An Insider's View of Software Patents 405
An anonymous reader writes "Ross Gittins at the Sydney Morning Herald has published an interesting insider view of software patents. This kind of thing is starting to be a hot issue down here with the US-Australia Free Trade deal about to be ratified and bring our intellectual property laws in line with Micros^D^D^D^D^D^D^D America's."
^H^H (Score:5, Informative)
2 words: Sovereign Immunity (Score:5, Informative)
Remember, due to the concept of sovereign immunity you can't sue the government unless they say you can.
(Unless, you sue for injunctive relief claiming that the action is unConsitutional, and, after Eldred, I won't hold your breath there.)
Re:Poster has the wrong idea (Score:5, Informative)
WIPO has been driven by the U.S. (reacting to its corporations) to get the same bad software patent system going elsewhere.
If you want to blame Clinton for some intellectual property matter connected to WIPO, digital rights management and associated treaties requiring anti-circumvention law would be more accurate.
Bruce
Re:^H^H (Score:3, Informative)
Though control-H acts like backspace, and control-D is eof, in most Unix shells (and cisco's IOS) control-D will delete the character directly under (to the right of?) the cursor.
So ^B^B^B^B^B^B^D^D^D^D^D^D would work (^B moves the cursor on character to the left). If you really want to nitpick though, he deleted 7 characters even though 'Micros' is only 6 characters.
PS Only heterosexual gay chimpanzees support software patents.
Re:2 words: Sovereign Immunity (Score:3, Informative)
This would be very unlikely, since we have companies like BTG Plc [btgplc.com] which license patents worldwide. Plus European contractors for government DBMS are extremely keen to maintain their monopoly. To quote David Blunkett on ID Cards "we have to keep the terms of the contract strictly confidential and away from the public in order to guarantee value for money".
Re:^H^H (Score:3, Informative)
Second Half Of the Article Published Today (Score:5, Informative)
Trade deal a free kick for US software racketeers [smh.com.au]
Economists viewpoint may effect change (Score:5, Informative)
Reading about the abuses of patents really makes my blood boil, but at the same time it is comforting to know that economists are starting to react against software patents.
The economic papers (and probably many others) " Sequential Innovation, Patents, and Imitation [researchoninnovation.org]" and " An Empirical Look at Software Patents [researchoninnovation.org]" articulate in economic terms why software patents don't work.
I think that most economists believe that monopolies are bad and competition is good. I think that the more the economic viewpoint like those mentioned in the papers above start to have stronger acceptance amongst economists, then these viewpoints will start to hit the main stream press such as the Sydney Morning Herald (as a main stream newspaper in Australia). Hopefully, by this point, these viewpoints would start to influence government policy.
Geeks got on to the problem of software patents early. But the "geeky" point of view is often overlooked by governments. Economists are much more respected in government and probably can articulate an argument against software patents that probably will not be be overlooked. I'm looking from the perspective in Australia, I don't know how politics works in other parts of the world. But I hope that common sense will prevail.
Re:You're all blaming the wrong person (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'll say it again.... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not necessarily that simple. State immunity comes about in many forms, from what I gather. In the USA, it is likely that there are several ways to sue the government, or its agents.
1. Sue the agency itself, for harm arising from its negligence. As part of the Feds, it might be immune to civil lawsuits through Federal legislation.
2. Appeal to a tribunal, such as human rights tribunals (if the USA has those), or justice tribunals, or what have you. They sometimes pointedly get around state immunity legislation.
3. Sue the Patent Agent as part of the Agency; his negligent acts mean the Patent Agency is vicariously liable for damages. This may be different from suing the Agency itself, depending on the immunity legislation. If the Agent acted 'negligently' in their role, they may make the Agency liable.
4. Sue the Patent Agent as acting outside their duties. If they were so irresponsible as to have acted outside the boundaries of their job, they may be personally liable for your losses. Shallow pockets; sets a nasty precedent,though.
Mind you, you probably want to find a lawyer if it gets to that. Lobbying your senator or congressman, or whomever your elected representatives are, is probably the best option.
Re:I'll say it again.... (Score:2, Informative)
The question is where do you publish it so it becomes prior art that the USPTO will consider when examining a patent.
No it isn't. The question is where to publish so the particularly the date of such publication becomes an indubitable matter of public record in a form admissible to a court as evidence.
Whether the USPTO is aware of this publication (and whether any patent is subsequently granted) would seem to be largely irrelevant.
Re:A Question (Score:4, Informative)
A backspace is the equivalent of Control-H. If you look at your ascii tables [asciitables.com] and skip the first NUL character, begin going down the line and counting off each letter of the alphabet. On H, you will land on BS (backspace). You can look at other codes and their equivalents on your own time.
Well, in Unix, it was written that when a keyboard sent a "^H" (which was recreated by holding down Control and pressing H), that it would backspace. When you are parked in your poorly-emulated remote terminal and press backspace, it sends the ^H over the line but it's not properly formatted and the terminal program thinks ^H is what the person wanted to type as plain text.
So some people are in a hurry, and want to send emails over their poorly-emulated remote terminal. They type, make mistakes, append ^H's that don't correct the typing mistake and then resume the email. It's just another call back to a golden age of computing, like how people still use vi...
Re:You're all blaming the wrong person (Score:5, Informative)
Sarbanes-Oxley. Here's a blog about it at Gartner [gartner.com]. Basically Sarbanes-Oxley makes CEOs liable for the actions of the company. Though this does not redefine the corporation as a citizen, it does hold someone criminally accountable for the actions of the corp. It was in response to Enron at all and severly weaked the coporation as an entity that can act wantonly.
-truth
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Informative)
In the mean time, all the BigCorps of the real world have patented obvious algorithms all over the place, so if an inventor comes up with something new, he'll have to cross-license his patent to them anyway to avoid being sued into bankruptcy for violating their "summation of two integral numbers via electronic manipulation logic gates" patents.
Re:Damm pre-registration sites... (Score:4, Informative)
Also I think you'd have a hard time finding an alternative site carrying the same story because Ross Gittins, the author, is an opinion writer for Fairfax, and this article is not news but an opinion piece. I doubt this article would show up anywhere but in Fairfax owned newspapers (i.e. Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, etc.) all of which have the "soon you will need to be registered to read this article."
Re:You're all blaming the wrong person (Score:3, Informative)
The Corporation has been a relative success here in Canada.
I took a (Canadian) Constitutional Law course with Joel Bakan [law.ubc.ca], the author of the Corporation, at the University of British Columbia. He is one of most interesting professors that I ever had.
We call it offensive patenting at our company (Score:5, Informative)
a hidden assumption (Score:4, Informative)
Publishers and lawyers like to describe copyright as ``intellectual property''---a term that also includes patents, trademarks, and other more obscure areas of law. These laws have so little in common, and differ so much, that it is ill-advised to generalize about them. It is best to talk specifically about ``copyright,'' or about ``patents,'' or about ``trademarks.''
The term ``intellectual property'' carries a hidden assumption---that the way to think about all these disparate issues is based on an analogy with physical objects, and our ideas of physical property.
When it comes to copying, this analogy disregards the crucial difference between material objects and information: information can be copied and shared almost effortlessly, while material objects can't be. Basing your thinking on this analogy is tantamount to ignoring that difference. (Even the US legal system does not entirely accept the analogy, since it does not treat copyrights or patents like physical object property rights.)
If you don't want to limit yourself to this way of thinking, it is best to avoid using the term ``intellectual property'' in your words and thoughts.
``Intellectual property'' is also an unwise generalization. The term is a catch-all that lumps together several disparate legal systems, including copyright, patents, trademarks, and others, which have very little in common. These systems of law originated separately, cover different activities, operate in different ways, and raise different public policy issues. If you learn a fact about copyright law, you would do well to assume it does not apply to patent law, since that is almost always so.
Since these laws are so different, the term ``intellectual property'' is an invitation to simplistic thinking. It leads people to focus on the meager common aspect of these disparate laws, which is that they establish monopolies that can be bought and sold, and ignore their substance--the different restrictions they place on the public and the different consequences that result. At that broad level, you can't even see the specific public policy issues raised by copyright law, or the different issues raised by patent law, or any of the others. Thus, any opinion about ``intellectual property'' is almost surely foolish.
If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, copyrights and trademarks, or even learn what these laws require, the first step is to forget that you ever heard the term ``intellectual property'' and treat them as unrelated subjects. To give clear information and encourage clear thinking, never speak or write about ``intellectual property''; instead, present the topic as copyright, patents, or whichever specific law you are discussing.
According to Professor Mark Lemley of the University of Texas Law School, the widespread use of term "intellectual property" is a recent fad, arising from the 1967 founding of the World Intellectual Property Organization. (See footnote 123 in his March 1997 book review, in the Texas Law Review, of Romantic Authorship and the Rhetoric of Property by James Boyle.) WIPO represents the interests of the holders of copyrights, patents and trademarks, and lobbies governments to increase their power. One WIPO treaty follows the lines of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been used to censor useful free software packages in the US.
Re:That isn't practical (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong Figures.... (Score:2, Informative)