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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.
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.
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.