There are many problems caused by the enforcement of patents in the software industry, but it is important to first understand how user and developer freedoms are affected. If you don’t know what End Software Patents (ESP) is about, please Read more…
Read this article in Spanish. At the Free Software Foundation (FSF) we have reported extensively on many issues concerning user freedom. In this article, we will reintroduce a problem that has plagued the free software community for many years: the Read more…
Jarek Duda is a lecturer in Institute of Computer Science and Computational Mathematics of Jagiellonian University. He has education in computer science (PhD), physics (PhD) and mathematics (MSc), focusing mainly on widely understood information theory. He is mainly known from Read more…
Because Microsoft has made it part of their core business to extract patent royalties from distributors of free software (particularly on smartphones), I decided to take a look at the patent safety offered by the licence of the parts of Read more…
(For analysis and info links, see the swpat.org wiki page Alice v. CLS Bank.) “Reining in”. It wasn’t easy to find a term that was both accurate and also vague enough to describe what just happened. The US Supreme Court Read more…
I was reading about the US Supreme Court declining to hear Soverain v. Newegg when I saw someone ask if Soverain Software was a patent troll. I started with Wikipedia’s article on Soverain Software. I’m a big Wikipedia fan, but Read more…
May brought exceptionally good pieces of news for campaigns against software patents, but I’m stuck studying for law exams. If anyone would like to help, it would be great to have better write-ups about these recent events on the ESP Read more…
The USPTO is organising roundtables to get suggestions from software developers. Below are my initial thoughts on what changes we can ask for. If you have other suggestions, please contribute to this wiki page: Suggestions for the USPTO in 2013 Read more…
The European Parliament approving the unitary patent is bad because: Patents become a lot cheaper, which means more patents, which means more restrictions and litigation. People can now get one patent that’s valid in 25 countries (the EU minus Spain Read more…
There’s a good anti-software-patent video on YouTube (in WebM video format): End Software Patents w/ Alex TabarrokSoftware such as youtube-dl can download this without Javascript:youtube-dl -t “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkWPGwfuQcM&webm=1” Despite the name it has no connection to us but it’s a very Read more…
Richard Stallman’s latest article on software patents suggests that instead of a law excluding software from patentability, we need a law saying “that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement.“ This Read more…
The unitary patent proposal has been floating about for years, under various names, but it seems to now be getting dangerous. I don’t know all the details of the current situation and I haven’t found a satisfying overview, so I’ll Read more…
Richard Posner, a very influential US judge, has written an article about the current patent system’s problems and their causes. The article provides useful support for many software patent abolition arguments. He unfortunately closes with suggestions which are unhelpful or Read more…
Brazil’s patent office has launched a consultation about granting software patents. Please join the ESP-Br mailing list and help us: discussao-br (Portuguese). The patent office’s page about the consultation is here: Consulta pública sobre exame de patente implementada por software. Read more…
Timothy B. Lee and Christina Mulligan have published an good article: The problem with software patents? They don’t scale
Two exiting recordings from Australia: Ben Sturmfels’ recent presentation: Ending Software Patents in Australia (video) and Audio of the committee hearing on software patents in the House of Representatives Or, to view Ben’s presentation in WebM format via YouTube, first Read more…
There are no patents involved in the SAS Institute v. World Programing Ltd case, but there’s a very interesting statement from the European Court of Justice’s legal advisors, the Advocates-General: To accept that a functionality of a computer program can Read more…
By studying the movements of the stock market, three researchers from Boston University School of Law have found that over the past twenty years patent trolls have cost publicly listed US product developers 500 billion US$, and the rate is Read more…
Ben Sturmfels of ESP Australia recently gave a talk outlining the problems caused by software patents. A recording is online at:
NPR published a really excellent article on patent trolls in the software industry. Great. They then broadcast a radio version on This American Life. Great exposure for the issue, but, it was published in the still-patented MP3 format. Sign FSF’s Read more…