Software Patents Good For Open Source? 150
schliz writes "The Australian software patent system could be used by open source developers to ensure their inventions remain available to the community, a conference organized by intellectual property authority IP Australia heard this week According to Australian inventor Ric Richardson, whose company came out on top of a multi-million dollar settlement with Microsoft in March, a world without software patents would be 'open slather for anybody who can just go faster than the next person.' Software developer Ben Sturmfels, whose 2010 anti-software-patent petition won the support of open source community members such as Jonathan Oxer, Andrew Tridgell, and software freedom activist Richard Stallman, disagreed."
In theory... (Score:5, Insightful)
In theory I could see how the argument could work, but in practice, the patent system is both prohibitively expensive and incredibly slow. The cost and delay renders it mostly only usable by big players. Exacerbated by big companies having gigantic, practically unknowable portfolios at their disposal (many companies have a practice of making employees try to patent anything they can think of, regardless of plans to actually implement them, leaving a company with gobs of patents no one even really knows about....
The Big Problem with Software Patents is... (Score:3, Insightful)
uhh? defensive patents = offensive = good? (Score:5, Insightful)
if you want to ensure it's free - why the fuck just not release it?
just release the damn thing. it's prior art after that.
if you assemble a patent portfolio and assign them to an "open source" company, that company might be bought and the patents used to force forks to die. that's the only thing the patents could be used apart from using them in suits against commercial competitors(just purely offensive or for defensive if getting sued by said commercial competitor).
the business week article in one of the linked articles is dead btw. some guy who netted 300+ mil from having a patent thinks sw patents are good? news?
May Be Better. But Open Still Means Open (Score:5, Insightful)
a world without software patents would be 'open slather for anybody who can just go faster than the next person.'
Well, yes -- that is pretty much the essential nature of "Open." Anyone who has the skill, time, and energy can build whatever they want, even if it is based on someone else's work. It has its ups and downs, but saying the software world would be more Open if it were more restrictive is an internally inconsistent statement. It is logically self-contradictory.
There are those who believe that using the system against itself is better than changing the system. Some believe the GPL is better than would be the elimination of software copyright. I actually fall into this camp (though I do believe in reducing the strength and duration of patent and copyright). But it would not be more Open. Open has some shortcomings, and that may lead a rational person to believe that absolute Open-ness is less efficient than some degree of Closed-ness. But that does not mean you can redefine Open to mean partially Closed. Just say you believe in a balance between Open and Closed. It's OK to believe in shades of gray.
Not every question demands an absolutist answer, but rational discourse does rely on words like Open having a clear and unequivocal meaning in a given context. Dilute your hard-core ideology, not the terminology you use to describe it.
Re:Stallman is anti-freedom (Score:3, Insightful)
It's restrictive on purpose and those restrictions are exactly why people in the industry, including myself, use it. The GLP slogan is "Free as in Freedom" for a reason, and its "infectuous" nature is great for preserving that. On top of that it's extremely clever in changing how copyright works - retaining rights to grant different licenses to the actual author/rights holder of the software while effectively nullifying copyright on the base distrobution. That means anybody who wants to use GPL source closed can still be granted a license for it and the authority to grant such a license is in the hands of the actual authors of the source - but otherwise there's no way people can just steal the source like they could under the BSD/MIT/etc. licenses.
The GPL forces freedom and still gives me rights over my code - and that is exactly what I and many other people in the industry want.
The actual arguments (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is the point made:
None of these techniques benefit open source, they only try to limit the damage done by software patents, fighting fire with fire.
If you ask me, an "open slather" (Score:5, Insightful)
... "for anybody who can just go faster than the next person" would be a good thing for software.
Re:In theory... (Score:5, Insightful)
And copyrights mess with this in that they protect the actual work and establish the underlying idea as being prior art (from that point on) and thus no longer patentable.
Patents, aside from being slow and expensive, create a kind of virtual property that the big players* can buy, sell, and otherwise securitize. And that game has been fixed for quite a while, making it cost prohibitive for the little guy to do anything more than sell his property into the system to those who can afford to trade it.
* The big players resemble Goldman Sachs more than Boeing or Caterpillar. They don't actually create value anymore so much as trade title to value that is 'within the system'. That is, ideas for which negotiable paper has been generated by the patent office.
Protect the wealthy (Score:5, Insightful)
All the arguments so far on the benefits of software patents come from the rich.
A man who was award millions of dollars from patents says they are good. Government that makes millions of dollars from patents say they are good!
How does a small , non rich, developer do this, or small open source project get patent protection.
It cost 1000's upon 1000's of dollars just to put in applications. (Not including the legal mumbojumbo and hoops you need to jump through.)
Then when you've blown 80% of your development budget on government fees, the Apple, Oracle or Microsoft types come along and steal your idea anyway, and now you need millions of dollars to fight them in court. (In the mean time they throw their patents at you, ie you used a "software button" or "bouncing icon" etc, so they claim millions of dollars in damages from your $2 company)
Software patent are killing many open source projects and smaller development, limiting innovation in general.
No one can write even the simplest of program without breaching someones so-called patent.
Software should be protected under copyright law, in that the code itself, and the graphics are protected. If someone rewrites software to do exactly the same thing but without using any of the original code then that should be good.
Patents should be only for mechanical physical devices, and even then should only be for a couple of years to give the inventor time to utilise. If they don't then bad luck, its open for all!
In reality small developers have to simply ignore the patent system and hope they aren't targeted by Apple and co if they happen to create something profitable or too popular!
This story smells funny... (Score:4, Insightful)
Patents are Generally Bad (Score:1, Insightful)
Software patents are bad.
Patents on life/DNA/etc are evil.
Generally patents are bad over all and should only be granted for VERY short periods, say five to seven years at most. If you can't make money with your monopoly by then get out of the way so someone else can use it.
Fact is, many people come up with the same ideas. Most patents are obvious and should never be granted.
Re:If you ask me, an "open slather" (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a word for that in English. What was it? Oh yeah. Competition. That's really bad for incumbent corporations, but good for consumers.
Moralization (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, software patents are good for open source, like HIV is good for fidelity.
What sickens me is that people still try to sell their poor ideas with moralization.
Using categories like "good/bad" or "nice/evil" is the typical way it's used.
This way, if you disagree with my opinion, you are "bad/evil", while I'm "nice/good".
BTW, I think that software patents are a huge waste, both of time and money.
All this energy is spent on trying to defend ideas, but ideas are unlimited and patents are limited.
Instead of trying to protect your ideas, try to find new ideas !
Re:Missing freedom (Score:3, Insightful)
> This is not an infringement to freedom of thought
Sure it is. You can't use the labors of your own mind because some jackass got a bad patent on something any CIS student could come up with. Bad patents are THEFT. They are theft from you and from me (assuming you are a CS professional).
Software patents allow Apple and friends to claim ownership of things I have created. This isn't just some theoretical idea or academic idea. Someone like Apple or Amazon can sue me for re-implementing some blatantly obvious thing.
THAT is the very real problem with patents generally and software patents in particular.
Trivial shit is patented granting "exclusive ownership" to whatever lucky company was granted that patent. That means that NO ONE ELSE can recreate it. Doesn't matter if it is trivial shit that 10 companies are re-inventing at the same time.
1 company can get a patent, sue the other 9 and create massive chaos and stagnation in the industry.
Fuck no - stop the spread of the disease (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flood the market (Score:4, Insightful)
Quick patent every silly software idea you have so the big corps cant!
How's that supposed to happen when most is clone of software that already exists?
FTFY.
Re:In theory... (Score:5, Insightful)
If two people file a patent almost the same time, with first-to-invent, you have a long drawn-out court battle over who invented it. With first-to-file, the second filing will typically include evidence that it was invented before the first disclosure and therefore invalidate the first, so no one gets the patent.
This is as it should be for things that are sufficiently obvious that two people invent them almost simultaneously: remember that the point of patents is not to reward you for being clever, it's to provide an incentive for disclosing your invention. If someone else would disclose it a week later anyway, or all interested people know it already, then there is no reason to provide the incentive.