Last Chance to Thank Poland
January 30th, 2005 by Gavin BakerLate this week, the European Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure will thank Poland over 28,000 times.
Why? Without getting too bogged down in the details, basically, Poland has twice steered the European Union away from accepting the patentability of software. Turning back the tide in the EU is good for all of us.
There are several reasons to oppose software patents. Here are a few:
- Software patents threaten open source software: “The extension of patent law to the field of software represents a fundamental threat to the open-source development model.” – Kiel Institute for World Economics [source]
- Software patents threaten software development and innovation in general: “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today (1991).” – Bill Gates [source]
- Software patents are disproportionately harmful to smaller companies and independent programmers: “A software patent regime would establish the law of the strong, and ultimately create more injustice than justice.” – Linus Torvalds, Michael Widenius and Rasmus Lerdorf [source]
- Patent offices have a poor track record in judging non-obviousness and prior art: “The problem is particularly acute in the software and Internet fields where the history of prior inventions (often called ‘prior art’) is widely distributed and poorly documented.” – Electronic Frontier Foundation [source]
So, over 28,000 individuals have signed a letter thanking Poland for trying to keep software patents out of the EU. Late this week, the FFII intends to formally hand over the letter and its signatures. So sign on now, and next time you’re in Poland, find the Ministry of Science and Information Technology and say “Thanks.”
Free Culture groups, why not partner with a Polish or European student group to publicly discuss software patents and the status of new member states in the EU?
In the end, we all lose from software patents. To quote the Free Software Foundation: “Most software developers, as well as users, lose from software patents, which do more to obstruct software progress than to encourage it.”
For more information about software patents, see:
- NoSoftwarePatents.com
- FFII’s Software Patents site
- EFF’s Patent Busting Project
- League for Programming Freedom’s Software Patents site
Addendum: A few days later, Linus Torvalds is in the news again opposing software patents.
February 15th, 2005 at 4:22 am
[...] of context. But though we at FreeCulture.org may not know much about the EU bureaucracy, we know we don’t like software patents. The European Parliament has said it doesn’t, eith [...]
January 31st, 2005 at 8:02 pm
I am not sure I agree with this stance on patents. I think about software patents such as mp3 compression algorithm and I think it deserves protection as much as say the cotten gin. I agree with many that the patent office is doing a terrible job of evaluating software patents. I feel that the focus of this arguement against software patents is too broad. I think the focus should be to put pressure on the patent office and dispute these silly patents that have made it through their system.
I understand that this threatens the open source movement but I don’t think this is a reason to deny Fraunhofer protection for their brilliant audio compression algorithm.
I don’t necessarily agree that software patents threaten innovation. Once again Fraunhofer’s codec made music the “killer app” for the web.
Software patents are disproportionately harmful to smaller companies and independent programmers – I guess I can see this but this still is not a reason to get rid of software patents.
Your last point “Patent offices have a poor track record in judging non-obviousness and prior art” is where the focus of this argument should concentrated. The patent office is at fault not software patents as a whole.
My $0.02
February 1st, 2005 at 10:00 am
Nick,
I think just about everyone can agree that trivial patents should stop being granted and should be easier to challenge. But there’s a lot to say for why software, as a whole, just simply shouldn’t be patentable. IANAL, but patents are really meant for mechanical inventions. Software — many people, including lots of prominent programmers, think this — is closer to the sort of creative work that copyright covers than the mechnical inventions that patent covers. If you read around on some of the sites linked, I think you’ll start to see why. For some examples, here are a patent that probably should not have been granted and a patent that probably should have. In addition, having exclusive, 20-year control of a method of doing something, even if others discover it independently, just doesn’t make sense: software moves far too fast. I think a lot of us agree that software patents are a two-pronged problem: not only are they poorly implemented, they’re just bad in concept. Although Patent Offices have problems of implementation in many fields, the only other field I can think of that’s currently patentable but perhaps shouldn’t be is the genes of living creatures.
February 1st, 2005 at 10:25 pm
I am in complete agreement about software patents. If you do a bit of research, you will find people extending patents for completely unrelated items to software, mainly because they can. One of my favorite examples is the extension of a patent from the late 80’s on using MIDI to turn on pro-audio amplifiers. This patent was purchased and extended to autonomic computing by one of IBM’s strategic partners, Singlestep. I have heard some very respected software architects suggest that the PTO essentially rubber stamps software patents, with the intention of letting disputes be resolved in courts. The process at the PTO isn’t really designed to handle an industry that evolves as quickly as software.