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 problem of software patents. In the past, we had several successful campaigns against them, and 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 introduction of Asymmetric Numeral Systems, which are currently replacing Huffman 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 good 2 minute video explaining some of the problems of 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…
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…
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.
I was recently asked to give an introduction to our perspective on software patents. Below is a quickly edited copy of what I sent. The purpose was to help someone prepare for a meeting, so these are starting points, not an overall summary.
Analogies are useful for explaining the issue to people who don’t have the same background. There’s no single best analogy, so it’s useful to have a few to choose from when the need arises.
I recently found a paper published in 2004 by European Schoolnet: Software Patents – A Potential Hindrance of
ICT in Education. This if the first paper I’ve found on this topic and I find it well written, so I’ve summarised it below.