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Most software companies infringe patents
THE CATO INSTITUTE, a paleo-conservative think tank that promotes totally unregulated, dog-eat-dog free market ideology by invoking the Roman champion of slavery, has poured cold water on the US patent regime by saying that practically all software companies infringe patents.
In a report, Cato denizen Timothy Lee compared patents on software and business processes to patents on English prose.
He asked what would happen if the US courts were to legalise patents on the plots of novels, news stories using a certain interview technique, or on legal briefs using a particular style of argumentation.
Lee pointed out that this would mean that writing most books, papers, or articles would expose authors to potential liability for patent infringement. To protect themselves, writers would have to hire patent lawyers before publication and rewrite passages found to be infringing.
He said that such a concept was completely barking but it is analogous to what has grown to be expected of software programmers over the last 15 years.
His hope is that the US Supreme Court will rule out patents on software when it hears the case of Bilski v. Doll this coming term.
Since patent protection was first extended to software in the 1980s, it is difficult or impossible to create any significant software without infringing one or more patents. With tens of thousands of new software patents granted every year, and no effective indexing method for software patents, there is no cost-effective way to determine which patents cover any piece of software.
Lee observed that many software companies have simply given up on trying to avoid any software patent infringement and larger firms stockpile defensive software patents to use as ammunition when they are inevitably sued for infringement.
Another practice that many software companies use is to sign broad cross-licensing agreements with other large firms promising not to sue one another.
The Cato Institute thinks patents on software and business processes should be outlawed in order to avoid stifling creativity and innovation. We tend to think that Cato has got something right in this particular case. µ
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Long live FSF & GNU!
Bill's got a valid point. This is sloppy journalism, and the author ought to be ashamed that even a a href="http://www.cato.org/about.php" very /a a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato%27s_Letters" little /a a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_the_Younger" reading /a could
Libertarians don't get geek humor. Dudes should relax a little. Smoke a joint or something.
I'm one of 'em (libertarian, I mean, not pot smoker), but unfortunately my fellow freedom-lovers tend to be a little tight-assed sometimes.
Cato is a libertarian, not conservative, organization. And it was named for Cato's Letters, written to espouse the philosophy of John Locke (philosopher, not LOST character). The letters were named for Cato the Younger, not his great-grandfather, Cato the Elder, who you seem to be referring to.
Open the flood gates, open the info, let it gush through. If this get's implemented, we'll for sure see a golden age in software writing. As long as the government, or companies are into financing software for the sake of software. And making sure the authors works get referenced.
Ah the days of every house of scholarship during the early muslim days. Let it be for the world!
Stockpiling your own patents for countersuits doesn’t work against patent trolls. These are companies that do nothing but buy up patents and use them to sue companies that make things—they don’t make anything themselves, so they don’t infringe anybody’s patents.
I love it that the dead language grammar police can't even agree if it's
"delenda sunt" or "delendi sunt"
Aristotle gave the five basic plots, a little while ago.
Basic math functions were mostly worked out a tad bit of time ago...
Most accounting still relies on the basics...
ALL programming relies on what had been learned from others. (so too with all we know and use, otherwise)...
Uniquely putting two 'knowns' together in a mechanical sense, gives rise to invention.
Unfortunately, too often the inventor loses out. (Remember the cotton gin? the 'gerry can,' Aspirin? All inventors got little in return.)
But Patenting 'ideas' that have been around for a long time (Remember you Microsoft hero trying to patent the idea of gene trees??) is not fair, right, or original.
Had our patent offices had a bit more qualified or ethical workers (you surely have seen that they work on a quota system),this may not be a problem.
But, it is.
Finding a fix, will take time (SCO is still writhing through courts, spending other peoples money). But, finding that fix will be important.
pretty much everything said is true. Companies are patenting everything to protect themselves and making cross-licensing 'won't sue' agreements with each other, with the real winners be small companies who don't actually sell anything that are able to sue big companies for patent infringement. They can't be counter-sued because they have no real products, rendering the patent hording of the large corporations useless, but they are seen sympathetically as the injured party, deserving of millions of dollars.
And what does the legal system care? The whole process creates tonnes of work and demand for their profession.
This isn't about politics or economic ideologies, it's about being pragmatic in an ever changing world. At one time the patent laws suited our needs and they probably seemed sufficient for the future, however the laws don't work today. So what happens now? Do we change the laws to better fit today's economic and business models or do we just keep trudging along and wonder why everything is so screwed up.
See:
http://mises.org/story/3668
As this article demonstrates, more Capitalist businesses (e.g. in Porn) provide a better product, at lower cost, in a market without effective 'Intellectual Property' protection.
People need to understand that Corporations are implicitly Socialist, that is why Mussolini said Fascism should really be called Corporatism.
Socialism is not compatible with Capitalism, it is a parasitic concept, that is why the market is so sick, and why the artificial state protection of businesses, via Copyrights and Patents, is so evil.
Open Source was never Communist, it is just ideas unencumbered by the artificial state distortions called Patents and Copyrights.
I think you'll find it's called "agreeing". And (plot warning: epiphany moment) the more people that work out that software patents are complete shite you never know what might happen.
Or would you prefer something else to happen?
Cato Institute rips off Richard M. Stallman, right down to the comparison (les miserables, I think it was).
Film at 11.
They are absolutely right and guess what, conservatives.
If they were a liberal/fascist think tank they would come to the conclusion it causes global warming.
Since patents are plural you should write:
delendi sunt
That's plural! So... Software patents delenda SUNT.
O Farrel... TU QUOQUE!