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 introduction of Asymmetric Numeral Systems, which are currently replacing Huffman 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 their .NET framework that they’re releasing as free software: Microsoft 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 today published its decision on Alice v. CLS Bank. It’s 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 articles about little-known companies run the risk of getting more 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 A big problem with this sort of hearing is that 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 and Italy), instead of making 25 separate applications involving many 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 would achieve the same goal as a software exception but 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 point you to a list of pages and then discuss 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 even counter-productive (with the exception of his suggestion of a Read more…
Timothy B. Lee and Christina Mulligan have published an good article: The problem with software patents? They don’t scale
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 rising year by year. They’ve also shown that very little Read more…
ESP ed. note: The following article by Richard Stallman was originally published in The Guardian. I’m republishing it here verbatim. For ESP’s information this topic, see the ESP wiki article Unitary patent.
Originally published in The Guardian. Re-published here with permission:
Copyright 2011 Richard Stallman
Released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noderivs 3.0 license.
Just as the US software industry is experiencing the long anticipated all-out software patent wars that we have anticipated, the European Union has a plan to follow the same course. When the Hargreaves report urged the UK to avoid software patents, the UK had already approved plan that is likely to impose them on the UK.
Rob Tiller (Red Hat) has posted an interesting article about three mainstream articles (NPR, The Economist, Professor Mark Lemley) discussing problems caused by software patents.
That’s great news. Awareness of certain problems is growing in the mainstream press, but discussion of solutions is still quite shallow.
I’ve added a wiki page for analysing the "Cabinet for the blind" example. It’s an example that was used in a 1980 amicus brief for the Diamond v. Diehr case in the USA. Below are the details. In looking into this, I also turned up a few interesting quotes about pen and paper patents. Comments welcome on the wiki.
CSIRO is an organisation that holds a patent on wifi. They’ve already sued twenty companies and have said that they want royalties from “the entire industry”. If this includes software developers, then we have a problem. Can anyone help analyse if their patent is a software patent or a hardware patent? Thanks in advance.
The below is the text, and links to machine translations to English, of a recent German court ruling that seems to uphold software patents.
Here it is: https://cyberside.net.ee/docs/tradoc_146029.pdf. We owe a big thanks to the government employees who risked their jobs by leaking previous versions. Without those leaks, our governments probably wouldn’t have agreed finally to show us the text. (on en.swpat.org, there’s related info at ACTA overview.)
Below are some initial thoughts.
The following is a transcript of a talk given in New Zealand, 2010. Andrew Tridgell discusses why reading patents is usually a good idea, how to read a patent, and how to work through it with a lawyer to build a solid defence. For the free software community, Tridgell also suggests how cooperation could help scare off patent holders.