"Only where you restrict yourself to the right scenarios. What about the mammoth software project at a proprietary vendor (smaller comparative costs)? What about the tummy trimmer inventor (largest cost in the whole process, but not software)?"
As everyone economically literate and cognizant of the history of the software industry knows: the mammoth software project has ample opportunity for ROI and competetive success by the ordinary mechanisms of copyright, trade secret, marketing, reputation, associated quality of service and first mover advantage. The tummy trimmer inventor is probably quite happy to invent the damn thing (whatever it is;-) and license it's unit manufacture and sale to some third party. As many practitioners in the software field have pointed out: another difference is that software authors are rarely if ever happy to be restricted to inventing components which they are unable to 'manufacture' themselves but are willing to license to big software manufacturers. The dynamics are completely different and those who do seek to merely license their software 'inventions' to others are generally regarded as patent trolls. No matter what the characterisation of particular cases, it is all rather irrelevant in the face of your obligation to demonstrate the present (in Europe) and historical (in the USA) necessity of extending the scope of patentable subject matter to software in order to promote progress in that vast and extraordinarily diverse field.
"Plenty of experts and pioneers are idiots outside of their field. Not that these guys are, but hero worship has no place here. You wouldn't trust them to do your taxes, would you? The bottom line is, they know how patents affect them and the software industry - they don't know how patents affect others, they just imagine they do."
This plenitude of experts and pioneers in the software field I referred to are not talking about matters outside their own field: they are making observations and criticisms about the arrogant and fallacious assertions that practitioners in the field of patent law make about the software field. How patents affect other fields of technology is not our concern: it is well known in the electronics industry that patents have impeded innovation but if Andy Grove et al are not willing to do anything about it, that is their affair.
"If it is abstract in nature but can be used to make money, it is arguably a "business method", and that is a potential defense for the poster's scenario."
I'm beginning to wonder if you really are a patent lawyer. I've never heard this particular piece of nonsense before.
"Well, yes, they are. The argument goes, software is subject to copyright and is expression, so it shouldn't be patentable. Also, software is a mathematical entity and shouldn't be patentable. It can't be both. If it is expression, it's not a mathematical entity, and may be patentable. If it's a mathematical entity, then it's not expression, and there goes copyright. You have drunk the koolaid. "
Someone has drunk something noxious and I don't think it is me. If you cannot tell the difference between ideas and the particular expression of those ideas then I'm sure you're not a patent lawyer. Is the Firefox web browser a mathematical algorithm? Not by any practical definition it isn't, but it certainly expresses hundreds or thousands of such algorithms and so does Microsoft's IE browser and IE is a very different expression of the very same algorithms that Firefox is.
"I think you are saying that those opposing software patents will avoid the extreme arguments, even if they believe them, because they wouldn't be politically acceptable? Because it is strategically self-destructive? Is that wrong? Well, the problem is, it's an emperor has no clothes situation. I can see right through your "software is special" argument to your "patents are evil" belief! Why can't you?"
Probably because I do not subscribe to the extremist beliefs you imagine I do - as I thought I had pointed out. Yes - you think wrong - very wrong - and it is the extremism of your own point of view that demands the justification - not mine.
" Why should software authors have to worry less about patents than independent mechanical designers, chemists, or electrical engineers?"
Because the patent system in the case of software often imposes the largest costs in the whole process, amounting frequently to an absolute barrier to innovation. Patents are obviously not meant to do this and where the capital and marginal costs of bringing innovations to market are significantly greater than the burden of the patent system itself, the extra burden may be acceptable. Your "why shouldn't everyone else suffer" argument is perverse, especially since in reality the extension of patents to software has imposed even greater a burden on the mechanical designers, chemists and electrical engineers you mention.
"What's the difference between your hypothetical and a guy who designs a new engine on paper, proposes a new synthesis on paper, or sketches a new circuit on paper, and posts it on the web, whereupon some third party company picks it up and mass produces it, and the guy is threatened for inducing patent infringement (yes, there is such a thing)?
There is not much difference. I have heard the arguments that say software is special for various reasons, but you have to have already drunk the koolaid to buy them."
You are not the first patent lawyer to pretend that inventions in the abstract, mathematical world of software are no different than inventions in the realm of physical devices and processes and it is tiresome that many of your colleagues continue to utterly disregard the arguments and opinions of experts and pioneers and the consensus of the majority of practitioners in the field itself. If you are unaware of the explanations of what is different about software, written by notable practitioners and pioneers such as Donald Knuth, Phil Salin and Richard Stallman, then you are guilty merely of ignorance. If you are aware of those arguments and still maintain that "you have to have drunk the koolaid to buy them", then I think the onus is on you to explain in detail why these luminaries in the field have got it all wrong and you are right.
"Just FYI, in the U.S., there is a special "personal use" escape clause for "business methods" (which would be most algorithm/data structure type things)."
I don't understand how this is useful or relevant, nor how compression, encryption, routing, memory management, transform, signal processing etc. algorithms and the plethora of data structures ranging from image formats to crystallographic data structures can be regarded as "business methods".
"I'm sorry. I can accept that patents in general may harm the penniless dreamer. But software is not special, and there is no credible reason to exclude it. The (unproven) net benefit is the same as it is with all other technologies(a disclosure for exclusivity bargain)."
You would have us believe that patents only harm the idle and the penniless, but that is arrant nonsense and software patents in particular have a great propensity to gratuitously harm the least idle and to make penniless (or very much less wealthy) those who would not otherwise expect to have anything to do with the process of software technology innovation and ought to be able to go about their businesses unmolested by the parasites you and your colleagues help to arm.
"Freedom of expression - a red herring. Free speech is a very good reason to restrict copyright, especially for artistic works. However, software was treated as "expression" as a convenient legal fiction to shoehorn it into the existing copyright laws. But really, that makes no sense. You can't argue simultaneously that an algorithm is both a discovered law of nature and unique personal expression."
No-one is - an algorithm is a mathematical entity and mathematics should absolutely not be cursed with the misery of t
"Could you please justify by reply in moderate detail the supposed net benefit to society..."
That's far enough - there's no need to even mention open source or free software projects: the onus is on those who are proponents of software patents (or any other kind of patent) to show that they promote progress in the sciences and useful arts. It must be demonstrated by them that the overall effect is beneficial in each area of technology and in each industry to which the patent system is applied.
Patent attorneys and others will always try to hoodwink us into believing all kinds of nonsense about the patent system. They use words and expressions like "protection", "intellectual property" and "theft" to mislead people into believing that a patent represents some kind of tangible entity over which people have natural rights. But we should never forget what a patent really is: a government granted 20 year monopoly right to exclude everyone else other than the patentee from freely using some idea, whether they came up with it independently or not. Unlike a copyright, it is a kind of officially sanctioned and enforced removal of rights from everyone else and in the case of software patents it is a serious infringement of the tangible property rights of millions of computer owners.
Extraordinary interventions in the free market, that even entail curtailment of natural rights and liberties, demand extraordinary justification.
"With all due respect, I'm quite familiar with the basics of computer science. My areas of expertise include computability and algorithm analysis. I have spent more time staring at FSMs and models of computation than any human should. Do you mind sharing some of these granted patents on the basics of computer science? I look at anywhere from 5-200 computer-related patents every business day and have yet to find them. (Cue the requisite jokes about a patent examiner's inability to find something *rimshot*)"
Rather than fill this post with links to a myriad RLE and other compression patents, discrete transform patents, Djikstra algorithm variants, memory management algorithms etc. etc. I'll just say this: Congratulations! - it's not every day one comes across someone who knows more about computer science than Donald Knuth.
" Sorry, I was merely representing his perpective which I have found intersting to understand and analyse."
No need to apologise - I knew you were only representing his perspective but I have found these people to be a most dishonest, venal and disreputable collection of sociopaths. I have found that they have no respect whatsoever for the fundamental principles of the patent system of which they are a part and over which they have exerted almost completely autonomous power, and nor have they shown any respect for the freedoms and tangible property rights of others.
That they have power and influence enough to have caused Ministers of European Governments to lie to their Parliaments, that they are capable of drafting legislation so as to deliberately deceive legislators as to it's intentions and effects and that they have a long history of lying to and misleading the public, the press and the Governments of Europe has been a shocking revelation to me and to others and I hope outsiders will not be too easily put off by the bananas.
Re:GStreamer is under less of a threat than others
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"The most important thing anyone of us can do to fight software patents is to start using free formats."
The most important thing for Europeans to do is to write to their MEPs. If the Council Directive is adopted then the war is over and you will be hard-pressed to find any patent-free formats or software of any kind. Free video and audio formats and codecs do not live in isolation and relying on them winning the hearts, minds and pockets of industry and society seems a reckless strategy anyway. BTW - it is news to me that the BBC is putting out content in free formats.
"He was also quite disdainful of some of what he sees as misrepresentations on the FFII site."
Presumably, these 'misrepresentations' on the FFII site include the 'misrepresentations' concocted by some of Europe's most respected computer scientists, legal experts and economists? No doubt they also include the 'misrepresentations' of Deutsche Bank, Price Waterhouse Coopers, the 'lying' comparative analyses of patent practice by various legal experts showing EPO practice to be virtually identical to US practice and the EU's own 'deceitful' EESC analysis and the many more such disgraceful documents from equally dodgy sources?.
Who wouldn't be disdainful of the FFII's references to the 30,000 + gigantic fibs allegedly spoken by the EPO and UKPO databases themselves, which tell us of patents on progress bars, tabbed palettes, compression algorithms, shopping carts, marking up program code for display in a browser... all of which the saintly UKPO assures us cannot possibly really exist. Clearly the FFII has it all backwards and the proposed Directive, which will codify current practice, will surely save us from a drift towards the US practice of patenting software and business methods. Those reputable firms of patent attorneys really ought to stop misleading their clients and pretending to them that they know how to get their US b/m and swpat patents granted by the EPO. Perhaps they too have been bamboozled by the FFII.
When I first encountered this issue, I didn't really know who to trust and who was misrepresenting the facts either. It seemed entirely plausible that the Directive was intended to avoid the death-by-patent guaranteed for European software by a massive US style extension to the abstract and intangible and that these people really did respect the EPC. 2 years later, I know better.
"I mean, presently, nobody has the ability to patent an algorithm in Europe."
That's not the case: the EPO has already granted more than 30,000 software patents, including algorithms for image compression, but the point is that they have done so illegitimately and the validity and enforceability of such patents is in doubt in many individual nations of Europe. The European Patent Convention specifically excludes programs for computers from patentable subject matter but over the years, the European patent bureaucrats at the EPO and elsewhere have found dubious and tricksy ways to wriggle out of those exclusions.
At least to their own satisfaction they have done so, but not all nations in Europe have followed them very closely because e.g. their legal systems have relied more on the statutory law (the EPC) than on the subsequent EPO case law (the evil, twisted stuff made up by the patent bureaucrats over the years). When the patent extremist bureaucrats failed to have the EPC exclusions removed altogether, they drafted their deceit-laden Directive to pull every country into line with the EPO practice anyway. If passed in it's current form it will retrospectively legitimise and codify the case law and make all those software patents valid and enforceable in all European countries (it will get incorporated into each national legal system pretty much automatically).
Also, SCO's case is a copyright case against IBM and you can't just bring alleged patent infringements into a copyright case. There is no reason whatsoever why any patent lawyers would have been poring over the code at the same time as the copyright lawyers, and SCO would have to be even more foolish than it is to attack IBM on patent infringement grounds anyway.
Quite right. A good example being Microsoft, who once went out of their way to avoid infringing any known compression patents of a particular type but got caught out anyway:
http://www.ross.net/compression/introduction.htm l
If Microsoft, with their ample legal resources, can't write software without unwittingly infringing software patents, who can?
You should understand that the patent system cannot operate in the fine-grained discriminatory way you would wish it to. There are ethical and practical reasons for this which you ought to be able to figure out if you think about it a little.
Also bear in mind that the patent system is a macro-economic instrument of policy with a broad but specific purpose: to promote progress in the sciences and the useful arts - not to reward people who have brilliant ideas - and that patents are not granted for ideas but for inventions (a very important distinction).
Now you can see why the inevitability of the existence of patents on obvious, trivial and broad inventions in any workable patent system is a well understood phenomenon and deemed an acceptable nuisance in some (investment eating) fields of technology, and it should also be clear why certain whole fields of endeavour have historically been excluded from patentability.
Specifically, mathematics has always been excluded and your example of the RSA algorithm is a classic demonstration of how the extension of patentability to the software field has made a mockery of the hitherto rational and careful practices of legislators and Courts in containing the patent system to the fields in which the damage it does is (possibly) an acceptable trade off.
The RSA algorithm did not take years to come up with - it took me about 30 seconds to come up with it once I'd read the lemma that is it's foundation, and the same would be true for anyone else. In fact the lemma itself is not something that would necessarily take a competent mathematician years to come up with but that is beside the point - the computerisable algorithmic expression of the lemma is an utterly obvious non-invention. Patentability of algorithms means patentability of computational mathematics, and that is - to me and many others - wholly unacceptable.
"I don't see anything in what he said that says that software patents shouldn't ever be issued, only that in a lot of cases, they were issued in violation of the USPTO's own rules."
"Auctioning the library off in such a piecemeal fashion just seems wrong, IMNSHO."
Whether that is wrong or not, I do think important historical documents should be electronically 'preserved' and made available for the benefit of the public. Some institutions and companies make an effort but not all and quality is variable - the British Library recently scanned some 17th century Shakespeare Quartos and put images of them up online in jpeg format. They are readable but not as readable as if they'd used something like the excellent DjVu.
It would be good to see documents like those original Turing and other papers preserved and presented like the Shannon example here has been - whatever later happens to the actual physical copies.
Try not to get too angry;-) - they are not really 'her' claims and many of these people really do think they and their Party are doing the right thing and do not realise they are being lied to by the UKPO et al. Show her the evidence (Jonas found 13 really bad UK granted swpats recently) that proves the EPO and UKPO have already sewn a business method and pure software patent minefield even though the UKPO keeps saying otherwise. Show her the EESC analysis of the original Directive proposal (the latest version is effectively identical) which demonstrates (independently) the deliberately deceptive nature of the wording of the proposal. Ask her if she thinks democracy in Europe is well served by drafters of legislation who deem it necessary to conceal the intentions and effects of their work from the public and from MEPs.
There are actually several MPs with degrees in Maths,Computing etc. and the D.G. of Intellect, the software patent lobbyist organisation, has a degree in maths and a history of employment in high tech. industry and just look at Nathan Myrhvold's background. Even more surprisingly perhaps, one of the (minor) KDE developers posted his anti-OSS anti-GPL stance here at/. a while back and I found he was even deliberately violating it. Last year, a post I made to the feedback in a LinuxFocus article by a scientist who was using a lot of FLOSS tools in his work, in which I brought up the subject of the effect of software patents on science, was removed.
"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think"
Your definition of moron must be rather unusual - Unlike your good self, I have found that Jonas is able to read and easily comprehend what he has read:
"All this can be found on the Free Software Foundation's website, if you ever took the trouble to visit it."
The simplest way to make a program free is to put it in the public domain (18k characters), uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software (18k characters). They can make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a proprietary product. People who receive the program in that modified form do not have the freedom that the original author gave them; the middleman has stripped it away.
In the GNU project, our aim is to give all users the freedom to redistribute and change GNU software. If middlemen could strip off the freedom, we might have many users, but those users would not have freedom. So instead of putting GNU software in the public domain, we ``copyleft'' it. Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom.
Yes - but if no-one else turns up anything, the reason I gave you that link and left you to google for others is because those 30 boxes and many other documents in the University of Minnesota CBI collections would be a good place to look for this kind of historical stuff - stuff which isn't really ever likely to appear on a website. BTW - look what they use to navigate their dictionary pages!
I don't live anywhere near Minnesota and maybe you don't either but if I did, I'd certainly be sticking my nose into some of those boxes.:) What intrigues me most is the hint in the article I quoted earlier that IBM had a policy of opposing software patents.
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/collections/inv/cbi00159.ht ml
Also google for the words "Goetz" "Autoflow" "IBM". The Goetz/IBM story is full of hindsightful ironies - who would've guessed that IBM were the original "free" software advocates and anti-software patent activists;-)
I don't think there's all that much around on the 'net on this subject and I certainly don't know about court case specifics but I'd very much like to get a deeper insight into IBM's early anti-swpat policy myself.
"I asked this [slashdot.org] in the previous patent discussion as well, but let me ask again: does anyone know of any "good" software patents? I.e. non-trivial, innovative, and realistic? The only one that came out of that previous discussion was the RSA patent, which I agree meets these criteria and as such is worthy of patent protection."
Please try and find another example - and preferably not one that is a direct assault on my freedom to study and communicate mathematics. As I have said before and elsewhere:
The RSA algorithm is neither innovative nor a non-obvious invention. The unnamed lemma (which I would call Cocks's lemma if it were up to me) from which the algorithm is derived, is a moderately interesting
discovery in elementary number theory and it might reasonably be called an innovative (but tiny) piece of mathematics. The algorithm itself however, follows naturally and obviously from this lemma and when someone implements it by writing a computer program, he or she is doing nothing more than would be required to implement anything else found in an elementary mathematics text book; the discrete Fourier transform or Euclid's algorithm for example.....
.....It is intolerable (to most of us) that computational mathematics be subjected to patents in this way, no matter what the uses to which it is put: there is a vast difference in consequences between granting the monopoly right to exclusive use of a physical invention that depends on mathematical, scientific or logical ideas and doing so for the actual expression (regardless of implementation particularities) of those abstract ideas in exemplary form, as is made possible by computers.
"Not true. There are patents applicable to software going back for decades. It became evident many years ago that the line dividing software and hardware was practically non-existent, but it seems many slashdotters will never catch up to that simple truth for at least another decade."
Unlike IBM perhaps?:
Cooley takes pains to praise the Gentleman-Sande paper, as well as an earlier paper by Sande (who was a student of Tukey's) that was never published. In fact, Cooley says, the Cooley-Tukey algorithm could well have been known as the Sande-Tukey algorithm were it not for the "accident" that led to the publication of the now-famous 1965 paper. As he recounts it, the paper he co-authored with Tukey came to be written mainly because a mathematically inclined patent attorney happened to attend the seminar in which Cooley described the algorithm. The lawyer, Frank Thomas, "saw that it was a patentable idea," Cooley explains, "and the policy of IBM and their lawyers was to be sure that nobody bottled up software and algorithms by getting patents on them." A decision was quickly reached to put the fast Fourier transform in the public domain, and that meant, in part, publishing a paper.
The publication of the Cooley-Tukey algorithm brought on an explosion of activity, as researchers from all branches of science rushed to apply the new technique to their own computational problems. One of the most spectacular applications--at the time--was an FFT computation of a sequence of 512,000 data points taken from interferometer measurements. This computation, done using a program designed by Norman Brenner at MIT, enabled Janine Connes, an astronomer at the University of Paris, to calculate the infrared spectra of the planets for a book that has become a standard reference in the subject.
You don't seem to have quite grasped the point that for the two decades after the first software patent was acquired (by Goetz in '68 iirc), hardly anyone else did so or even thought about software patents,and there was nothing quite like the insane free-for-all of recent years.
By the way, it became "evident many years ago that the line dividing software and hardware was practically non-existent" only to lawyers. No-one else I know and respect who is reasonably numerate and scientifically literate has any trouble making the distinction.
"You've got a patent to study and nothing to worry about. What's the complaint?"
Businessmen call it "uncertainty", and they seem to hate it for some reason. And if you can find a software developer who thinks that studying patent claims is useful, they are probably working for an "IP company" and not actually writing any software.
It isn't just pretty weak - it's nothing more than a feeble-minded rant. It is meant to be a serious article but it was written by a crank with a personal stake in representing his own patents as something other than absurdly trivial, something which he mysteriously forgets to do (either for his own or the others) in his 'analysis'. It is so full of flaws like those you have quoted: absurd non-sequiturs, assertions presented as facts, generalisations from the particular and from anecdote etc. that it is not really worth worrying about - especially given it's vintage.
Opinions are rather more convincing if they are demonstrably representative of a wider community:
http://www.ccp14.ac.uk/maths/software-patents/ and there is of course plenty more (up to date) material at the swpat.FFII.org site.
Yes, very good indeed - thanks for writing it. It's a shame though that the media still fail to recognise this as an issue that is of great concern to everyone. The Guardian has been immeasurably better than the rest of the UK media but they still relegate it to the geek section, as though we were still in the 1970s and few people had ever even seen a computer.
If only there were some way to give journalists and editors a taste of life under a regime of literature patents and "pen and paper implemented inventions".
Re:If this were Trek...
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Sorry - that didn't come out right because of the angle brackets in it:
Slashdot Mirror
"Only where you restrict yourself to the right scenarios. What about the mammoth software project at a proprietary vendor (smaller comparative costs)? What about the tummy trimmer inventor (largest cost in the whole process, but not software)?"
;-) and license it's unit manufacture and sale to some third party. As many practitioners in the software field have pointed out: another difference is that software authors are rarely if ever happy to be restricted to inventing components which they are unable to 'manufacture' themselves but are willing to license to big software manufacturers. The dynamics are completely different and those who do seek to merely license their software 'inventions' to others are generally regarded as patent trolls. No matter what the characterisation of particular cases, it is all rather irrelevant in the face of your obligation to demonstrate the present (in Europe) and historical (in the USA) necessity of extending the scope of patentable subject matter to software in order to promote progress in that vast and extraordinarily diverse field.
As everyone economically literate and cognizant of the history of the software industry knows: the mammoth software project has ample opportunity for ROI and competetive success by the ordinary mechanisms of copyright, trade secret, marketing, reputation, associated quality of service and first mover advantage. The tummy trimmer inventor is probably quite happy to invent the damn thing (whatever it is
"Plenty of experts and pioneers are idiots outside of their field. Not that these guys are, but hero worship has no place here. You wouldn't trust them to do your taxes, would you? The bottom line is, they know how patents affect them and the software industry - they don't know how patents affect others, they just imagine they do."
This plenitude of experts and pioneers in the software field I referred to are not talking about matters outside their own field: they are making observations and criticisms about the arrogant and fallacious assertions that practitioners in the field of patent law make about the software field. How patents affect other fields of technology is not our concern: it is well known in the electronics industry that patents have impeded innovation but if Andy Grove et al are not willing to do anything about it, that is their affair.
"If it is abstract in nature but can be used to make money, it is arguably a "business method", and that is a potential defense for the poster's scenario."
I'm beginning to wonder if you really are a patent lawyer. I've never heard this particular piece of nonsense before.
"Well, yes, they are. The argument goes, software is subject to copyright and is expression, so it shouldn't be patentable. Also, software is a mathematical entity and shouldn't be patentable. It can't be both. If it is expression, it's not a mathematical entity, and may be patentable. If it's a mathematical entity, then it's not expression, and there goes copyright. You have drunk the koolaid.
"
Someone has drunk something noxious and I don't think it is me. If you cannot tell the difference between ideas and the particular expression of those ideas then I'm sure you're not a patent lawyer. Is the Firefox web browser a mathematical algorithm? Not by any practical definition it isn't, but it certainly expresses hundreds or thousands of such algorithms and so does Microsoft's IE browser and IE is a very different expression of the very same algorithms that Firefox is.
"I think you are saying that those opposing software patents will avoid the extreme arguments, even if they believe them, because they wouldn't be politically acceptable? Because it is strategically self-destructive? Is that wrong? Well, the problem is, it's an emperor has no clothes situation. I can see right through your "software is special" argument to your "patents are evil" belief! Why can't you?"
Probably because I do not subscribe to the extremist beliefs you imagine I do - as I thought I had pointed out. Yes - you think wrong - very wrong - and it is the extremism of your own point of view that demands the justification - not mine.
"
Why should software authors have to worry less about patents than independent mechanical designers, chemists, or electrical engineers?"
Because the patent system in the case of software often imposes the largest costs in the whole process, amounting frequently to an absolute barrier to innovation. Patents are obviously not meant to do this and where the capital and marginal costs of bringing innovations to market are significantly greater than the burden of the patent system itself, the extra burden may be acceptable. Your "why shouldn't everyone else suffer" argument is perverse, especially since in reality the extension of patents to software has imposed even greater a burden on the mechanical designers, chemists and electrical engineers you mention.
"What's the difference between your hypothetical and a guy who designs a new engine on paper, proposes a new synthesis on paper, or sketches a new circuit on paper, and posts it on the web, whereupon some third party company picks it up and mass produces it, and the guy is threatened for inducing patent infringement (yes, there is such a thing)?
There is not much difference. I have heard the arguments that say software is special for various reasons, but you have to have already drunk the koolaid to buy them."
You are not the first patent lawyer to pretend that inventions in the abstract, mathematical world of software are no different than inventions in the realm of physical devices and processes and it is tiresome that many of your colleagues continue to utterly disregard the arguments and opinions of experts and pioneers and the consensus of the majority of practitioners in the field itself. If you are unaware of the explanations of what is different about software, written by notable practitioners and pioneers such as Donald Knuth, Phil Salin and Richard Stallman, then you are guilty merely of ignorance. If you are aware of those arguments and still maintain that "you have to have drunk the koolaid to buy them", then I think the onus is on you to explain in detail why these luminaries in the field have got it all wrong and you are right.
"Just FYI, in the U.S., there is a special "personal use" escape clause for "business methods" (which would be most algorithm/data structure type things)."
I don't understand how this is useful or relevant, nor how compression, encryption, routing, memory management, transform, signal processing etc. algorithms and the plethora of data structures ranging from image formats to crystallographic data structures can be regarded as "business methods".
"I'm sorry. I can accept that patents in general may harm the penniless dreamer. But software is not special, and there is no credible reason to exclude it. The (unproven) net benefit is the same as it is with all other technologies(a disclosure for exclusivity bargain)."
You would have us believe that patents only harm the idle and the penniless, but that is arrant nonsense and software patents in particular have a great propensity to gratuitously harm the least idle and to make penniless (or very much less wealthy) those who would not otherwise expect to have anything to do with the process of software technology innovation and ought to be able to go about their businesses unmolested by the parasites you and your colleagues help to arm.
"Freedom of expression - a red herring. Free speech is a very good reason to restrict copyright, especially for artistic works. However, software was treated as "expression" as a convenient legal fiction to shoehorn it into the existing copyright laws. But really, that makes no sense. You can't argue simultaneously that an algorithm is both a discovered law of nature and unique personal expression."
No-one is - an algorithm is a mathematical entity and mathematics should absolutely not be cursed with the misery of t
"Could you please justify by reply in moderate detail the supposed net benefit to society..."
That's far enough - there's no need to even mention open source or free software projects: the onus is on those who are proponents of software patents (or any other kind of patent) to show that they promote progress in the sciences and useful arts. It must be demonstrated by them that the overall effect is beneficial in each area of technology and in each industry to which the patent system is applied.
Patent attorneys and others will always try to hoodwink us into believing all kinds of nonsense about the patent system. They use words and expressions like "protection", "intellectual property" and "theft" to mislead people into believing that a patent represents some kind of tangible entity over which people have natural rights. But we should never forget what a patent really is: a government granted 20 year monopoly right to exclude everyone else other than the patentee from freely using some idea, whether they came up with it independently or not. Unlike a copyright, it is a kind of officially sanctioned and enforced removal of rights from everyone else and in the case of software patents it is a serious infringement of the tangible property rights of millions of computer owners.
Extraordinary interventions in the free market, that even entail curtailment of natural rights and liberties, demand extraordinary justification.
"With all due respect, I'm quite familiar with the basics of computer science. My areas of expertise include computability and algorithm analysis. I have spent more time staring at FSMs and models of computation than any human should. Do you mind sharing some of these granted patents on the basics of computer science? I look at anywhere from 5-200 computer-related patents every business day and have yet to find them. (Cue the requisite jokes about a patent examiner's inability to find something *rimshot*)"
Rather than fill this post with links to a myriad RLE and other compression patents, discrete transform patents, Djikstra algorithm variants, memory management algorithms etc. etc. I'll just say this: Congratulations! - it's not every day one comes across someone who knows more about computer science than Donald Knuth.
" Sorry, I was merely representing his perpective which I have found intersting to understand and analyse."
No need to apologise - I knew you were only representing his perspective but I have found these people to be a most dishonest, venal and disreputable collection of sociopaths. I have found that they have no respect whatsoever for the fundamental principles of the patent system of which they are a part and over which they have exerted almost completely autonomous power, and nor have they shown any respect for the freedoms and tangible property rights of others.
That they have power and influence enough to have caused Ministers of European Governments to lie to their Parliaments, that they are capable of drafting legislation so as to deliberately deceive legislators as to it's intentions and effects and that they have a long history of lying to and misleading the public, the press and the Governments of Europe has been a shocking revelation to me and to others and I hope outsiders will not be too easily put off by the bananas.
"The most important thing anyone of us can do to fight software patents is to start using free formats."
The most important thing for Europeans to do is to write to their MEPs. If the Council Directive is adopted then the war is over and you will be hard-pressed to find any patent-free formats or software of any kind. Free video and audio formats and codecs do not live in isolation and relying on them winning the hearts, minds and pockets of industry and society seems a reckless strategy anyway. BTW - it is news to me that the BBC is putting out content in free formats.
"He was also quite disdainful of some of what he sees as misrepresentations on the FFII site."
Presumably, these 'misrepresentations' on the FFII site include the 'misrepresentations' concocted by some of Europe's most respected computer scientists, legal experts and economists? No doubt they also include the 'misrepresentations' of Deutsche Bank, Price Waterhouse Coopers, the 'lying' comparative analyses of patent practice by various legal experts showing EPO practice to be virtually identical to US practice and the EU's own 'deceitful' EESC analysis and the many more such disgraceful documents from equally dodgy sources?.
Who wouldn't be disdainful of the FFII's references to the 30,000 + gigantic fibs allegedly spoken by the EPO and UKPO databases themselves, which tell us of patents on progress bars, tabbed palettes, compression algorithms, shopping carts, marking up program code for display in a browser... all of which the saintly UKPO assures us cannot possibly really exist. Clearly the FFII has it all backwards and the proposed Directive, which will codify current practice, will surely save us from a drift towards the US practice of patenting software and business methods. Those reputable firms of patent attorneys really ought to stop misleading their clients and pretending to them that they know how to get their US b/m and swpat patents granted by the EPO. Perhaps they too have been bamboozled by the FFII.
When I first encountered this issue, I didn't really know who to trust and who was misrepresenting the facts either. It seemed entirely plausible that the Directive was intended to avoid the death-by-patent guaranteed for European software by a massive US style extension to the abstract and intangible and that these people really did respect the EPC. 2 years later, I know better.
"I mean, presently, nobody has the ability to patent an algorithm in Europe."
That's not the case: the EPO has already granted more than 30,000 software patents, including algorithms for image compression, but the point is that they have done so illegitimately and the validity and enforceability of such patents is in doubt in many individual nations of Europe. The European Patent Convention specifically excludes programs for computers from patentable subject matter but over the years, the European patent bureaucrats at the EPO and elsewhere have found dubious and tricksy ways to wriggle out of those exclusions.
At least to their own satisfaction they have done so, but not all nations in Europe have followed them very closely because e.g. their legal systems have relied more on the statutory law (the EPC) than on the subsequent EPO case law (the evil, twisted stuff made up by the patent bureaucrats over the years). When the patent extremist bureaucrats failed to have the EPC exclusions removed altogether, they drafted their deceit-laden Directive to pull every country into line with the EPO practice anyway. If passed in it's current form it will retrospectively legitimise and codify the case law and make all those software patents valid and enforceable in all European countries (it will get incorporated into each national legal system pretty much automatically).
" What would be the best way to illustrate what a software engineer does to a group of primary school kids?"
Reprogram them.
"Diamonds have value because of the clever manipulations of a cartel."
You are referring to the feared and sinister global cartel known as W.O.M.E.N. perhaps?
"Actually, there's not a shred of evidence that Linux has any patented code in it."
p /3 432241
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.ph
Also, SCO's case is a copyright case against IBM and you can't just bring alleged patent infringements into a copyright case. There is no reason whatsoever why any patent lawyers would have been poring over the code at the same time as the copyright lawyers, and SCO would have to be even more foolish than it is to attack IBM on patent infringement grounds anyway.
Quite right. A good example being Microsoft, who once went out of their way to avoid infringing any known compression patents of a particular type but got caught out anyway:
m l
http://www.ross.net/compression/introduction.ht
If Microsoft, with their ample legal resources, can't write software without unwittingly infringing software patents, who can?
You should understand that the patent system cannot operate in the fine-grained discriminatory way you would wish it to. There are ethical and practical reasons for this which you ought to be able to figure out if you think about it a little.
Also bear in mind that the patent system is a macro-economic instrument of policy with a broad but specific purpose: to promote progress in the sciences and the useful arts - not to reward people who have brilliant ideas - and that patents are not granted for ideas but for inventions (a very important distinction).
Now you can see why the inevitability of the existence of patents on obvious, trivial and broad inventions in any workable patent system is a well understood phenomenon and deemed an acceptable nuisance in some (investment eating) fields of technology, and it should also be clear why certain whole fields of endeavour have historically been excluded from patentability.
Specifically, mathematics has always been excluded and your example of the RSA algorithm is a classic demonstration of how the extension of patentability to the software field has made a mockery of the hitherto rational and careful practices of legislators and Courts in containing the patent system to the fields in which the damage it does is (possibly) an acceptable trade off.
The RSA algorithm did not take years to come up with - it took me about 30 seconds to come up with it once I'd read the lemma that is it's foundation, and the same would be true for anyone else. In fact the lemma itself is not something that would necessarily take a competent mathematician years to come up with but that is beside the point - the computerisable algorithmic expression of the lemma is an utterly obvious non-invention. Patentability of algorithms means patentability of computational mathematics, and that is - to me and many others - wholly unacceptable.
"I don't see anything in what he said that says that software patents shouldn't ever be issued, only that in a lot of cases, they were issued in violation of the USPTO's own rules."
"For the sake of innovation and a competitive software market, we sincerely hope that the European Union will seize this opportunity to exclude software from patentability and gain a major competitive advantage in the information age."
"Auctioning the library off in such a piecemeal fashion just seems wrong, IMNSHO."
Whether that is wrong or not, I do think important historical documents should be electronically 'preserved' and made available for the benefit of the public. Some institutions and companies make an effort but not all and quality is variable - the British Library recently scanned some 17th century Shakespeare Quartos and put images of them up online in jpeg format. They are readable but not as readable as if they'd used something like the excellent DjVu.
It would be good to see documents like those original Turing and other papers preserved and presented like the Shannon example here has been - whatever later happens to the actual physical copies.
Try not to get too angry ;-) - they are not really 'her' claims and many of these people really do think they and their Party are doing the right thing and do not realise they are being lied to by the UKPO et al. Show her the evidence (Jonas found 13 really bad UK granted swpats recently) that proves the EPO and UKPO have already sewn a business method and pure software patent minefield even though the UKPO keeps saying otherwise. Show her the EESC analysis of the original Directive proposal (the latest version is effectively identical) which demonstrates (independently) the deliberately deceptive nature of the wording of the proposal. Ask her if she thinks democracy in Europe is well served by drafters of legislation who deem it necessary to conceal the intentions and effects of their work from the public and from MEPs.
There are actually several MPs with degrees in Maths,Computing etc. and the D.G. of Intellect, the software patent lobbyist organisation, has a degree in maths and a history of employment in high tech. industry and just look at Nathan Myrhvold's background. Even more surprisingly perhaps, one of the (minor) KDE developers posted his anti-OSS anti-GPL stance here at /. a while back and I found he was even deliberately violating it. Last year, a post I made to the feedback in a LinuxFocus article by a scientist who was using a lot of FLOSS tools in his work, in which I brought up the subject of the effect of software patents on science, was removed.
"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think"
[Dorothy Parker]
Your definition of moron must be rather unusual - Unlike your good self, I have found that Jonas is able to read and easily comprehend what he has read:
"All this can be found on the Free Software Foundation's website, if you ever took the trouble to visit it."
What is Copyleft
Yes - but if no-one else turns up anything, the reason I gave you that link and left you to google for others is because those 30 boxes and many other documents in the University of Minnesota CBI collections would be a good place to look for this kind of historical stuff - stuff which isn't really ever likely to appear on a website. BTW - look what they use to navigate their dictionary pages!
:) What intrigues me most is the hint in the article I quoted earlier that IBM had a policy of opposing software patents.
I don't live anywhere near Minnesota and maybe you don't either but if I did, I'd certainly be sticking my nose into some of those boxes.
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/collections/inv/cbi00159.ht ml
;-)
Also google for the words "Goetz" "Autoflow" "IBM". The Goetz/IBM story is full of hindsightful ironies - who would've guessed that IBM were the original "free" software advocates and anti-software patent activists
I don't think there's all that much around on the 'net on this subject and I certainly don't know about court case specifics but I'd very much like to get a deeper insight into IBM's early anti-swpat policy myself.
Please try and find another example - and preferably not one that is a direct assault on my freedom to study and communicate mathematics. As I have said before and elsewhere:
Unlike IBM perhaps?:
You don't seem to have quite grasped the point that for the two decades after the first software patent was acquired (by Goetz in '68 iirc), hardly anyone else did so or even thought about software patents
By the way, it became "evident many years ago that the line dividing software and hardware was practically non-existent" only to lawyers. No-one else I know and respect who is reasonably numerate and scientifically literate has any trouble making the distinction.
"You've got a patent to study and nothing to worry about. What's the complaint?"
Businessmen call it "uncertainty", and they seem to hate it for some reason. And if you can find a software developer who thinks that studying patent claims is useful, they are probably working for an "IP company" and not actually writing any software.
It isn't just pretty weak - it's nothing more than a feeble-minded rant. It is meant to be a serious article but it was written by a crank with a personal stake in representing his own patents as something other than absurdly trivial, something which he mysteriously forgets to do (either for his own or the others) in his 'analysis'. It is so full of flaws like those you have quoted: absurd non-sequiturs, assertions presented as facts, generalisations from the particular and from anecdote etc. that it is not really worth worrying about - especially given it's vintage.
Opinions are rather more convincing if they are demonstrably representative of a wider community:
http://www.ccp14.ac.uk/maths/software-patents/
and there is of course plenty more (up to date) material at the swpat.FFII.org site.
Yes, very good indeed - thanks for writing it. It's a shame though that the media still fail to recognise this as an issue that is of great concern to everyone. The Guardian has been immeasurably better than the rest of the UK media but they still relegate it to the geek section, as though we were still in the 1970s and few people had ever even seen a computer.
If only there were some way to give journalists and editors a taste of life under a regime of literature patents and "pen and paper implemented inventions".