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Trend: More Software Patents
The number of software patents issued this year increased to 22500,
while a new type of hardware predator has arisen: companies that increase their revenue by patent royalties. Indeed some companies focus on making patents on products they will never make, just to get IP-revenue. Neither is extortion out of the question ("Come here laddy, prove to me your not violating any of my 100 patents !"). Software engineers don't like it, and in one company had to be threatened to play the lawyers' game. Even though few companies currently use software patents offensively, at a $20,000 cost per patent, they could hurt Free Software badly, should they follow the hardware trend and do so.
Contrary to a widespread belief, the patent system was not design to protect small inventors from predatory large companies. It was designed to give an incentive for technological innovation at a time where the rewards were very long to show up. At this time, the hi-tech domains were things like mechanic, ship building, metalurgy, bridges, etc.
Now, the rewards of innovation are clear, obvious and immediate in today's hi-tech: computer sciences, electronic, networking. And, as a matter of fact, the computer and software industry did pretty well for the last 20 years without nearly any patent. The rule was public disclosure, public disclosure, public disclosure. IBM did publish EVERYTHING to create prior art and protect itself from any obscure ass-hole who could come with a stupid patent. Alas, under pressure of lawyers, the Great Rule has been broken. There are many domains where patents make a lot of sense, e.g. medical drugs. But the only sound perspective for the hi-tech industry is to lobby the Gvt to BAN patents over hardware and software. In the meantime, only lawyers get fat and rich out of hi-tech patents.
For us, NDAs and copyrigths are more than enough.
They do invent something and they develop it enough to demonstrate the idea, but they don't put in the level of investment needed to actually release it as a product. You can invent something without actually selling it to the public.
- bridgette
"Indeed some companies focus on making patents on products they will never make, just to get IP-revenue. "
The validity or morality of software patents aside, I don't see what's wrong with patenting inventions that you'll never make. In fact, for independent inventors or even small companies, the sensible way to go about making money off your invention would be to license the patent to a larger company with the manufacturing capabilities -- it's called specialization or making the most of your comparative advantage. Furthermore, I don't see why a large company willing to devote the time and resources to research, but chooses not to manufacture the product itself shouldn't be able to license out its patents -- unless you're against the whole idea of patents.
"In a world without patents, then they would have less incentive to create a copycat drug, and a greater incentive to create novel drugs."
You that clueless? They would have the *most* incentive to just turn out el cheapo copies of the *same* drug. No having to invest in R&D etc...
Guarenteed that if the patent system didnt exist, the "different" world for the pharmeceutical companies would be worse. The OSS or "free" model doesn't work at all here, nor does it work in most industries where there are hard, real life goods.
An industry absolutely *must* have some sort of a fincial stram to survive. The *only* way those companies can make money is to sell product, not support, nor sell advertising space, nada. If it cannot sell its product and turn a profit, it won't survive, let alone invest in R&D.
That's econ 101 for you.
"but too often I see the argument that things would be different pass for an argument that things would be worse."
And I am getting real tired of hearing people apply the OSS and "free" software model to everything and their dog. Its just not possible.
Please, read the Constitution. Or, if that does not convince you, head on over to the United States Patent and Trademark Office here. I am interested in what the source of your information is.
Did you mean 'hacker' or 'cracker'?
Do you know the diffrence? I don't think you do.
You'll see the pattern if you look at drugs where the patent has expired, for example Beta2 antagonists. The company which first created them has the largest marketshare with Salbutamol (sold as Ventalin), while other B2 antagonists and generic Salbutamol trail behind.
You flunk history.
The industrial revolution started in about 1730 with the invention of the cotton mill in England. One of the most famous US inventions, the cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney around 1790.
But one that sounds very profitable!
(You might want to avoid the irony of demanding increased Patent Office funding and lower taxes simultaneously, though)
If increased Patent Office funding increases the GNP, then a lower tax rate might end up having a net increase in government revenue. no irony there. A secondary effect might also be that by spending a dollar at the Patent Office, they save two in court costs (judges salaries court room time etc.) A more efficient government doesn't need as many taxes.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
The way patents are used in the late 90's is nothing like the way patents have been used over the previous 200 years. We are now facing patents on life forms, patents on business models, and patents on algorithms.
Life forms in the form of plant patents have been around far longer than genetic engineeering. I don't know when the first plant patent was issued, but I bet it was in the 19th century to somebody like George Washington Carver.
As far as setting license fees at levels just short of the costs of litigation, this is nothing remarkably new. It was certainly common practice 25 years ago when I entered private industry.
And I think you overestimate the importance of patents in the technology business in the US. All of the current big software companies grew up in an environment where software patents didn't exist for practical purposes.
I think that is patently nonsense. The software industry was able to do without because opportunities were so huge and nothing was established at the start. Other industries live and die on patents. Biotech startups don't get funding without a patent review. Large consortia like Unipol are formed for the sole purpose of exploiting patent positions. Huge companies like UOP exist based on one thing - selling patented technology that they develop.
It isn't even anything like the patent system that we have had until the 90's.
It only appears that way to people who haven't studied the history of technology.
For defensive uses, it's much cheaper, faster, and pretty much as effective to use disclosure.
Recently I managed to get my name taken off of a software patent application my company is paying for.
It surprises me that you could this. A patent must list all the inventors to be valid.
So? The fact that patents support large consortia and oligopolies is not intrinsically an argument in their favor.
In fact, many people would argue that patents lead to a concentration of power in large companies and consortia, and that that is, in fact, an overall undesirable outcome; to many it appears that a vibrant, innovative free market economy depends on the existence a large number of nimble, small players, not a few lumbering giants locked up in huge consortia.
It's pretty obvious that in the presence of patents, rational economic agents will take advantage of them (and, hence, investors will require them). That says nothing about the economic or social desirability of patent protection.
Life forms in the form of plant patents have been around far longer than genetic engineeering. I don't know when the first plant patent was issued, but I bet it was in the 19th century to somebody like George Washington Carver.
The US Plant Patent Act was established in 1930 and had very limited scope (only asexual reproduction, among others); if you know of references to any earlier plant patent protection in the US, please let us know.
It only appears that way to people who haven't studied the history of technology.
If you are implying that you have, why don't you start to apply some of that knowledge and experience to this discussion?
About algorithms - in which countries you can patent algorithms? Or worse, can you patent protocols and fileformats in US?
I don't know about other countries, but in Finland you can't patent these... Go and check yourself, all finnish laws and more. You can even do searches there, patent is 'patentti' in finnish ;)
I just ran into a patent which basically puts the brakes on my work. For an upcoming networking product which will support Cisco's Fast EtherChannel it would be really nice to seamlessly interoperate through Cisco's simple PAgP (Port Aggregation Protocol). I found out that Cisco just got a patent on this simple protocol. I can't believe it. It's one of the stupidest patents I've seen. The result, however, is that Cisco can use it to continue to bolster their monopoly since they prevent anyone else from interoperating with them. They patented EIGRP as well, which is a popular routing protocol which is only supported by Cisco. Software patents should be for things that are truely revolutionary or very different. Software patents also should be subject to a different time limit, i.e. 5 years, since an Internet year is so much shorter.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Why bother about patent predators? THEY ARE OK!
Patent predators have have lurked around campuses ever since XXXXX was invented. After all THEY are playing by, or using if you prefer, the patent rules!
Beware, however... Ask instead how certain nations got their relative prosperity. For sure, they did not play by the patent rules.
And, ask yourself DVD-RW and Hollywood??? How many pirate copies of 3DMax does your shelf store, etc.
PATENT PREDATORS ARE OK! (in a sense...)
Proof that the single most damaging aspect of humanity is greed.
IANAL either but If you win the patent case being pushed against you then you should be able to recoup the attorny fees from the company that brought the case against you.
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Even better is enterprising lawyers who dig for companies who are lapse about defending their patents, the lawyers will buy the patents, then go on a lawsuit spree and extort little guys into coughing up royalties.
You can patent processes by just describing them in enough detail. Take an idea, develop it to the point where it can be described in enough detail to be patented and... presto! You can patent it without havng to actually build anything.
This reminds me of Feynman's memoirs where he's describing how he pulled ideas out of his butt (like a nuclear powered airplane) and having them patented. He didn't have to get out a wrench and a pile of unranium to get the patent... just a fairly detailed idea is good enough. You think the guys who patented the centrifical birth assisting device that the Ig Noble awards folks recently gave an award actually built the damned thing? I hope not...
This, of course, is what's causing the problem. The patent system is equating any old idea with ideas that are reached after years of painstaking research. The latter, I think, do at least deserve some sort of protection, to encourage spending on R&D. The former are the ones causing problems.
The problem with "spurious" patents is you'll need precedent in order to define what "spurious" really means.
The other problem with this is I can still grab up stupid patents, as long as it's cheaper for companies to pay me a pitance rather than try to challenge it in court.
Essentially what you're asking is for companies to take gambles that their huge court bills will be reimbursed when they win. This is a risky business at the very least. Who knows what a judge will think is logical and what isn't. Remember, most judges are not technologically savvy (my father is a Judge in Maricopa County, AZ (USA), and has little to no clue about computers/other technology).
The problem with opening the patent process up to the public is that you are exposing your idea. It behooves everyone else out there to shout down your patent idea, then try to beat you to market.
As to limiting the life of a patent, that's an interesting idea. It gives a company a chance to grab the market, while still allowing for competition down the road.
drudd
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
It should be pretty easy to at least partially automate this process -- IBM is generously supplying the patents in electronic form and it should be possible to build a program that cross references the patent for relevant web pages. Just have your debunker check out a patent to work on and he gets a nice page of info already researched by the computer. Hopefully a group like this would also encourage the PTO to improve their own process of granting patents.
Just a thought...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
$20,000 is quoted as the cost of getting a patent. So, a $10,000 fine wouldn't change that much.
It can't be[1], which is covered by copyright law. It can't be [2] or [3] because they are unpredictable in detail depending on the design of the compiler and its optimizers, the linker, etc. In fact, it seems to me that the top-level design is almost always impossible to deduce from the resultant binaries, particularly with OO languages. It can't be [4] because, as the department tag on the topic points out, algorithms are usually mathematical construct and as such is an inherent property of whatever mathematical system it falls out of, and is thus (I would think) unpatentable. It can't be [5] because that's just the purpose of the "invention," not the invention itself.
Have I missed something?
I get the feeling that what is needed here is a patent lawyer, with enough of a software background to understand what this is all about, challenging one or two of the more prominent software patents. If done with care, it could bring this whole evil legal edifice down on top of the corporations who built it.
And the brethren went away edified.
nice They Might Be Giants sig :)
I'm not the only one who listens to em.
I just ran into a patent which basically puts the brakes on my work. For an upcoming networking product which will support Cisco's Fast EtherChannel it would be really nice to seamlessly interoperate through Cisco's simple PAgP (Port Aggregation Protocol). I found out that Cisco just got a patent on this simple protocol. I can't believe it. It's one of the stupidest patents I've seen. The result, however, is that Cisco can use it to continue to bolster their monopoly since they prevent anyone else from interoperating with them. They patented EIGRP as well, which is a popular routing protocol which is only supported by Cisco.
Software patents should be for things that are truely revolutionary or very different. Software patents also should be subject to a different time limit, i.e. 5 years, since an Internet year is so much shorter.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
See what I mean? Patents cost MONEY. Money that people involved in OSS projects simply don't have to spend. So, what if some less-than-well-intentioned people with lots of money (say, around 100 billion for example :) ouch what a cheap shot...) start getting patents for things that are being developed as OSS projects? Can you even start to think about the ramifications of this? That's why software-patents-ARE-BAD(tm) and everyone should oppose them.
What can we do to prevent this? There have been a few ideas about making lots of prior art, but I believe there are more direct way to fight this possibility. The bigest one being internationalization of open source projects. It gets a LOT more expenciive to sue people if there are people in multiple countries working on a project. Plus, Joe GNU who gets a cease and desist letter can always continue the project.. just giving the credit to someone else.
Perhaps the EFF or some other somewhat international orginisation could host CVS servers in diffent countries. If a company harasses Joe then he just talks to the operator of a CVS server in a country which will make life difficult for the company and gets a numbered account with no ties to himself. We could also add a transport mechinism for CVS to allow you to connect to the CVS server WITHOUT it knowing where you were comming from. Now, the company needs a searh warent to see if the account login information is on his sytem and Joe can use a plausable deniability encryption System to make search warents useless (like SegFS). Hell, the patent ass wholes may stir up intrest in any project they attack, so there is NO WAY to prove that just because some anonymous person is contributing to the project means that Joe is.
I think Slashdot should adopt a policy of posting mirroring and contribution information whenever OSS project is (specifically) attacked with software patents. They know they are not going to make any money off of the guy, but the though that hundreds of geeks would suddenly take an interest in the guys project is probable enough to kep the layers at bay. I would be curious to know how many people have contributed to the Console Game Simulators because there interest was pirked by Nintendo's legal mess. (This is probable one of the best solutions)
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Find a dumb patent, sue the owner right up to the Supreme Court. Force the polititians to redefine patent law.
If a product is released closed-sourced, know one knows if they are violating any patents. However, as soon as the source is released, patent-hording companies can sue them into oblivion.
The responce to this is PUBLISH. If you know you can't affort to get the patent, PUBLISH your idea immediatly. Once you publish, any patent applied for after the publishing date is invalid.
We need a OSS paper documention campaign to publish all the OSS ideas into a legal archival format.
What if some loon discovers the cure for AIDS and decides to patent the process? What kind of limits does one face when filing a patent?
Phuck off.
You can't mount a counterattack based on disclosure.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
Don't forget the government can revoke a patent if there is a compelling public interest to do so. If someone patented the cure for AIDS and wanted to charge a million bucks a pop for it, the government would say that person is abusing a patent critical to the public good and therefore forfeits the rights to it.
First, this is all completely ridiculous. This doesn't really help anyone in the long run. Too bad it's the law.
:)
Second, everything in that graph past 1994 is an estimate. It might be accurate, and it looks like an upward trend, but I'm surprised it isn't worse, considering the hype.
Finally, anyone who thinks they have something worth patenting, feel free. If you believe in free software, maybe you can GPL your patent.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
About a month ago, all the engineers in my company were required to attent an "info" session on patents. Aside from appealing to our personal greed and fear (you get bonuses for patents, and trips to exotic locales for lots of 'em, and besides your evaluation is based on them) the lawyer there tried to morally justify patents. The main argument was, of course, "we need these defensively, for cross-licensing and counterattacks." Nothing new there.
The ancillary arguments, though, were very revealing. First, there was "everyone else is doing it". They gave the example of M$, which had 5 patents as of 1992 and now has hundreds. "And that's happening all over" they continued, citing some more alarming growth figures. Of course, this is all an argument against the new philosophy of "patent everything that moves" - it casts it not as an established way of doing business but as an alarming new trend.
Another argument they made is even more scary. The main body of my company is number 2 in its industry and slowly falling further and further behind number 1 (although my own division, soon to be spun off, is number 1 and pulling ahead.) The patent lawyer dropped a few asides about how patents were an asset "of growing importance", especially to our stock price. It definitely sounded to me as if the lawyer realized that, if all the rest of our business went south, well at least we could start suing people. In other words, DON'T BELIEVE THE BULL ABOUT PATENTS BEING DEFENSIVE. A growing company can afford to have such scruples; but when that large company starts to stagnate, and all the employees with imagination gradually leave, those scruples will fall by the wayside. Every last penny will be wrung out of patent "assets".
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
So the rest of you can get by with just the zeroes.
To rant about this for a few seconds on a well iterated thought. These Patents should not even exist! These companies are making Idodic Patents THEY KNOW they should not be able to make. But the US patent office chugs along. I could probalby patent certain mouse Icons If i was in a big enough company. Okay. The white pointer tilted at a slight angle with black outline!. Thats mine. Sheesh! We dont need to submit to this type of thing. COntact the patent office and rant to them! (I will get a email of address soon)
Are you a patent attorney, thad?
I'm guessing that you are not.
You make it sound as though no business is safe from patents and then further claim, based on your faulty premise, that open-source software is doomed.
Why would you assume that you could implement research presented at a technical conference for your own monetary gain without checking?
Sounds like your company made a big mistake. That does not lead one to conclude OSS is doomed. Rather it leads one to question your merits.
Somehow software development flourished without patents for years, even building silicon valley. Still if you really want to have software pattents don't you think they should at least resemble patents in other areas? If you patent an invention you must provide blueprints. If my invention works better there is no infringment.
.au file over the Internet.
Provide source, if I can find a case that runs in fewer steps for my algorithm than yours then we have no infringement.
But I guess in the Free Market I should have to cut your lazy butt a check if I want to send an
An Object at rest CANNOT BE STOPPED! -The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Perhaps he knows this, and is trying to sabotage the patent.
Just create a $10,000 fine for "spurious patents", and define spurious just
as vaguely as the USPTO defines valid software patents. This will put
the breaks on most companies (if, for example 1/3 of Microsoft's software
patents were found to be invalid, that would probably be enough to
cancel out profit from Office for a year!)
The other way to go, that a lot of people cite is just limiting the life
of a software patent to 3 years. I'd sign on to this, IF there were
a reasonable way to speed up the approval process.
One way to speed it up might be to open it up. Let everyone see every
submitted patent that has been past the first "does it fit the
required format, and did they pay up" pass. Do it over the Web, and
allow a Slashdot-like feedback. Only patents that don't get a bozo-alert
from the masses get sent on to the next stage (internal USPTO technical
review). Thus the next 200 people to submit "talking online" and
"window-shopping online" will be bounced in less time than it takes
to Slashdot a personal web-server into the ground.
For anyone who has an interest in the subject:
http://www.theonion.com/oni on3311/microsoftpatents.html
Once again, for those that don't already know, proof that The Onion is the font of all wisdom.
Can your IM do this?
This is kinda like the tort reform that was floating around capitol hill last year ...
Big companies can always manage to pay the fines, it's individuals and small groups who would find a 10K fine devistating. And there is no gaurentee that your patent application, no matter how well intended, won't get fined. And it's not like the patent process needs any help being totally inaccessable to the average individual.
- bridgette
Q: What's the difference between a hooker and a lawyer?
A: A hooker stops screwing you after you're dead.
--The Rainmaker
--
Win98 sux without these 1337 toolz !!
Where do people get this stuff? Doesn't anyone have a clue as to how technology businesses in the US have operated for the past 200 years?
Dammit, For many years companies like Texas Instruments and UOP have gotten more of their profits by developing technologies and licensing them to other companies. Giant conglomerates like Unipol exist primarily to take advantage of patents developed in large consortia.
The idea that anything has changed in the hardware area over the past 20 years is ludicrous. The only thing that is different is that we have a new set of PHB's fresh out of Stanford Business School that need to be educated, and a bunch of impressionable journalists that have no education in this area.
Software patents are another ballgame altogether. The patent office is being far to lenient when it grants these things.
a) people submit ideas, not designs
b) people are trying to patent things that have been around for a long time
Unfortunately, I really do think that there are legit software patents though. I think that having a shorter time, like you suggest, for the patent length would really help.
Please explain to me why the FSF, or any of a number of democratic open-source initiatives should not start patenting many of the advances made in the course of developing open source software. Any takers for starting up a new org to tackle this?
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Cellular is a fairly unimportant little cellular automata program.
;) ). It's fought with ideas, and sacrifices have to be made. If intellectual property is not to be become a ball and chain, if people are to retain the ability to work with their minds and retain control over their own ideas and clever inventions, it seems the only safe haven anymore is the hardcore free (libre) software side- the determination to produce ideas and add them to the shared hoard. If these ideas are in use and known to be in existence, matching ideas cannot be patented. If the ideas are unsung and never seen by anybody, then lawyers will have a relatively easy time raising doubt that a matching idea came first. Publicity is the friend of free software, the handmaiden of 'prior art'.
Staccato is a reminder program, which might have some ideas relating to intelligent input parsing somebody is trying to patent. It sets things up so entries in the info file are very easily done, with the 'API' extremely easy to master. I'm sure someone would try to patent that.
Sitebot is a particular method of keeping data files as plain text with a couple of easily added headers, and 'compiling' that into a website which can then be uploaded. If anybody means to patent a narrowly defined method for writing plaintext and having it read and turned into a web site with the same structure as the plaintext files and folders, Sitebot is prior art.
ROTSOS (Return of the Son of Spacewar) is the best yet, being a radically different approach to game engine design. It offers literally the ability to produce game 'maps' equivalent to data files billions of gigs in size, in fact the ability to have billions of worlds each with 'maps' (not all of which will be distinct, but for all practical purposes...). It requires that game map creation be an exploratory process rather than a creative process, a major innovation in map design IMHO as the person who came up with it after reading lots of stuff on AI and artificial life. Took some years to work out, and naturally I've had to produce flashy demos (mostly movies, others to come) to illustrate what's being done here.
What do all these software products have in common, from the trivial to the actually innovative?
They are _all_ Free Software under the GNU GPL. That is including ROTSOS, and I have every expectation that somebody else with ship a GPLed game before I can get one together. I understand that and approve of it. I also understand that I'm going to stay poor and won't get diddly from all this.
Then why on earth am I doing it?
Because I'm just another soldier in a different sort of war. This patent stuff is deadly serious, but it's not fought with guns (unless they are patentable
So.... STEAL MY SOFTWARE!!!! That's right- go grovel through its ugly depths for any ideas that might make your open source project take off! Grab anything you want! Be grateful or not, say nice things about what neat ideas I have or not- the only requirement is that it stay GPL. Take all the credit for stuff that I came up with, while releasing it as GPL! Because as long as somebody gets publicity for a GPLed idea or algorithm or program, as long as that idea is obviously prior art and not ripe for a patent, that means I get to keep using it. And if the ideas languish in obscurity, it's all the more likely that some clown will patent some broad notion, hire better lawyers and enjoin me from ever using the idea that was mine in the first place. I'm not kidding. Wittingly or not, this is war now.
Write GPLed software (that being the most hardcore of the licenses)! Get glaring publicity! Anybody who can, _please_ make sure as many ideas (broad or specific) are within the camp of 'free software, prior art' as possible. Because it's a real problem, a serious danger, and these people trying to fight it by staking out defensive patents are only compounding the problem.
Time to choose sides!
The pollution analogy suggests that one effective way of curbing patents may be to let vendors know that you are on to them and prefer to buy from the least serious offender.
For example, I consider Amazon's patent on one-click ordering a blatant attempt to increase the cost of doing business for other web merchants through a frivolous patent. I canceled my account, let them know about it, and will order elsewhere now.
You probably prefer buying from companies that try to keep your environment clean. Try to apply the same standard to your intellectual environment and avoid companies that pollute the patent space as much as possible.
I hve to disagree. There are good reasons for a patent system--mainly disclosure and protection. Look at countries with limited patent protection (India, for one quick example) and you will see places with limited innovation (no drugs will be made there, because there aren't enough protections). If you can propose a better system, try, but I don't believe that the patent system is preferrable to a system which relies solely on trade secrets to operate. Such systems, historically, have failed.
3.) The American Government sees strict Patents laws as a way to ensure that dominace of American firms on the world market. There are a reported cases, when obviously stolen patents of non american firms appeared to to be patented in America just before this firms themselves applied for the international patent. As the American goverment once stated openly, it sees industrial espionage as a legimate way to ensure American dominance for key technologies. So the American legislature has a good reason (for them) not to change this laws.
This is very, very wrong. The US system is FIRST TO INVENT. So if you file here second, but invented earlier, you win. Let me repeat, the first inventor gets the patent.
In Europe, the system is FIRST TO FILE, so if I invent something in the US, but someone files before me in europe, then I am screwed, and my patent gets NO protection.
Get your facts straight.
All a big company needs to do is sue someone in a project that makes huge contributions. So this guy gets nailed -- you think the others won't be scared?
Someone should set up a competition for the least valid patents of each year. Nominations could be made by anyone and would form the primary post of a slashdot-like discussion forum. Users could then contribute to the debate about each patents merits and then vote for which ever they thought was worst. You would probably have to have a final voting stage for the top 10 nominations to eliminate any timing bias. The competion would be called the Gore Awards in honour of the man who invented (and yet did not patent) the internet. I have of course thought about patenting this idea itself but this could lead to the it winning its own competition which would surely lead to charges of bias.
/* The Declaration of Independance */
Seriously though, I'm sure that such a competition would draw a fair bit of attention to the problem of obvious ideas being patented. If something like this already exists (the 'idea' is actually a 'memory') please post saying where it is. Otherwise how about some preliminary nominations?
int independance;
If you release an open-source program which violates a patent, and the company sues you for damages, its purpose is to destroy you and let it serve as a warning to others who might in their stead do the same. If it costs them $100,000 to crush you into the ground, and they only get half of that in damages, it's an acceptable loss; companies budget for patent defense.
Suppose open source licenses contained some additional language to make life more difficult for the patent parasites out there:
(1) Prohibit analysis or reverse-engineering for the purpose of determining the applicability of a software patent, and
(2) Prohibit use by any party who has, say, in the past two years demanded software patent royalties.
A cause of action for infringement would automatically transfer to any company required to pay software parent royalties to a patent holder.
Example: A year from now MonsterSoft demands patent royalties from LittleWare for the use of an "OK" button in a dialog box. LittleWare finds out that MonsterSoft uses open source software in some of its servers. LittleWare counterclaims for infringement of the revised open source license. MonsterSoft, suddenly seeing its own deep pockets put at risk, retreats.
So, without entering [yet] into the discussion of whether patents are a good idea (the system in general seems to mostly be working... I don't hear a lot of screaming about it in other industries, except drugs), in the case of a lot of software patents, it seems that the obviousness clause ought to be invoked.
People get patents for things like "storing digitized voice in a file system" or "conducting e-commerce with cookies and aitch-tee-tee-pee". It's insane! This stuff is obvious to any programmer, but apparently mystifying to the rest of the world. I mean, if you are going to give a patent on voicemail, give it to the guy who invented A/D or filesystems, but not the idea of using both: it's obvious.
In terms of some software patents, I don't know how to define it accurately, but public key encryption was a pretty good, non-obvious idea: seems as worthy of patent as anything. I think we need to keep going back to the basic question: does allowing the patent holder a temporary monopoly encourage more good in the world by stimulating more R/D? People often cite this as a reason, but citing it is not the same as showing that it's true.
Ya know, patent intellectual property rights were not invented to stimulate R&D, in particular. Think back to manufacturing days: patenting was created to stimulate people sharing ideas. You, then and now, had the choice: invent a process and keep it a secret but have no protection against me-toos, or share the idea and be granted a temporary monopoly. The community as a whole wanted to stimulate more sharing because after the patent expired, then you'd see some extra innovation taking place. So, R&D stimulation was indirect, and not all for the reason of the monopoly rents (that's a fancy word for "real profit").
Software does not have this "I can keep it a secret" nature like manufacturing does (unless it runs on your server...) so that sort of creates a bigger incentive to patent in this arena, and probably calls for a different set of rules.
Problem is, companies would actually have to make a good product to stay ahead of the competition, and couldn't just rest on their laurels lest a little guy who was willing to try something different came along and ate their lunch. It would promote an open and (much more) fair business landscape. The people who want to be multi-billionaires don't like that; too many people getting a piece of the pie, dontcha know.
Mr. AC
After we were approached by the University of Utah, though about a patent we had violated on free-form deformations, we decided to not do that anymore. It was a tough decision to make, because these videos were quite popular. Still, we couldn't risk our company's existence any longer, as we had no idea what patents we might be violating.
This FFD patent was a complete and utter surprise. We had attended a technical conference (Siggraph) where Sederberg presented the research, and had assumed that we could just implement the ideas in the paper. There was no notice given (or necessary) that there was a patent application in the works.
The worst thing is that there is absolutely no way to not get sandbagged by this. There is no way of knowing what patents are in process; and if you base your companies in-house development on things for which patents are later granted, you can be completely hosed.
The situation for open-source software, is, of course, immensely worse; as you have no way of keeping how you did things secret.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
What about the situation where you've spent a huge amount of money doing R&D, then discover that some other company thinks your spiffy new product violates an obscure claim of one of their patents? Personally, I think that if you can prove that you did all the R&D, you should be able to reap the benefits of that work regardless of whether some other bozo beat you to the patent office first.
Actually, the controversial patents don't seem to be the ones costing billions of dollars in R&D - the ones that people get pissed off about are the ones where a dozen people with limited imaginations get together, brainstorm some totally obvious variations on existing technology, play "footsie" with the patent office to get them in the records, then try and make money by intimidating people into paying w/o any real intent to develop the idea themselves.
Hmmm...there's an interesting idea. Maybe the viability of the patent could somehow be tied to the amount of documented resources that it took to put the patent together? On second thought, I'm sure that some companies would be able to figure out how to waste millions of dollars pursuing really obvious ideas.
Lame, Lame. It will only hurt if someone is selling it. They cannot sue me for coping a design and letting my friends use my homeade version of something....even if I have 10 billion friends. And screw whether redhat can distro and sell it I could care less.
A: At least we believe one exists.
Ok. How? How can you be sure that you are not violating patents? How can you even be 1% sure? How can you even pretend to be sure that you're not violating patents that are currently being processed?
I suppose the only way would be to base all of your algorithms on old (> 20 years) papers and to contribute nothing original on your own. This would be the only way to be certain.
Well, I suppose you could also go into space and nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I have no idea.
Got bored. -mgcpl
What's a mechan?
Then the companies lobby the US government to drop a few laser-guided bombs on the data haven to wipe out this racket. The corporate media, always helpful, then runs stories about the servers having contained child pornography or something.
Yes, but I'm willing to say I'm not one of the inventors. The whole thing is a big gray area anyway. It was a "collaboration" and besides I don't think the ideas are worth patents anyway, so it's easy for me to justify saying I didn't invent anything. I'm not trying to sabotage the patent. Perhaps I should have the courage to do so, but I don't want to stab my co-workers in the back who want to have a patent (even though they too hope its only used defensively -- its the higher ups I'm worried about).
The problem is that this is not what the patent system accomplishes in practice, patents are often used as an additional revenue stream and protectionist measure against smaller companies and cross licensing deals mean that between the larger companies patents don't tend to protect innovation either.
Scarier still are the public standards which have patented IP designed in and the companies that patent the "bleedin' obvious" to form IP bundles for commercial negotiations. This is becoming more and more common and in these cases there isn't even the pretence of protecting 'ideas' or 'innovation'. It's simply using the system as a commercial & legal lever to increase a companies revenue.
Also this does threaten to cripple the open source movement: Even if you know there's a prior art case or the patent is obvious/invalid then to fight these things you still need a vast reserve of money and lawyers, both of which open source projects don't have.
A review of the patent system which did protect innovation and prevented the use of patents and IP in general as a commercial tool _would_ be worth having IMO, but it's something that we don't have now....
It's been almost 6 years since I followed an introductory course in business law. Now the syllabus is burried under a whole stack of paper in my father's basement, so I can't look it up easily.
I vaguely remember one thing about patents: if you register one, you have to exploit it, or licence it to someone else to use/sell it for you. Otherwise, you lose the patent rights.
This is one of the reasons why some ideas never get to the patent office: companies consider it more beneficial to guard the know-how as a trade secret. (And of course, trade secrets don't expire, while patents do.)
WWTTD?
Unless everyone who works on the infringing project is careful about attaching copyright notices to every CVS commit, attributing ownership of the work to the FSF, they will simply sue the individual whom they judge to have crossed the line between a non-infringing work and an infringing work. They have never denied that individuals can be sued. :(
I've spent quite a bit of time lately trying to get a patent (Don't kill me, its for hardware I designed), so I have a few thoughts on the whole process.
The patent office as it stands right now is so heavily biased towards large corporations that the only solution I can see is to rebuild it from scratch. Origionally, the inventor would write up a patent, (with free help from a patent examiner!) and submit it. It would be evaluated and either rejected or accepted. It cost about a hundred bucks.
Now, don't even THINK about trying to get a patent without a lawyer. Most likely, you'll get rejected, and if you manage to get accepted, you'll end up with a mostly worthless patent. If you're serious, and have a good, patentable idea, expect to pay about 3000 dollars for a decent patent.
However, if you're a large company, and have a staff of good lawyers, you can get just about anything patented, no matter how ridiculous. And companies usually try to price their licenses so that its cheaper to just submit to extortion than to fight their patent (which is so expensive that an individual shouldn't even consider it).
Large companies have their own patent portfolio, and if they need someone else's patent, they arrange a cross-licensing agreement, instead of paying fees, since they can most likely extort the other patent holders as well.
The current system has been manipulated to stratify the status quo, and protect slow moving large companys from small innovators. Write your congresscritter, not that'll it'll do any good.
Software patents are relatively untested, and the patent office is "attempting" to issue patents on the basis of the way they are written in law... unfortnately they are failing in terms of practicality. The largest problem seems to be a lack of prior art searches, or rather insufficient ones. All lot of this e-commerce nonsense will begin to disappear once cases start going to court and the defense attorney pull of ten years of "e-commerce" business practices prior to the filing dates of the patent. Once companies start to realize that their frilivous patenting of software products ($20000-40000 US) is pointless because the patents are mostly worthless, they'll stop doing it. The courts in the past have through their ruling changed what is "patentable", and so until the courts establish better rules about patents the patent office will continue to dish out this nonsense.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
...how do you save a drowning lawyer?
good.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
The one problem with this argument is that If a product fails and a company sues another big one, they actually can get money out of it to cover any damages for the failure. It actually matters that they can get money out of it, and dicourage the other company from allowing that to happen again. Suing over patents is completely different, in that it's far more important to get rid of the other product and hold on to the monopoly than it is to actually get money from the violator. if they were to sue an OSS project over a patent, they wouldn't expect to actually get anything out of it. If it's over liability, however, they need to expect to get something out of suing.
I really don't agree with this line of thinking, but it's a reality that someone's going to face eventually.
Look at the icon slashdot is using that depicts the woman holding the scales of justice. Why is she not blindfolded? Is this some subtle statement of Slashdot's real political goals and intentions?
Writting your Congressperson won't do much good. It won't go past the staff. Drop by the local office. That way the staff knows that you are commited to the idea and will be far more likely to pass it on. Friday AM is a great time for this because you stand a good chance of catching the Represenative at the office preparing for some weekend campaining. Call the local office to find out if s/he is giving any speaches. This is the time of year they are doing grassworks to prepare for next years election. Use the right Buzz words, like "protecting the American Cyber-Revoulation" A secondary course of action is to write to companys using software pats as a weapon. Cirrus logic is looking for a 5% gain in revenues. Write them and inform them that you will not buy any product containing Cirrus logic chips if they continue. Write thier customers and inform them that you will not buy thier product if they use cirrus logic chips. Let them know they stand to lose more $ through lost sales than they will gain by IP warfare.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
I see nothing wrong with patenting software per se. As several people have pointed out, the patent process originated not in the desire to keep large bags of cash in the hands of corporations, but to allow inovators the freedom to create and distribute their ideas while still putting food on the table, which tends to be a concern for most people. The problem seems to me to be not that patenting is wrong, but that the process that we have is not prepared to address the issues of software patenting. The patent process was origonally designed for steam engines, zippers, and light bulbs, not operating system code. The devices being registered have gotten more complex, and so has the patenting process. The process that the patent office has is not prepared to deal with the issues that software patenting raises. We can't just blaim the patent service for bowing to the will of large companies; the patent service is following the rules it has always had, but the situation has changed so as to make it only accesable to companies with serious resources($). The answer would be for Someone(what body is responsible for administering the patent office? Anyone know?) to start a very serious inquiry into patent law as it relates to software. In some cases, old precidents may be useful, but as with any growing field of the law, some times new precidents will need to be written. Law as related to computers, software, and the internet is still in its infancy; this issue is just one of many that are going to be addressed in the coming years.
If I have an idea, I have three choices:
- Sit on it until a big corp matches it and enjoins me from using it ever again
- Use it and risk being taken to court when the big corp figures out it can win purely because it can challenge my right to the idea, and I can't pay to fight it
- GPL the bugger, whereupon it's very unlikely that I personally can profit from the idea in the usual sense, but on the other hand it's very likely that the idea can't be taken away from me, ever, and _that_ might be worth something to me, independent of my desire to not let the corp own it.
I go for option 3, unhesitatingly. How about you?Don't do it. If you do, then you're no better than the lawyers you don't seem to like.
The "father of the Internet" was given the task of reengineering the patent office in the early 1990s. Before Al's efforts, the policy of the patent office was "to issue valid patents." After the reengineering, the patent office had a mission statement to the effect of "to help our customers obtain patents." This shift in focus has resulted in a significant deterioration in the quality and validity of patents issued by the USPTO. The vast majority of software patents as well as other recently issued patents would have been rejected in the past. However, this plays well for one of the administrations favorite lobbying groups, lawyers.
Take a totally implausible example: say a company patents the process by which books are ordered by employing a single click.
This isn't so implausible. NPR had this story a couple of weeks ago about a couple of developers who claim to hold a patent on the concept of delivering video over networks.
It's a tragedy of the contemporary imagination that it cannot concieve of any motivation other than profit - that it has actually come to believe that monetary gain is the only effective motivator.
A fairly clear debunking of this motivational claim is available here on the FSF site. I also refer you to Maslow's heirarchy of needs - short version is that when one is no longer anxious about one's material well being, one persues more elevated "needs," such as the need for creativity and intellectual expression. (Those institutions which depend on our drive for material accumulation thrive by using media to artificially maintain our sense of material anxiety, by linking it to social anxiety - ie, we won't be happy and shall lack social credibility without a New Car, New Shoes, the Right Deoderant, a Bigger Car, a Bigger House, etc.)
As less money is available to academic research environments, and our media culture continues to elevate the materially successful as heroes above the scientifically, culturally and intellectually successful, this whole "only profit will motivate people" line becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, unfortunately, and it's especially tragic to see it promulgated among those of us who a. have the least to fear as far as our material well-being is concerned and b. have the most to gain by valuing intellectual achievement for its own sake. The spiritual virus, our new sickness-unto-death, is among us.
If 2 people submitted the same idea in a short period of time, should not both of them be disallowed because of obviousness?
Q: Why don't sharks eat lawyers?
A: Professional courtesy.
Q: What do you call 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.
But i do not see where this argumentation contradicts the the point i made. The reported cases i mentioned are from an Articel series in a major german news magazine (Der Spiegel) about the Echelon network. The problem is once a patent is registered you have a major legal battle at hand to get your invention back. This case has to be made before an american court, which is no easy task for a smaller non american firm. Especially because 'first to invent' is much harder to prove than 'first to file'.
Hope this makes the case a bit more clear.
Thomas
And the Bozo checks have failed. The good news is that most will not survive a 'challenge' re prior art. The fine for a spurious patent, should be to pay 'costs' for the other party , by having to dig deep Notice the US patent office does not cross check against foreign patents (about as well as the local ones it seems)
If offshore == europe, where a big part of OSS already comes from, the problem becomes much more interesting. Europe does have a patent system, which is probably extremely complex because of the two levels (local & european), but as far as I know, (http://www.freepatents.org/) it's not (yet!) so buggy.
Honestly.. they'll be trying to steal our wind, or dip those patents in our sacred pools soon.
OTOH, if you invent something and -tell the world- what you've invented, the day -before- xyz, inc. files for a patent, they can't, legally, touch you. (Or anyone, their patent is invalid by 'prior art').
They can legally sue you, though. That'll run most one-man companies into the ground anyway.
Plus, you see how far you get on your own against an angry horde of Microsoft lawyers. They could probably persuade the judge to get you to cease-and-desist from breathing if they wanted.
What we need now is Bob the Corporate Dinosaur to get appointed to the Supreme Court.
The purpose of patents is to encourage inventors to share their ideas, rather than keep them secret. Therefore, there's little point in offering a patent on something that's going to be made public knowledge anyway. For example, there's no way that a user interface feature (such as Apple's wastebasket) could be kept secret, so those should not be patentable. Similarly, any information about a product that can be gleaned from the user manual, or by simply using the product, shouldn't be protected by any patents.
For instance:
US1997000820718
Abstract:
A method for recovering from software fault in a fault tolerant computing system includes a
system status recording step to record the system status at the occurrence of the above
software fault when the above fault is judged to be a software fault by a fault identifying step,
a software fault factor diagnosing step to diagnose the fault factor of the above software
fault, a software fault recovery action determining step to determine a recovery action to the
above fault factor of the above software fault, and a software fault recovery action executing
step to execute the recovery action the above fault factor of the above software fault
determined by the above software fault recovery action determining step after roll back.
What's this? I'd say this is called exception handling since about 1985. And it features an exceptionally obfuscated choice of words. It's been the first I found when searching for "software" in IBMs patent server.
Kirth
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
I know of at least one company spending lots of money on software and process patents for (what I believe to be) the sole purpose of licensing and litigation of the offensive nature. They've even offered me money and re-occuring revenues if I'll let them cross-patent what they consider to be "my inventions". Even though I've developed what I would consider to be some pretty decent systems, I don't know how I feel about patenting the process, then threatening anyone who comes close to doing the same thing.
I don't know, but I think Heinlein had the right idea about lawyers...
It's an interesting question, when you wonder how to protect free software. I wonder if it would be possible for free code to be released by a nonprofit corporation(s). You could have a situation where free software is developed in an underground, then handed to individuals running nonprofits to "publish". I'd imagine only the corporation has liability, and it has no assets to recover. Additionally, you could look for people who were "judgement proof" to run the corporations. Fundamentally, there's liable to always be legal loopholes that protect people who want to put out something free, since you can't take their profits, etc. The real question is: what's this doing to innovation? The real scare ought to be flimsy patents defending non-innovation. There are a whole host of things that could be done to protect innovation, such as severly limiting how long a patent lasts, forcing licensing or capping license costs, etc. If only there was a good way to protect true innovation while getting rid of all the sharks in the pool...
The reasoning behind this was (to my knowledge) to encourage a firm to patend their inventions by giving them the right to use them for themselves for a number of years. To do this they must make the idea or process public. This means they have to share it with everyone. This is IMHO a Good Thing. When the patent expires the knowledge is given to the public for free use.
The Question here is why and when got the process of patents got twisted around and changed to something that is actually hindering progress and not helping it along.
In my opinion this has the following reasons:
1.) The whole patenting process is from a time when technical innovation was moving much slower. The timelines for patents are just to long these days and should be shortened. Or perhaps an evalution process should be used, so that patens will be given to the public domain after a firm made a decent return on investment from them. But this would perhaps lead to another insane buerocratic nightmare :-)
2.) The American patent laws do not have a clause for mandatory licensing. As far as i know this is the case for some European patent Laws. Under this Laws a license must be issued to any firm that applys for one. So a firm can make money by licensing the innovations, but cannot hoard innovations by keeping them for themselves.
3.) The American Government sees strict Patents laws as a way to ensure that dominace of American firms on the world market. There are a reported cases, when obviously stolen patents of non american firms appeared to to be patented in America just before this firms themselves applied for the international patent. As the American goverment once stated openly, it sees industrial espionage as a legimate way to ensure American dominance for key technologies. So the American legislature has a good reason (for them) not to change this laws.
I think the system itself is not completely without reason. But the implementation lends itself to misuse. I'm not sure if the system could be fixed, so big firm cannot use it to stiffle Open Software or competitors. Perhaps it is inherently flawed and should be thrown away. But this would lead to a severe cut in the exchange of ideas beetween commercial operating buissinesses. I dont like patents but i'm not sure, if we wouldn't go from bad to worse by dumping them.
At least there should be clear criteria what is allowed to patend and what not. Buying books with one click should not patentable, this only leads to misuse.
Oh, before i forget. Patents are already hampering the implementation of Free Software in a major field, audio compression. To my knowledge there was once a project under way to specify a new free audio standard that could replace mp3. The project was cancelled because most of the key technologies needed for good, lossy audio compression were already patented und could not be used.
Thomas
I completely agree. But here's a question: What constitutes a patentable intellectual property in software?
Any idea which is not 'obvious' to the patent reviewers... which is to say, any idea whatsover that hasn't already been patented. Some of these patents can be challenged in court, but most judges don't know any more than the patent reviewers about software.
I'm not even sure that I know what part of my code/products are patentable. Am I going to have to worry about companies swooping in and stealing my effort just because they had the resources to get the patent filled?
Ummmm. Maybe. Depends what you mean. If you and xyz, inc. invent something on the same day, and they patent it and you don't, you lose. If you invent it the day after, you very definitely lose.
OTOH, if you invent something and -tell the world- what you've invented, the day -before- xyz, inc. files for a patent, they can't, legally, touch you. (Or anyone, their patent is invalid by 'prior art').
The good news is that the open-source movement is a continual stream of prior-art being poured out into the world, so at least -the- most absurd patents from now on will be defeatable.
Anyway, what is 'patentable' is basically, algorithims and ways to combine algorithms for a purpose. (Despite the fact that arithmatical algorithms are not patentable, software algorithms are, even though the two are often (always?) interchangeable.)
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Currently I am working on for a DNA sequencing company that does similar things :) /. archives if you don't know what I'm talking about)
The company's primary focus is sequence a genome, find the function, if it's something 'commercially viable' than patent it and sell it to pharmacutical (I can't spell, i'm a programor) companies to develop cures and what not.
I was initially opposed to this, but after thinking about it for a while I figured that it's employing a lot of people, and saving a lot of people.
In most casees, ifthere is no commercial interest to do something, it will not get done (excluding Linux/OSS of course) -- that's the bottom line. If someone finds the cure for AIDS and patents it and does not grant licenses for the patent they will go under and wont afford the lawyer to enforce the patent rights anyway
Biomedical research is quite expensive and typically requires commercial support
Unfortunately as time goes on more and more patents are coming out -- instead of thinking, "hey there isn't an app that does xyz" we're being forced to think, "Hey -- is there a patent for xyz".
Limits should be placed on what you can patent -- patenting the idea for something should not be allowed, patenting the method should be. If you actually come up with something specifically unique than it's yours -- bottom line. But you should never be allowed to patent concepts and general idea's. (Like One click shopping for instance, check the
Patents are a great thing and a bad thing -- which seems to mirror the majority of things about our economy.
-= Making the world a better place =-
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Actually, my grandfather has a great idea on what to do with lawyers. Get 'em all in a transport ship and stop it in the middle of the ocean. Drill a few holes in the hull and let 'em argue out their case to see who gets to be the last one on top.
I've been working for about five years on a "human language learning exchange" project, which turned into software, which recently turned (partly) into a pending u.s. patent. The basic "method" claimed ain't rocket science, but it did take a lot of error and even more trial to come up with. And trust me, it's really *sucked* working on the chicken side of the egg. I'd prefer not to get screwed in the end. Still, there are so many reasons *not* to file internet software patents, especially as churn churns churn faster:
* if the world wide web or linux were patented, who'd use 'em? free ideas are far more powerful.
* patents perpetuate outdated economic models, imposing artificial scarcity upon abundant bits.
* the Internet is transforming human societies much faster than local laws or terrestrial governments can adapt.
* (in fact, we might experience widespread institutional failure and soon.)
* not all jurisdictions recognize the international patents, so they're difficult to enforce on the web.
* it costs a fortune to file, prosecute manage and enforce patents in multiple the jursidictions of the world.
* patent laws discriminate against the poor: those who can't pay up can't legally "protect" innovations. (this ain't a big deal today, but wait 10 years when bandwidth is 60,000 times more plentiful, tripling yearly its reach)
* patent claims set a precedent, thus inviting future patents to attempt to monopolize derivative works.
* patents perpetuate ideals of marketplace "dominance". "partnership" may give rise much more valuable trade.
* patent impose an outdated a "zero sum" game. Learning grows more valuable as more people share it.
* trademarks are a far more "defense worthy", as they identify reputable brand (increasingly valuable as info gluts)
so.. why'd i file? believe me, i been on the fence.. (and sick to the stomach) but finally decided a patent pending might buy some time and keep some options open.. (besides, the thing took forever to write, and *damned* dull it was.. (no wonder the patent office is overwhelmed.. (have you ever read a patent?)))
Anyway, i'm 100% sure that, um.. "my" project should chaorganize and go open source, and aim to host a license selection forum real soon, but here's my question now:
there's been some talk of an Open Source Patent Pool to cross-license w/ the closed stuff.. (are there any "open" patents in this pipeline yet? (any chance at "first post"8P?)).. Anyone have more info?
[btw- IMO, open source patent pooling *might* be an effective "defensive" strategy, but remember the "enemy" has deeeep pockets. Better choose playing field wisely.. the way to outmaneuver *money* is increasingly to outsmart it..]
there's a lotta smart, creative, energetic thinking on Slashdot, but this one aspect drives me nuts! A $10,000 fine would be a joke. Who posted that, Dr. Evil on defrost?
Patents can be overturned if it can be shown that the core idea was published before the patent application was filed. If you have anything you want to share, publish it.
This may allow someone in the future to site your work in order to overturn a patent.
If you believe in free software, maybe you can GPL your patent. :)You do not need to patent. Just publish! Formally, once published, the idea is not applicable. PS: maybe Slashdot is "good enought" :)
That the law could be interpreted that once you HAVE an mp3 it is legal to USE it...even if the SOURCE was illegal (ie, Fair Use applies just from having a copy, legal or not)
That's my take on 17 USC. Copyright law prohibits unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyrighted material. As a result, someone in possession of illegal duplications should not be in any sort of violation. Duplicate that, and you're history (or at least can be). This is probably why Microsoft wasn't concerned about getting pirateware and giving away real licenses (not that I'd trust them anyway).
This sucks, so basicly if you want to improve someones software out and make it better, but buidling your own software, you could do, if the company who make it in the frist place has a patent on it? This is just going to lead to more crapy software, and more crapy companys out there.
Patent law is also being used very differently. Patent law is being used to tie up small startups in knots and patent licensing fees are calculated to be just below the cost where it would be profitable for a competitor to actually defend themselves in court. And the amount of work and the cost related to writing and applying for patents has increased enormously.
And I think you overestimate the importance of patents in the technology business in the US. All of the current big software companies grew up in an environment where software patents didn't exist for practical purposes. And even for hardware, most innovations weren't patented, and those that were often weren't enforced or enforcable (with a significant number of highly publicized exceptions, of course).
Maybe the way patents are used in the 90's is defensible from an economic and policy point of view (although I have grave doubts). But one thing is clear: even if the letter of the law hasn't changed much, from a practical point of view, this is nothing like the patent system we have had for the past 200 years. It isn't even anything like the patent system that we have had until the 90's. So, past successes and failures are not a guide to whether this system will work.
Wouldn't DNA patents be forbidden under prior art?
This is a rough draft of the DNA Public License (DPL). If you will pardon the pun, the DPL is intened to be viral.
Please add your comments, especially if you actually have a clue to the law.
1. I hereby claim ownership of all DNA sequences and all variations herein that occur within my own cells. (It is mine, in a very real sense, my DNA is me.)
2. No company, individual, or government shall patent, license or restrict in any way shape or form any technology, technique or information sharing that uses these sequences or variations on these sequences. Companies are free to charge whatever they want for any medical treatment derived from my DNA or variations herein. (Companies can make a profit from their reseach, but they can't keep other companies from using the same information to also make a profit. Competetion is good for the market.)
3. No company, individual, or government shall make any profits from the disemination of information about my DNA sequences or any variations thereof. A nominal fee of $2.00 plus shipping and handling is allowed to cover the cost of media used in information sharing. (You can't horde information about my DNA just because you reverse engineered me first.)
4. Everyone shall be free to make copies of any media containing any information about by DNA sequences or variations herein. (Have a CDROM with my DNA on it? Feel free to make copies and pass it out to all your friends.)
5. The use of my DNA or variations thereof is forbiden in the following areas: Weapons development, Germ Warfare, Marketing, or Determination of Insurance Coverage. (I will not allow the information gained by access to my DNA to be used against me.)
6. Actually implementations of technology that insert my DNA or variations herein into any other living organism, including gene therapy for disease or gene improvement must be approved by me on a first case basis. No exchange of value will be allowed in this determination. I will not be liable for injury or accident caused by technologies resulting from information gained from my DNA or variations thereof. (It is me being used on those people, I take the responsibility to ensure that information found from my DNA will not hurt others, to the best of my ability.)
7. My DNA or variations herein will not be used for the purposes of sexual reproduction without my written consent. Failure to receive this consent in writing prior to conception will absolve me of all responsibility for said child, including but not limited to financial and legal responsibility. ( Nonconsential sex is called rape. I would feel raped if someone used my DNA or variations herein for the purposes of sexual reproduction. )
8. All provisions of this document are in effect from this time on. Your use of my DNA or any variations herein are proof of your consent to all provisions of this contract. (The shrink wrap argument.)
9. If any paragraphs in this document are voided by a court of law the rest of the document remains in full effect.
James M. Rogers
jrogers@visnetinc.com
In this case you are talking about two completely different forms of litigation:
1. patent infringement
2. liability
First of, there's rarely anyone to sue ANYWHERE if something goes wrong even in commercial software....ever read those licensing agreements (EULAs and such)? They stop nothing short of saying "if you touch the floppy and it blows up in your face, we're not responsible".
The argument companies make against OSS isn't a legal one - they themselves do everything they can not to be liable for their software. The argument is basically that "if joe newbie can't open his word processor, he can't call some 1-800 number where a friendly tech support rep. will be with him shortly"
However, that's liability - who to sue if doggy dies. In this case, we're talking about patent infringement - you steal my idea, I sue you (as long as I paid tons of money to have it patented).
AFAIK, companies are free to sue ANY entity that is believed to have infringed on their patents. I think this poses a HUGE HUGE HUGE (did I mention...HUGE?) threat to OSS.
I'll say it again:
A FUCKING HUGE ASS THREAT
Why?
Scenario 1:
Ok, say IBM sues Intel for some patent infringement. Say that Intel actually came up with the idea themselves and that they would win if the case were taken to court. Intel has the resources to face such litigation...
Scenario 2:
IBM sues Joe GNU for some patent infringement. Joe GNU came up with the whole thing himself, after many hours of work, cases of Jolt Cola and packs of camel lights. Joe GNU however, can barely afford the rent of his crappy lower east side loft. What do you think will happen? He'll piss his pants at the first cease and desist letter that he gets from the legal dept. and promptly delete all of his code (well, at least remove it from public access - the ramifications of his code already being out there at one point is a whole different issue altogether).
See what I mean? Patents cost MONEY. Money that people involved in OSS projects simply don't have to spend. So, what if some less-than-well-intentioned people with lots of money (say, around 100 billion for example
peace,
dr0ne
The large software companies kep Free Software down, by pointing out that there's nobody to sue if something goes wrong.
This puts them in a bit of a bind. If they sue over patent infringement, then (win or lose), they let the genie out the bottle. They show to their customers that, indeed, free software -can- be sued, and is therefore a liable source of software - something THEIR lawyers insist on.
Do that, and they lose customers to OSS alternatives. BIG time. And there's no way in hell they are going to take that chance.
On the other hand, if they don't sue, they risk wasting their cash, they risk losing their patents and they risk losing their image. Can you imagine what the press would make of it? "MegaCorp, Inc, handed their multi-trillion dollar patent file to Dweebs, Inc, a bunch of long-haired computer nerds who's only claim to fame is being any good at programming."
The computer companies would get -SLAUGHTERED- by the press, AND their shareholders, if they simply bow down.
So what can they do? Nothing. There is no answer, at least, not in the direction they're going. Whatever their response, if an OSS group infringe their patents, they are going to be cut to pieces. Their only hope is that we don't.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yeh! but if I'm not making any money off the s/w and I don't have alot of money, there isn't anything to collect! :)
This ridiculous process of patenting 'business methods' is closely related (IMO) to the 'frivolous lawsuit' business method, which AFAIK remains unpatented. In both cases individuals or companies are trying to get money for nothing. The only difference is that in the cases of patenting, the applicant maintains a veneer of respectability, leaving people with the impression that s/he is an innovator.
Take a totally implausible example: say a company patents the process by which books are ordered by employing a single click. This is doubtless handy for those of us who order books that way, but is it patentable? Obviously it is.
Patents are in place to give individuals and companies the -- pardon me -- freedom to innovate, and patenting one-click widget ordering does nothing to help anyone except Amazon's shareholders.
About seven years ago, I ordered a book with a single click (so to speak). I phoned the bookshop, got cut off and (here's the good bit) hit (or 'clicked') redial. I then ordered the book, had my credit card charged, and waited for the book to arrive. I'm willing to testify to this if Forbidden Planet want to sue Amazon.
Many companies issue patents as a purely defensive move to use in out-of-court settlements when they are sued for infringement. Some companies even make a public statement about the conditions in which the will or will not use the patents. I wonder if the open source community could get IBM to issue such a statement about open source or non-profit software. IBM has one of the world's biggest patent portfolio.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Many companies issue patents as a purely defensive move to use in out-of-court settlements when they are sued for infringement. Some companies even make a public statement about the conditions in which the will or will not use the patents. I wonder if the open source community could get IBM to issue such a statement about open source or non-profit software. IBM has one of the world's biggest patent portfolio.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
You can't prove the non-existence of something in an infinite space. (and the world of ideas is close enough to infinite that the job is impossibly huge)
If I'm using a piece of open source that violates someone's patents, am I liable for some kind of lost revenues to the patent holder?
Wow, Anonymous Coward has yet another inane first post. Why don't you people get a life instead of refreshing /. every 15 seconds to see if there is something new?
/.-dudes, why not just include the first post nonsense every time you put up a new story? (OK, so then these kiddies would do "First real post", or "Second post".)
Hey
RE: $25K/patent. Obviously, some law firms are more expensive than others. An individual should consider going with a patent agent rather than a patent attorney; the total cost can be as little as 1/3 of this. Less, if you do your own searching, drawing, or specification writing. Corporations don't generally go this route (I think it is because they like to spend money:-) ), but this is a very real alternative for individuals.
RE: Don't patent it yourself. I agree with this, completely. There is an honest review of this book at http://www.evansville.net/biz/patagen t/book.htm which asserts it is a good book to learn from, but not so good for filing patents.
DISCLAIMER: My father is the knowledgeable patent agent, not me.
Q: What's the difference between a dead snake in the middle of the road, and a dead lawyer?
A: There's skid marks in front of the snake.
--Ben
Error #134: Can not find intellegent .sig
As Jon Katz demonstrated here, this process is a piece of art and thus does not fall under the patent legislation.
Someone tell me how to graw my tongue out of my cheek.
Since software patents don't yet have the rigid enforceability of hardware patents, I don't think anyone needs to worry yet (but sleep with one eye open).
Wonder what would happen if someone patented the open source process?
Another thing to remember is the current OSS backers. IBM has invested heavily in Linux in their battle with Microsoft and isn't about to let their new hope fall under the hand of litigation. We can hope that if some greedy organization comes along with the hope of extortion, IBM's extensive patent array could be used in OSS's defense. Something along the lines of: "Linux is violating your patent Foo? Well, your software is in violation of our patents X, Y, Z, Q and Bar."
But really, OSS doesn't have the massive money behind it to be extorted and the open nature of it helps it dodge patent problems quickly, IMHO.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Since who are you going to sue? You're not going to get anything out of it (after you take my house, car, and stock portfolio, you probably spent more in lawyers fees than you'll get from me personally).
What this could hurt is some of the collaboration of (big) business and free software. For example, Wine and Corel, or IBM and Apache. A patent getting in the way of those projects won't necessarily kill them, but I'm sure CORL and IBM would be less inclined to continue.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Cherie Blair likes it up the dung trumpet!
The lawyer my little company uses is constantly asking us if we have anything 'patentable'. I tell her every time she asks: "No, we don't have anything patentable. And even if we did, we wouldn't patent it anyway."
... this blows her mind.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
if publishing software in a legal form can get around patents, why isnt my company doing this...i'm gonna have to get on the horn with corporate--even though i am a little stock holder....
Remember this...no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn....(jim morrison)
It seems the major problem with the software patent process, and perhaps other areas of intense R&D, is that the people working in the PTO are not only inexperienced in the myriad of areas of research, but also overworked. (From my brief time in a government office, it is apparent that there is a perception by the public that civil servants sit around waiting for phones to ring.)
Perhaps a solution would be to implement some form of peer review, as is used by academic journals. Obviously the privacy of an application is potentially jeopardized, but if the consultants (industry types, academics, etc.) are made to sign a form of NDA, then we might secure up-to-date experience on the topic in question, and a variety of people to use. I see this a sort of Open Source patent process, if you will.
fink
Interesting but....
:(
I remember it stated on one of the big MP3
talks a while back (where a lawsuit was involved)
That the law could be interpreted that once you
HAVE an mp3 it is legal to USE it...even if the
SOURCE was illegal (ie, Fair Use applies just from
having a copy, legal or not)
I don't know if this would aply to software
(it would in my eyes, but courts may see it
differntly) but Reverse Engineering IS fair
use.
Then again...large companies et al seem to
conviniently forget about fair use (RIAA being
just one example) Unfortunaly...it seems the
courts do too ocasionally
-- Steve
I'm going to file a patent on a method of keeping track of ideas and inventions combined with a method of bringing legal action against a person or persons who infringe upon the ideas of other people without obtaining written permission of the inventing party.
This would involve starting up an office which would charge exhorbitant amounts of money to file your invention or idea with, but then you would be legally protected from other persons using your ideas. No matter how stupid or broad the idea, many people are bound to get rich off of this, including me.
What?!? Someone already does this?
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Let's face it, folks -- there are two fundamental problems with software patents. One is that doing a search to avoid infringement is a horrible resource hog, and the other is that (a la Ted Sturgeon) 95% are junk.
Both of these problems are solvable, though, in the same sense that "with enough eyes all bugs are shallow." A distributed project to review software patents would go a short way to index and cross-reference the pests, but it could go a long way toward pointing out how silly most of them are. Most of these toads got past the Patent Office because the PO doesn't review against unpatented prior art, and until recently none of the prior art was patented.
So! The trick is to scan through the patent database for software patents. Sort them into categories. Apply an open review process which rates patents by impact (e.g., a patent on linked lists) and if possible identifies prior art.
With enough ludicrous examples we might even be able to enlist some press to shame Congress into dealing with the problem.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
If there are open-source-friendly companies patenting for defensive reasons, how hard would it be to convince them to put their patents under a licence that allows unrestricted irrevokable use to *all* individuals and companies who agree to use the same for licence any patents they hold or may hold in the future? This licence would need to be a finely crafted legal document to avoid loopholes and protect the rights of all concerned. If enough useful, enforceable patents were licenced in this manner, soon everyone with a software patent would need to adopt the licence in order avoid legal entanglements, and software patents would effectively cease to exist.
There seems to much FUD floating around this topic, so I thought I'd toss in a few facts. I've filed for ten patents for my previous employer, and keep a close eye on the patent world.
1. $25K/patent. Patents are not cheap. It costs about $10K-$15K to disclose, draft, file, and sheppard a patent to conclusion. Add to this another $10K of time for people in your group to disclose and review the patent. Now, some would view getting ten patents at $25K each better than one engineer at $250K (loaded). Some patent firms are much better than others; mail me for some recommendations.
2. Don't patent it yourself.You can learn a lot from the Patent It Yourself book, but you probably won't make a good patent. You can save money by preparing for the disclosure and by drawing your own diagrams. Never opt for the various 'individual inventor' reduced fees; the clauses bite and kill your patent. Also, there are a bunch of rip-off places that will sign any NDA and talk about 'marketting'.
3. No patents = No Silicon Valley. Silicon valley exists because of patents. Otherwise, MS or Sun would keep a group of engineers on standby just to clone every interesting piece of software. Patents provide reasonable barriers to entry for small firms. Not everything is a matter of time to market.
4. Silly Patents. There are many silly patents out there, and more being filed all the time. The problem is the breakdown at the US Patent Office, mostly by the previous administrator. For a while, patent agents were being reviewed by how many patents they awarded, and so they awarded a lot of trash.
5. Defense. In software, patents are defensive for the most part. Cisco, for example, has publically promised never to sue. Patents keep others from quickly ripping you off, and from others trying to enforce patents against you. Xerox is the notable exception; the idiots keep thinking they can raise money from their portfolio. Remember, nothing a law firm does can keep you from being sued; it can only keep you from losing.
There's a lot more about patents. It's a religious issue, even among patent attorneys. Most feel that the patent office does an inconsistent job, and all patent attorneys I know of cheered when gene sequence patents were tossed.
Profit motivates invention.
All that is really necessary is for a (liveable) country or two to simply refuse to recognize software patents. We could then funnel the publishing of OSS through conveniently placed like-minded folks or not-for-profits in those countries.
This wouldn't work for profit-oriented software, since the money could always be sequestered in the evil-patent-enforcing country of origin. But with sufficient bandwidth to the anti-patent country it would make OSS unstoppable.
I vote for Anguilla. Off-shore banks, smart people, cheap and easy IBCs and (of course) good weather. I even volunteer to move there.
Seriously, how would/could this be stopped? I'm no lawyer, but this looks bulletproof.
Doesn't IBM have a patent on a vibrating dildo? Does anyone still have the link to that?
I don't see IBM making a lot of those or even sueing anyone over a patent infringment on that. One wonders what they do in those fancy offices...
So is this an argument FOR writing bad (write-only) code? If you can't figure out what it does how do you prove it violates a patent?
Other nations didn't play by patent rules?
Patent laws are National. If some country
doesn't want to impliment patent laws they
do NOT have to. If they decide not to honor US
patents, they don't have to.
If any country isn't playing fair it is the USA!
The worlds last SuperBully, who seems to enjoy
making policy and forcing it on other countries
with political and economic pressure.
In any case...yes Patent preditors ARE playing by
the rules...that doesn't mean that they are
playing fair (unless you are a legalist..and thus
believe that the Law is always right and fair
no matter what the law says)
If a big company comes to you and says "We have
1000 patents, your software is violating
30 of them, pay us $30,000 or we will sue"
What do you do?
Do you have the resources to verify that you
are in fact violating any patents? Do you
have the money to fight it in court?
The simple fact is that you might NOT be violating
their patent. In fact, it may not even be a
rightful patent, you might be able to show prior
art and invalidate it. However, the time and
resources to find and demonstrate prior art
in court for 30 patents (hell, even 1 patent
sometimes) might be alot more than they are
asking for!
is that fair?
-- Steve
My point was: given the choice between making the patent process more or less expensive, I'd prefer less expensive.
I'm not saying that I like the current IP trends. I'm not saying that like all the software patents. And I never said anything bad about the GPL. But given the current state of IP law, I would prefer to see "the little guy" have a few viable choices.
We can advocate for free software and we can advocate for gutting the software patent system, but we can also advocate to make the existing system a bit more accessable.
For the record, given a choice, I like the GPL option the best, but employers often require developers to give up this choice.
- bridgette
They could just take longer to appove a patent... Or even deny them unless you can prove that there is no prior art...
Why patent specific algorithms? It explicitly says that algorythms can't be pattented (utillity patent right? please quote a passage if I'm wrong)... so what are we pattenting here? A theoretical machine?
What about the phillosophy that software is art? There's 500 ways to do something. 50 of them might all be the most effective way to do it. Would all 50 be covered by a pattent? If not couldn't you just try one of the other 49 ways?
The thing is, I've got an idea... I think it's pretty spiffy... an experienced CS prof think it's pretty spiffy... and I want to use it, pattent it (it's nothing like what's been done before, it's not obvious etc - think extremely large ordered data sets, presumedly faster than an AVL BST and very concurrent-access friendly).
Hearing of all these *rediculous* patents I'm pretty scared that the US patent office is going to have a fit and thousands of pattents are going to one day be struck down all at once. You better believe I don't want to be one of them.
Yet I think this thing (when I'm done developing it -- anyone got any links on the architecture of a modern high performance database?) will absolutely kick ass... and probably contribute to the realm of computer science in general.
Right now I figure the best way to go about it is to actually impliment the theory (put my money where my mouth is) show a few important people a controlled demo ("gimme your fastest code, I can beat it" sort of thing) and try to sell it for them. BUT then I have no control over the patent. I would ideally hold the patent for say 8 to 12 years (enough to make a nice living/reputation) and then give it away (GPL! GPL!). The raw sale of IP doesn't offer that option.
Any advice? (or free help!?)
p.s. hotmail SUCKS (email andross@ghettobox.dhs.org changing profile but it might not show up)
The point in the I.8. of the Constitution of the US is that it is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", for "limited times".
... that's what we have politicians and lawyers for ...
The problem is the extension of patents with derivative patents, especially in regards to technology.
I'm not complaining about this on a personal level, mind you, just a societal level. On a personal level, this is why I have lots of assets in pharmaceutical and tech companies - I rake in a lot of cash from patents owned by those firms.
But the PURPOSE is to assist society in gaining the good works of the inventors and investors, not in making rich people more wealthy. We need a better method of expiring core patents, of limiting derivative patents (perhaps a shorter life), and of promoting the public good.
Don't worry about rich investors, we'll still rake in the cash
Will in Seattle
Look opensource is great but this argument is the among the dumbest. Where the author went astray was in the meaning of the word liability: it's a vector, culpability(direction) and judgement(magnitude). So, saying there's "no one to sue" is shorthand for "no one to sue who has any cash."
Opensource is going to win because it's better and there'll be no need to sue anyone, not because of this pie in the sky reverse psychobabble.
But, and this is why Stallman keeps harping about his concept of free, patents are not free speech, and they're not often free beer. It's an important distinction to make... RMS should be applauded for making it.
He should not be applauded for playing his little word game, though, it's too subtle, and it's not working. Free means what it means, not what he says it means, and except in the one case of the wordpair "free-speech", it means free-beer. However, I don't know if I can think of a better word, which would be more helpful. Anybody got any suggestions?
What companies do this? Is this a new form of vaporware?
The real question is: how can a company patent something it never used? Or conversely, how can you lay claim to something you didn't invent?
I guess I don't understand: are these guys patenting do/while loops, huge chunks of code, or concepts and metaphors?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The opensource community should get together and get a lot of patents, then hire a bunch of lawyers and sue any company whose product looks like it may use your patent. To drop the litigation all they have to do is license their source under the GPL, LGPL, Artistic, NPL/MPL or MIT license. To prove that their code doesn't violate any of your patents they would have to have the source reviewed. If we sue enough companies then we can make it much more profitible for people to be opensource than not.
Hardware companies spend time on patents so that when they infringe on another company's patents (intentionally or not) they have their own bargaining chip. "If you sue me for patent infringement on chip X I'll sue you for infringing on our patents in your product Y". Once one company really gets good at it (Look at how much money Texas Instruments makes off of patent suits, etc.) the rest have to follow to stay in business.
It takes a lot of money to get something throught the patent process. You can easily spend on the order of 10's of thousands on lawyers and research (have to ensure that on one else patented it before you).
And it takes years to find out of you actually got the patent. And it could all be for nothing if someone else submitted the same thing a day before you did (you can't find out what patents are in the 2-3 year processing pipe, you can only find out about them after they're approved/rejected).
So big companies can afford to "invest" in an agressive patent policy (i.e. getting patents for things just to keep competitors from making them, even though the patent holder will never create the patented stuff). Meanwhile, any person or group who isn't totally rich could get nailed to the wall if they develop some cool software without heavy VC backing.
Does this mean that a future Carmack could have his Doom engine patented out from under him?
- bridgette
sounds like an interesting read.. (if rather daunting.) "The Alphabet versus the Goddess" by Leonard Schlain is another good read.. (maybe more of a historical romp and riff on duality masculine/feminine, yin/yang, left/right, text/image, etc/etc.)..
anyway, the idea of claiming ideas as property is IMO a symptom of a dangerously recalcitrant (stick-in-the-mud) partriarchy, and largely unconscious form of rape, fueled by male fear and greed.. unnecessary delusions, yet so culturally entrenched and *so* costly . There are much smarter alternatives.. the way to implement 'em is evolve money.
Copyright and patent laws are both obsolete. Combine strong anonymity with an eternity service, and ideas and software can be published permanently, without repercussion. Digital identities based on public keys can be built and maintained without reference to physical persons. With a little more work and digital signatures to stamp official releases, open-source projects could be maintained anonymously. It does make it a little more difficult to put the work on your resume... do you want to get good Jobs, or do you want to change the world?
But I have an idea I will patent the process of making money by gaining broad patents that cover more than they should and then useing them to for other people to licence the right to innovate. This has to end somehow...
I realize that it's been said time and time again but I didn't see it in reply to this particular message.
Intellectual property will never "work". It's attempting to do something that just doesn't make sense -- we mine as well try to charge for access to the sun. Something as limitless as information (if I have an idea, and I give you the idea, I still have the original idea) cannot be treated like property because it just doesn't behave like property (which is a limited resource commodity where each unit has a duplication cost, and where if I have a unit, and I give you a unit, I have one less unit).
It just doesn't work, and it'll only get more and more painful as long as we try to pretend that it can be controlled.
But there is another option, and that is to eliminate the concept altogether. There is no reason that the concept of informational property is required for society to function, and without some fatally flawed concept undermining our culture, we would be far more healthy without it.
The goal is to recognize that we're dependent upon a sinking ship, and to plan an escape route that allows for as many people to be saved as possible.
Or, we can just slap more duct-tape on what we've got and leave it for later generations to sort out.
There not many in oss with much money... So the company would loose much money over that... And they would loose equaly much on searching for use of patented stuff in oss. So thisone they are going to loose Once distributed... Then, well rh could just say we are very sory about this, and complain that it is not their responsibility that they use software they have been given by the oss. Then the companys earns nothing...=> they won't sue
See the Free-IP Project. Free-IP is endeavouring to supply free (both beer & speech) cores for ASIC's and FPGA's (used in UARTS, CPUs, Ethernet Controllers, etc.). The website has only been up since July and already there are two cores available, Free-DES and and Free-6502. Free-IP cores are either patent free, or patented and released (similar to the copyleft idea).
And along similar lines there's the Freedom-CPU Prject which is developing a GPL'd 64 bit CPU and motherboard.
Recently I managed to get my name taken off of a software patent application my company is paying for. The lawyer was surprised, saying that usually he had the opposite problem, everyone fighting to be named as one of the inventors of the technoligies. But since I'm against software patents I don't want to be associated with that nonsense.
Although I briefly considered going along with having my name on the patent to give me more credibility with the fools who say that those who are against software patents are just not "innovative" enough to get one.
The patent will go through without me unfortunately, and they may make me sign a paper giving up all rights and my first born son.
I can only pray that it is only used defensively.
I've seen 2 successful bio-tech startups first hand. They simply wouldn't happen without patent protection. And yes, they did take on the big boys. Yes, there are some serious issues with patent abuse by the bigger companies. But no, killing patents won't help socially, economically, or medically. Fixing the legal/patent system is important though.
Patents were not invented in order to reward the inventor, or in order to make
They were created so that inventors would not keep their inventions secret, but instead have a way to share the inventions with others without losing the potential income from the invention. It is highly ironic that patents are now causing people to not share.
Benny
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Why would we someone open source something that they did not want everyone to see? This is why the current process needs to be demolished.
Plenty of projects, not enough developers...
the government has the power to grant patents to "promote science and the usefull arts," so says my copy of the constitution.
perhaps linux is not a useful art?
i think the best solution would be a percentage of all profits made, from the sale of gpl code, be given to the patent holders.*not* distrobution or support, just the code itself.
$0.00 * 90% looks OK on my screen...
have fun with those fat margins!
I think I'm pretty much for patents in most cases. The goal of most companies is to make money and keep a competitive edge. That means spending lots of money on R&D, and you don't want to make a discovery, get a product to market and then find that your largest competitor copying your work. That, i think, would cause the death of innovation in so many industries.
I think that there should be different classifications on patents, if that would be at all feasible. For instance, computer-related patents should only be allowed to be enforceable for 5-7 years (the 3 year life of any given computer, plus a couple years just to be generous)... That'd be enough, I think that a company could come up with something trully ingenious and make their money from it, but they'ed also have to work their buts off on their next product rather than going "Okay, now we've got 20 years of revenues from licensees"...
Patents on drugs are more difficult. We need drugs to live comfortably (and i'm not even talking about the recreational ones)... Should a company be allowed to patent it's discoveries? Yes. Should they be allowed to recoup their investments? Yes. If they couldn't, then they'ed all make the next diet drug, because those are a lot surer to bring back profits for the shareholders...
Perhaps the gov't should contract with the Pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs they feel they need developed. They could say, we need a new AIDS drug, start your bidding. Then the gov't would pay all associated costs for 5 or 7 years to develop the drug, and give the company 15% of the income derived from the drug.
That way, companies would still get their due, and consumers wouldn't get nearly as screwed as can be the case these days (ahem... UNISYS)
I completely agree. But here's a question: What constitutes a patentable intellectual property in software? I'm not even sure that I know what part of my code/products are patentable. Am I going to have to worry about companies swooping in and stealing my effort just because they had the resources to get the patent filled?
-- Moondog
IANAL, but this article seems to be implying that the burden of proof rests upon the defendant in patent-violation cases. If this is the case, then it creates a curious set of conditions in relation to the openness of the product code base. Software that is open, and thus can be inspected freely, is far easier to defend against charges such as these than is the case with closed software. If the the code is kept proprietary, then the only means by which a developer can prove innocence is to allow a court-supervised inspection of the code. This causes all sorts of legal troubles, because typically the suing corporation has a vested interest in learning how the proprietary code works.
You may remember Microsoft's tiptoeing with the Caldera case (I think it was Caldera). They had to explain at length to the judge that opening their Windows code as a defense exhibit would endanger their business model. The code could only be examined after much legal wrangling and numerous NDAs had been signed. No doubt this is pretty costly - legal work doesn't come cheap.
By contrast, since the code of open-source projects is, by definition, open, we might expect fewer spurious suits of this kind levied against FSF/OSS products. Why press your luck suing somebody when you know quite plainly they have not violated your patent and that it would cost them nothing (apart from lawyer overhead) to demonstrate that fact. It's a financially losing proposition. The incentive to settle and let the patent pirate laugh its way to the bank is far smaller.
By the same token though, if you do open your source, you'd better be damn sure you really aren't violating any proprietary code.
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
i wonder if i should patent the use of registers in a computer. Either that, or patent the use of the integer x.