fast expiring patents are a great idea there, why not in software?
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Patents are supposed to protect the little guy so he can get to market. But they're used to bully the little guy from ever getting a foot hold.
God spoke to me
I am still trying to figure out what the headline means - why cn't headlines be written better?
Iam sure that the patent on Risk ran out long ago.
Patents are supposed to protect the little guy so he can get to market.
That's not why patents exist. It's never been why patents have existed.
you could modify git to send commit messages to the USPTO...
if you can't beat them, subvert their system. if every patent is one that can be freely used, then problem solved! software patents would become useless because they'd all be free.
No, patents protect the innovator so they can get their product to market without copy cats devaluing their research.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Herby I patent the method of creating patent applications *on a computer*. It's novel and non obvious by the existing standards (noticed the "on the computer" part, right?) and it should at least slow the other ridiculous patent applications down. A clear win-win!
Everything is done in the "cloud" as it were. Nobody gets your code. Nobody gets your binary. Everything your software does is done on your hardware.
While for-profit companies that use and develop free and open source software have been sued for patent infringement, "FOSS communities" essentially never have been. The author is correct that "FOSS communities have fretted over this risk for years," but that's just it: they have fretted and nothing has come of it.
"Patent trolls" want licensing revenue. You can't squeeze blood from a turnip, so suing an open source project directly is a pointless waste of money. A proprietary competitor may only be interested in excluding an open source project from the market, but even that is effectively impossible. For example, consider the efforts to get rid of DeCSS and its progeny. That was about copyright, not patents, but the point is that a) you can't remove something from the internet and b) a project can always move to another country with more favorable laws. Patents are territorial: if a company sues a project in country A, the project can just move to country B, where the company doesn't have a patent.
The article seems incomplete without at least mentioning the Open Invention Network.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Dig up 20-year old code and re-use it.