Red Hat Says U.S. Patent System Is Broken
This week Red Hat filed with the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to carefully examine the state of software patents in the country. According to Red Hat, a company ripe with support for open source software, software patents are being issued at an alarming rate, and many of them are obvious ideas that should not have passed the patent desk to begin with.
Red Hat said that the patent system in the U.S. is currently a "hindrance to open source." There are many out there though that do agree with Red Hat. But the problem won’t stop simply because a software company requests so. According to Red Hat:
"Developers face the risk that the original code they have written in good faith could be deemed to infringe an existing software patent. It’s impossible to rule out this possibility, because there are now more than 200,000 software patents, and those patents cannot be efficiently searched. Software patents are difficult to interpret, even for experts in computer science and software engineering."
There are ambiguous areas in the patent game. For example, one could patent a method for doing something, but the patent may not go through because it’s based on a device that’s under a different patent altogether. In other more problematic areas, mountains of patents are being submitted for the most mundane things.
Red Hat believes that the current status of the patent system is the cause for the plethora of lawsuits and cases that run into the millions of dollars. One good example of this is the case between Research in Motion (RIM) and NTP. With push-email, NTP filed a patent against RIM indicating that RIM and its Blackberry devices infringed on patents. NTP was criticized for keeping its patent on the back burner for a number of years without any activity, just to wait until RIM was successful, and then sue. In the end, RIM ended up paying NTP over $613-million USD to settle the case. Later in the year, NTP brought Palm to court for similar allegations.
Capitalism at its finest. Clearly, there are always advantages and disadvantages in any system.
"Given the litigation risk, some open source companies, including Red Hat, acquire patents for the sole purpose of asserting them defensively in the even they are faced with a future lawsuit," said Red Hat. "We believe that although the patent system was created to foster innovation, it’s simply not an engine for innovation for open source."
Red Hat, one of the main propagators of the Linux operating system has been at the forefront on intellectual property. The company said it will follow this case through, hope to drum up more industry support and maybe see something be changed.
"We urge in our brief that [the Federal Circuit] take account of the perverse effects of the patent system on open source and narrow the standard for patentability," concluded Red Hat.
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Patents on code, and on logical expression in general, should be abolished altogether. An algorithm, be it short or very long, easy or very complex, should not be patented like for maths or physics equations.
Guess what would have happened if Newton applied for a patent for his physiscs laws.
Yet, code is just a way to descibe and solve a logic problem more like a physic law is a way to describe a natural phenomena. It's not "an invention" as the invention is the language used, not the to-be-patent solution.
Yet, in this era where information is the real value of economics, I doubt that one could ever dream that happening.
Patents on code, and on logical expression in general, should be abolished altogether. An algorithm, be it short or very long, easy or very complex, should not be patented like for maths or physics equations.
Guess what would have happened if Newton applied for a patent for his physiscs laws.
Yet, code is just a way to descibe and solve a logic problem more like a physic law is a way to describe a natural phenomena. It's not "an invention" as the invention is the language used, not the to-be-patent solution.
Yet, in this era where information is the real value of economics, I doubt that one could ever dream that happening.
totally agree with you, I'm fairly sure that most coders will aswell. The whole idea of patenting an algorithm is ridiculous ><
while(!StinkingRich()){
$patents++;
}
MichaelJ have you ever consider patenting your idea (code) ;-) it isn't bad at all but it may not last for long ;-) ...
I?m hopping you don?t mind that I join you that we file for:
while(!StinkingRich()){
$patents++;
//Play dirty
Thread patentWatcher = new Thread(delegate(){WaitEnoughAndSueThemAll($patents);});
patentWatcher.Start();
}
I never understood how patents were issued for software. So according to the patent office the first company to patent say software for EDI gets to be the sole supplier of EDI software? Since Word Perfect and Word do essentially the same thing how is it they are not in patent conflict? Software should be copyrighted like art. The intellectual property to be safeguarded is in the actual code not what it does. If you can figure out how to do what my code does fine invest the time or pay me for a license.
BTW I have book from the early seventies called "1001 algorithms" with the change in direction from the patent office since then am I now breaking patents in using these algorithms? I'm willing to bet most of the code patented since then use these basic algorithms in their code. Again I just don't understand? If I patented a program I created in the 60's to calculate payroll would I get to be the sole seller of software to calculate payroll? To the lawyers and patent people who have allowed this fiasco to exist I say "put the crack pipe down and stop eating the mushrooms".
Aren't they paid on per-patent basis?
Patents should be reduced in time of validity. If one has an idea, he should have limited time to put it into practice or sell it, after which it should be of public domain. That would stop for example MS from using every idea around and effectively stopping competition because of their money bag and the ability to implement the idea before the original ideator (you know, in this field advertisement is very important, so nothing can be safely protected by just business secrets).
if ($patent) {
SueAnyOne();
}
sub SueAnyOne {
$IQ = 60;
}