Kudos to Red Hat for this. However, arguing that software patents are harmful for open source falls short of the mark. In the end, they are harmful to everyone. In the best case, they raise the cost of software development for everyone, open source or otherwise, including anyone who does in-house software development. In the worst case, they make the development of certain programs impossible for anyone.
I think Bill Gates called it right years ago, when he wrote that patents would bring the industry to a stillstand, but I don't agree with his "solution" to acquire as many patents as possible: doing so only buys the patent holders a bit of additional time, i.e. they will be amongst last to be paralyzed by them (which of course is not without merit). But the patent creep will eventually catch up with everyone, leaving us with a software industry that can't do anything useful without paying toll to the patent trolls who won't do anything.
A few years back, someone with a hotmail account asked me for web addresses where she could learn more about Free Software, so I sent her links to the usual suspects. When she tried to visit them a couple of months later, she found they didn't work, and wrote back to me complaining about that they were "broken". I was very surprised about the whole thing, because there's not much room for error in http://www.gnu.org/. Besides, the copy in my sent mail archive was correct, so I asked her to please send me the message as she received it.
Of course, I had sent her a plain text mail, but she was reading it as HTML, and hotmail had been kind enough to translate the URL I had typed into a clickable link... only the href attribute of the link did not point directly to the GNU project, for instance, but rather to "http://64.4.18.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=ac40a69cbb8c98b8c7b6ce4475972c10&lat=1037721637&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2egnu%2eorg" which presumably should have bounced the user to the original link's destination. The reason the link didn't work was because that machine seemed to have gone offline for unknown reasons.
Of course, this does not mean that Gmail's idea of doing targetted advertising based on the contents of your e-mail is harmless, but changing the contents of the mail when they deliver it to the user does seem to be at least as bad. The worst part of it is the fact that users actually grant hotmail the right to do it, by blindly accepting the abusive Terms of Service.
Digital rights management is essentially a technology mechanism to enforce (or hinder the breaking of) contract law. The only thing it flies in the face of is consumer convenience.
Well, that is but one aspect of DRM: it can be used to hinder the breaking of contract law, but you are missing two important features of DRM:
they are unilateral: they can keep people on one end of the transaction from breaking the contract, but they do nothing to prevent the people at the other end of the transaction from breaking the agreement.
they are overreaching: DRM systems have no clue as to the terms of the contracts they are supposedly meant to enforce, and have the ability to restrict users way beyond the letter of te contract.
DRM is not a mechanism to enforce a contract. It is a mechanism to give those who run it full control over what you can do with the media you obtained, regardless of any law whatsoever.
Actually, the idea behind the "forces of nature" wording is that you should be able to patent a physical device that includes a software component, but not the software itself (that's covered by copyright), nor the algorithms you used, nor the idea of controlling the device by software. So you would not be barred from patenting your computer-controlled camera that follows motion just because it contains a software component, but you would not be able to patent the software or the algorithms themselves, nor would the patent cover all possible computer-controlled cameras that follow motion, but only those who take advantage of the "inventive step" you made.
This approach has the advantage of outlawing software patents while not rejecting the directive outright. This is good because a) if the directive is rejected, a new one will appear shortly, b) a positive but restrictive directive would reinforce the ban of pure software patents, c) lawmakers seem to feel that their job is sanctioning new laws, not avoiding them, so they are less likely to reject the directive altogether.
The problem with this approach is that it is confusing to many people (/. readers routinely discuss the subject, yet there still are differences in interpretation). This confusion is an invitation to abuse. Current European patent legislation bans software patents altogether, yet the EPO ignores the rules and grants them all the same. Nothing indicates that the EPO will honor the "forces of nature" wording, even if it's imposed on it.
In all, while the "forces of nature" approach may be a workable solution, it's not worth it: all this confusing concession buys us is the supposed bonanza of innovation that patentability would fuel. However, it has been shown that patentability not merely in the software but in the whole computing arena actually stifles innovation, rather than encouraging it. There again, it may be all that we manage to bargain from this situation.
Palladium, like computers and any other bit of technology, is a technology that can be used for good or evil.
I might accept that assertion about TCPA. As I have learned by the extreme measure of actually reading the spec, TCPA does have some useful applications, if used with software that is under your control, against servers that are under your control. But using TCPA-like technology together with proprietary software (i.e. Palladium) is a very good way to shoot yourself in the foot, because you just don't know what the program does. Software authors gain an unprecedented level of control over your machine, which means that you must have complete trust that the authors of your software will not abuse that power, not even if you piss them off badly in the future.
I don't know any company, let alone Microsoft, which would be worthy of such trust.
Slashdot Mirror
Kudos to Red Hat for this. However, arguing that software patents are harmful for open source falls short of the mark. In the end, they are harmful to everyone. In the best case, they raise the cost of software development for everyone, open source or otherwise, including anyone who does in-house software development. In the worst case, they make the development of certain programs impossible for anyone.
I think Bill Gates called it right years ago, when he wrote that patents would bring the industry to a stillstand, but I don't agree with his "solution" to acquire as many patents as possible: doing so only buys the patent holders a bit of additional time, i.e. they will be amongst last to be paralyzed by them (which of course is not without merit). But the patent creep will eventually catch up with everyone, leaving us with a software industry that can't do anything useful without paying toll to the patent trolls who won't do anything.
...or at least they used to.
A few years back, someone with a hotmail account asked me for web addresses where she could learn more about Free Software, so I sent her links to the usual suspects. When she tried to visit them a couple of months later, she found they didn't work, and wrote back to me complaining about that they were "broken". I was very surprised about the whole thing, because there's not much room for error in http://www.gnu.org/. Besides, the copy in my sent mail archive was correct, so I asked her to please send me the message as she received it.
Of course, I had sent her a plain text mail, but she was reading it as HTML, and hotmail had been kind enough to translate the URL I had typed into a clickable link... only the href attribute of the link did not point directly to the GNU project, for instance, but rather to "http://64.4.18.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=ac40a69cbb8c98b8c7b6ce4475972c10&lat=1037721637&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2egnu%2eorg" which presumably should have bounced the user to the original link's destination. The reason the link didn't work was because that machine seemed to have gone offline for unknown reasons.
Of course, this does not mean that Gmail's idea of doing targetted advertising based on the contents of your e-mail is harmless, but changing the contents of the mail when they deliver it to the user does seem to be at least as bad. The worst part of it is the fact that users actually grant hotmail the right to do it, by blindly accepting the abusive Terms of Service.
- they are unilateral: they can keep people on one end of the transaction from breaking the contract, but they do nothing to prevent the people at the other end of the transaction from breaking the agreement.
- they are overreaching: DRM systems have no clue as to the terms of the contracts they are supposedly meant to enforce, and have the ability to restrict users way beyond the letter of te contract.
DRM is not a mechanism to enforce a contract. It is a mechanism to give those who run it full control over what you can do with the media you obtained, regardless of any law whatsoever.Actually, the idea behind the "forces of nature" wording is that you should be able to patent a physical device that includes a software component, but not the software itself (that's covered by copyright), nor the algorithms you used, nor the idea of controlling the device by software. So you would not be barred from patenting your computer-controlled camera that follows motion just because it contains a software component, but you would not be able to patent the software or the algorithms themselves, nor would the patent cover all possible computer-controlled cameras that follow motion, but only those who take advantage of the "inventive step" you made.
This approach has the advantage of outlawing software patents while not rejecting the directive outright. This is good because a) if the directive is rejected, a new one will appear shortly, b) a positive but restrictive directive would reinforce the ban of pure software patents, c) lawmakers seem to feel that their job is sanctioning new laws, not avoiding them, so they are less likely to reject the directive altogether.
The problem with this approach is that it is confusing to many people (/. readers routinely discuss the subject, yet there still are differences in interpretation). This confusion is an invitation to abuse. Current European patent legislation bans software patents altogether, yet the EPO ignores the rules and grants them all the same. Nothing indicates that the EPO will honor the "forces of nature" wording, even if it's imposed on it.
In all, while the "forces of nature" approach may be a workable solution, it's not worth it: all this confusing concession buys us is the supposed bonanza of innovation that patentability would fuel. However, it has been shown that patentability not merely in the software but in the whole computing arena actually stifles innovation, rather than encouraging it. There again, it may be all that we manage to bargain from this situation.
Palladium, like computers and any other bit of technology, is a technology that can be used for good or evil.
I might accept that assertion about TCPA. As I have learned by the extreme measure of actually reading the spec, TCPA does have some useful applications, if used with software that is under your control, against servers that are under your control. But using TCPA-like technology together with proprietary software (i.e. Palladium) is a very good way to shoot yourself in the foot, because you just don't know what the program does. Software authors gain an unprecedented level of control over your machine, which means that you must have complete trust that the authors of your software will not abuse that power, not even if you piss them off badly in the future.
I don't know any company, let alone Microsoft, which would be worthy of such trust.