software patent

Free as in Freedom

by Sam Williams  · 16 Nov 2015

you need to sleep, by all means do." The speech ends with a brief discussion of software patents, a growing issue of concern both within the software industry and within the free software community. Like Napster, software patents reflect the awkward nature of applying laws and concepts written for the physical world to the

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frictionless universe of information technology. The difference between protecting a program under copyright and protecting a program under software patents is subtle but significant. In the case of copyright, a software creator can restrict duplication of the source code but not duplication of the idea

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off accusations of corporate espionage or developer hanky-panky. In the jargon of modern software development, companies refer to this technique as "clean room" engineering. Software patents work differently. According to the U.S. Patent Office, companies and individuals may secure patents for innovative algorithms provided they submit their claims to a

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models, the most notorious example being Amazon.com's 2000 attempt to patent the company's "one-click" online shopping process. For most companies, however, software patents have become a defensive tool, with cross-licensing deals balancing one set of corporate patents against another in a tense form of corporate detente. Still

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, in a few notable cases of computer encryption and graphic imaging algorithms, software vendors have successfully stifled rival technologies. For Stallman, the software-patent issue dramatizes the need for eternal hacker vigilance. It also underlines the importance of stressing the political benefits of free software programs over the competitive

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benefits. Pointing to software patents' ability to create sheltered regions in the marketplace, Stallman says competitive performance and price, two areas where free software operating systems such as GNU/Linux

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involve a hefty dose of spin, of course. Most open source advocates are equally, if not more, vociferous as Stallman when it comes to opposing software patents. Still, the underlying logic of Stallman's argument-that open source advocates emphasize the 99 utilitarian advantages of free software over the political advantages-remains

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least to take part in a vibrant, open culture, and yet those who hold the true power keep evolving new tricks and strategies-i.e., software patents-to keep the masses out. "You have millions of people moving in and building shantytowns, but nobody's working on step two: getting them out

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not really likely to change. In the old days-even in the 1980s-for the most part programmers were not aware that there were even software patents and were paying no attention to them. What happened was that people published the interesting ideas, and if they were not in the free software

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

by E. Gabriella Coleman  · 25 Nov 2012  · 398pp  · 107,788 words

conflict over intellectual property law that resulted is far from harmonious. To take one prominent illustration, in 2005 the European Parliament overwhelmingly rejected a proposed software patent directive that was under consideration for a number of years. This decision came after pressure from a grassroots movement that engaged in years of demonstrations

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, many of them organized and attended by F/OSS developers (Karanovic 2010). The directive sought to establish and fully harmonize the criteria for software patentability, since each national patent office still follows a slightly different set of principles. The European Commission over the last few years has aggressively tried to

Beautiful Testing: Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software (Theory in Practice)

by Adam Goucher and Tim Riley  · 13 Oct 2009  · 351pp  · 123,876 words

, Sun, Oracle, and Mozilla. Murali is a Certified Software Quality Analyst, Six Sigma lead, and senior member of IEEE. He has been awarded with multiple software patents in advanced software testing methodologies and has published in international journals and presented at many conferences. Murali holds a doctorate from the University of Hyderabad

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. He has managed software testing teams in companies from startups to large corporations, consisting of 3 to 120 people, in six countries. He has a software patent for a testing execution framework that matches test suites to available test systems. He enjoys being a breeder caretaker for Canine Companions for Independence, as

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

by David Kushner  · 2 Jan 2003  · 240pp  · 109,474 words

was beginning to break him. He started lashing out at his employees. One day, Jay suggested they talk about getting software patents for their game technology. “If you guys ever apply for software patents,” Carmack barked, “I quit, that’s it, end of discussion.” Everything grated on him: the distractions of business, the politics

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

by Lawrence Lessig  · 14 Jul 2001  · 494pp  · 142,285 words

their inventions.75 Science has traditionally resisted patents. 76 And even Bill Gates, no patsy when it comes to intellectual property protections, expressed skepticism about software patents. As he wrote in a memo to Microsoft executives in 1991: If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's

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were tied to the nature of programming (programs were considered algorithms, and algorithms were traditionally not protected), but the arguments in favor of not making software patentable were more pragmatic. Since software is often distributed without its source, it is often extremely hard to understand how it is in fact achieving its

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't broken, these coders said. It certainly didn't need Washington to fix it. But Washington was not to be deterred, and the push for software patents did not go away. Quite the opposite. Over time, the push was for even broader patent protection—this time to cover business processes as well

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new kind of mutual fund service, one that would manage a pool of mutual funds through a software-based technology. The court upheld both the software patent and the patent on the business method. Both, the court said, were inventions that the patent law could reach. This decision, in turn, gave birth

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software developers generally—have been among the strongest opponents to patents in this field. As Richard Stallman writes, “The worst threat we face comes from software patents, which can put . . . features off-limits to free software for up to twenty years.”106 Red Hat chairman Bob Young thinks much the same: “[S

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're a corporation charging customers to buy a product.”108 Thus patents tilt the process to harm open code developers. The problem is exacerbated with software patents because though the patent system was designed to induce inventors to reveal their invention to the public, there is no obligation that a software inventor

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statement. In particular, it should be required to perform an economic study to justify the most controversial extensions of patent right now—business method and software patents. If these forms of innovation regulation can't at least meet the burden of demonstrating that they are more likely to aid innovation than harm

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.26 REFORM FINALLY, THERE'S A range of reform that has been pushed on the U.S. Patent Office, much of it extremely valuable.27 Software patents are (relatively speaking) new. At least, they are newer than software itself. For many years, software could not be patented, which means that, for many

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. Merton, 121. 77 Fred Warshofsky, The Patent Wars (New York: Wiley, 1994), 170. Of course, I don't mean to suggest that Microsoft is against software patents. Indeed, in the same memo, Gates goes on to recommend the Microsoft strategy to respond to this new world of patents: The solution . . . is patent

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he is a supporter of patents in principle, he has been a strong critic of the U.S. Patent Office. Aharonian estimates the number of software patents in a number of ways. He provided the following data to me: “TOTAL is the total number of patents issued that year, GREG is my

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count or estimated count of software patents (using the Greg Aharonian scheme) issued in that year. SOFTWARE is the number of patents in that year that include the word software some-where

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://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/testimony/statements/ adobe.testimony.html. 84 “Oracle Corporation opposes the patentability of software.” Statement available at http://www.base.com/software-patents/statements/oracle.statement.html (visited June 8, 2001). 85 Patent law has long protected process patents. Mark A. Lemley, “Patent Scope and Innovation in the

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; the low additional cost to get the protection may induce too much patent duplication. See Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 39. 98 For skepticism about software patents, see, e.g., Pamela Samuelson, “Benson Revisited: The Case Against Patent Protection for Algorithms and Other Computer Program-Related Inventions,” Emory Law Journal 39 (1990

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Does and Should the Law Play?,” Virginia Journal of Law & Technology 4 (1999): 9. 99 “In the United States, despite the long-standing controversy around software patents, there has been virtually no government effort to study the economic effects of expanded patent protection. The one government-commissioned study of which I am

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personally aware was suspended at the request of a multinational company with a unique position in software patents.” Brian Kahin, comments in response to “The Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions,” available at http://europa.eu.int/comm/ internal_market/en/intprop/indprop/maryland

Hacking Capitalism

by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

is now becoming a common practice among companies to enforce them. In EU a struggle has been ongoing for years over the introduction of European software patents. Software patents pose a threat to GPL because companies can follow copyright law and abide to the terms specified in the free license, while restricting access to

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wont do users any good. The Free Software Foundation hopes to battle these developments in a third version of the GPL by adding conditions against software patents and Digital Rights Management technology. The updated version was released in 2007. However, the decision to adopt the changes suggested by the Free Software Foundation

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are at times indistinguishable. Undeniably, software start-ups have helped extending the political influence of the hacker movement, especially when campaigning against copyright legislations and software patents. And then again, a bridge runs in two directions. In the end, the most prominent role of garage firms will probably have been as bridgeheads

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was fined by the European Union for unfair competition, the EU commission pushed hard, in part on Microsoft’s behalf, for the introduction of software patents in Europe. Software patents can only strengthen Microsoft’s stranglehold over the market. In this light, the fine which Microsoft was asked to pay looks more like a

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fighting the lawsuit of SCO/Caldera and parading its support for Apache and GNU/Linux, has also lobbied aggressively in favour of the introduction of software patents in Europe. The company holds one of the world’s largest patent portfolios in the world. IBM has even been awarded an information process patent

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a unique line of software code is written to solve the same problem as a competing program, it is not a violation against copyright laws. Software patents, in contrast, ensure that all different ways to tackle a problem, and there are always several in computer programming, can be claimed by the owner

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a competitor. Such powers are of major advantage to big companies with large patent portfolios and the clout to cross-license with other major players. Software patents are particularly damaging to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developers who lack a war chest to fight lawsuits and a patent portfolio of their

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own to bargain with. In the US, software patenting goes back to the Diamond vs. Dierh case in 1981. The patent claim concerned a computer program that aided the process of making rubber. The

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Europe, the extension of the patent system to software applications is championed by the European Patent Office. The organisation has registered more than 30.000 software patents in defiance of its own instructions and the fact that software is not recognised as patentable by European treaties and national laws among most E

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.U. members.22 An alliance of small and midsize computer businesses and hacktivists has, at the time of writing, stalled the introduction of software patents in Europe. Their case has been strengthened by the many failures of the US patent system. The extension of patentability in the US to cover

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patents look rational in comparison to the havoc that the patent system causes when it is extended to the area of information processes, i.e. software patents. Software development, like the pursuit of abstract knowledge in general, is particularly affected by patents since computer programming builds on many disparate sources of information

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their continued relevance to the FOSS development community by amassing legal powers over developers. That goes a long way to explain the corporate push for software patents. A patent assigns exclusive ownership over an idea, while copyright is narrowed down to the ownership over a single expression of an idea. A very

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subject to the legal powers of a patentee. The contradictory policies of IBM towards software patents are suggestive. One branch is lobbying for the introduction of software patents in EU, while another branch of the corporation promises not to use software patents against FOSS developers. In this way, hackers end up working under a condition of

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source code. Instead it enjoys additional protection from trademark law, which lies outside the commitments made in the GPL license, and, more controversially, it owns software patents. Red Hat could probably not have got away with it so smoothly had they not had a close relationship with many of the FOSS chieftains

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a classic paper arguing the prevalence of ‘collective invention’. Robert Allen, “Collective invention”, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (March 1983). For a case against software patents, see Ben Klemens, Ma+h You Can’t Use—Patents, Copyright, and Software (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2006). 7. ed. Stephen Merrill, Richard

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition

by Steven Levy  · 18 May 2010  · 598pp  · 183,531 words

coveted McArthur Fellowship “genius grants.” The last time I saw him, Stallman was organizing a demonstration against the Lotus Development Corporation. His protest regarded their software patents. He believed, and still does, that information should be free. —Steven Levy August 1993 Appendix C. Afterword: 2010 “It’s funny,” says Bill Gates. “When

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World

by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams  · 28 Sep 2010  · 552pp  · 168,518 words

in their products if they felt there was a high probability that a patent infringement suit could quickly derail their product But by pooling their software patents and making them available for free, major corporate participants in the Linux community are sending a signal to users, developers, and would-be adopters that

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy

by Stephen Witt  · 15 Jun 2015  · 315pp  · 93,522 words

millions, and Brandenburg’s white-on-white Ilmenau campus would still be a cow pasture. Both Brandenburg and Grill knew that, without the incentives of software patent revenue on the horizon, they never would have spent the better part of a decade conducting those listening tests. Brandenburg would likely have stayed in

Democratizing innovation

by Eric von Hippel  · 1 Apr 2005  · 220pp  · 73,451 words

School of Law. Bessen, J. 2004. Open Source Software. Working paper, Research on Innovation. Bessen, J., and R. M. Hunt. 2004. An Empirical Look at Software Patents. Working paper, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Bijker, Wiebe. 1995. Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs. MIT Press. Boldrin, M., and D. Levine. 2002. “The Case

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. Hollander, S. 1965. The Sources of Increased Efficiency. MIT Press. Horwich, M. 1982. Clipped Wings. MIT Press. Hunt, R. M., and J. Bessen. 2004. “The Software Patent Experiment.” Business Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Q3: 22–32. Jensen, M. C., and W. H. Meckling. 1976. “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior

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