Some thoughts on Software Patents: Here's a little SlashDot response to someone calling himself "Anonymous Coward":
Keeping things equal (Score:2)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23, @02:21PM (#4128163)
> If Linus has no problem violating patents, I
> would have no problem violating the GPL.
> Intellectual property is intellectual property,
> whether it's covered by a copyright or a patent
> or a trademark or whatever. If Linus intends to
> willfully violate someone else's IP, he should
> have no problem with me violating his IP.
I think you are missing the point. Software patents were a stupid idea when they started appearing, they are still a stuipid idea today, and they will continue to be a stupid idea until either they are thrown out of court or they kill the software industry. Software patents don't protect anyone's legitimate intellectual property rights and they open every developer to the possibilities that his own work will be declared illegal at any time if someone with enough money and lawyers decides to go after him. Consider a few questions...
Have you ever actually filed a patent for anything you have written? If so, you must have noticed that it took years to come into force and required tend of thousands of dollars to secure. What's the useful lifetime of the code that you write? How many original ideas have you had in your work? I have had more than I could begin to list. Since I don't file patent applications for them what does that mean? It means that someone with less brains but more lawyers gets to use MY ideas without my permission, and keep me from using them if he (and his lawyers) decide to. Does that sound like the protection of intellectual property?
If you wanted to check to make sure that of the many thousands of ideas and techniques that you use every year in your work how would you go about searching to determine whether any of them are patented? Have you ever searched for a patent even once out of those thousands? How much of your time would it take to do that?
Have you ever seen a single software patent that wasn't either overly broad or non-obvious? I have not. Of course to a patent examiner who has never written a line of code himself just about everything we do seems novel, original, and non-obvious (to him) but what kind of standard is that? Should we limit our thinking to the level of some USPTO lackey?
Face it, software patents were imposed on us against our will (and over our objections) by the legal profession, and it helps them (and a few big bullies who use their patent portfolios to threaten smaller companies which develop better software but have fewer lawyers) and essentially makes independent software development illegal. Sure it isn't being enforced, and until we get some clout with the legal system, keeping it an unenforced law is the best way of dealing with it.
I sure don't oppose intellectual property rights. I LOVE intellectual property rights. The question is whether software patents in particular actually protect intellectual property rights or not. Software copyrights have a few small problems which could be easily remedied and would protect legitimate software intellectual property rights just fine (and did so without any problems before the early 1990s) and deserve our support and respect. Software patents are a different story entirely.
3:29:21 AM 
|
