Software Patents are Evil
In North America software is a patentable entity. This means that software companies are forced to waste countless resources and legal fees in the pursuit and protection of patents. I don’t blame the companies for this — I blame the policy makers! The idea of patenting software is absurd at best and can only have been the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of software by those in charge of intellectual property laws.
I’ve often compared the idea of patenting software algorithms to the patenting of a particular plot twist in a novel (e.g. “a murder mystery in which the butler did it”). After the patent has been granted, another author would not be able to write a story in which “the butler did it!” Absurd? Exactly!
I’m in full support of copyrighting software — after all, that’s what pays my bills. Software developers are like journalists. The company tells us what to write about, we do our research, solve the required puzzles and then we publish! Like writers, our work should be protected from unlawful duplication.
Anyways, I was pleased to recently discover that the somewhat eccentric (fanatical even) head of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, also uses a “book analogy” to drive home the ridiculousness of software patents.
Quoted from a ZNet article:
Free Software Movement Issues
A novel and a modern complex programme have certain points in common: each is large and implements many ideas. Suppose patent law had been applied to novels in the 1800s; suppose states such as France had permitted the patenting of literary ideas. How would this have affected Hugo’s writing? How would the effects of literary patents compare with the effects of literary copyright?
Consider the novel Les Misérables, written by Hugo. Because he wrote it, the copyright belonged only to him. He did not have to fear that some stranger could sue him for copyright infringement and win. That was impossible, because copyright covers only the details of a work of authorship, and only restricts copying. Hugo had not copied Les Misérables, so he was not in danger.
Patents work differently. They cover ideas - each patent is a monopoly on practising some idea, which is described in the patent itself.
Here’s one example of a hypothetical literary patent:
Claim 1: a communication process that represents, in the mind of a reader, the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and becomes bitter towards society and humankind.
Claim 2: a communication process according to claim 1, wherein said character subsequently finds moral redemption through the kindness of another.
Claim 3: a communication process according to claims 1 and 2, wherein said character changes his name during the story.
If such a patent had existed in 1862 when Les Misérables was published, the novel would have infringed all three claims - all these things happened to Jean Valjean in the novel. Hugo could have been sued, and would have lost. The novel could have been prohibited - in effect, censored - by the patent holder.
Now consider this hypothetical literary patent:
Claim 1: a communication process that represents in the mind of a reader the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and subsequently changes his name.
Les Misérables would have infringed that patent too, because this description too fits the life story of Jean Valjean. And here’s another hypothetical patent:
Claim 1: a communication process that represents in the mind of a reader the concept of a character who finds moral redemption and then changes his name.
Jean Valjean would have infringed this patent too.
These three patents would all cover the story of one character in a novel. They overlap, but they do not precisely duplicate each other, so they could all be valid simultaneously; all three patent holders could have sued Victor Hugo. Any one of them could have prohibited publication of Les Misérables.
Other aspects of Les Misérables could also have run afoul of patents. For instance, there could have been a patent on a fictionalized portrayal of the Battle of Waterloo, or a patent on using Parisian slang in fiction. Two more lawsuits. In fact, there is no limit to the number of different patents that might have been applicable for suing the author of a work such as Les Misérables. All the patent holders would say they deserved a reward for the literary progress that their patented ideas represent, but these obstacles would not promote progress in literature, they would only obstruct it.
This analogy can help non-programmers see what software patents do. Software patents cover features, such as defining abbreviations in a word processor, or natural order recalculation in a spreadsheet. Patents cover algorithms that programs need to use. Patents cover aspects of file formats, such as Microsoft’s new formats for Word files. MPEG 2 video format is covered by 39 different US patents.
Just as one novel could infringe many different literary patents at once, one program can infringe many different patents at once. It is so much work to identify all the patents infringed by a large program that only one such study has been done. A 2004 study of Linux, the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system, found it infringed 283 different US software patents. That is to say, each of these 283 different patents covers some computational process found somewhere in the thousands of pages of source code of Linux.
That’s why software patents act like landmines for software developers. And for software users, since the users can be sued too.
Treacherous computing is a plan to change the design of future PCs so that they will obey software developers instead of you. From the perpetrators’ point of view, it is “trusted”, so they call it “trusted computing”; from the user’s point of view, it is treacherous. Which name you call it expresses whose side you’re on. The new XBox is a preview–it is designed to prevent the user from installing any software without getting Microsoft’s authorization.
The technical idea underlying treacherous computing is that the computer includes a digital encryption and signature device, and the keys are kept secret from you. Proprietary programs will use this device to control which other programs you can run, which documents or data you can access, and what programs you can pass them to. These programs will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If you don’t allow your computer to obtain the new rules periodically from the Internet, some capabilities will automatically cease to function.
If Microsoft, or the US government, does not like what you said in a document you wrote, they could post new instructions telling all computers to refuse to let anyone read that document. Each computer would obey when it downloads the new instructions. Your writing would be subject to 1984-style retroactive erasure. You might be unable to read it yourself.
Treacherous computing puts the existence of free operating systems and free applications at risk, because you may not be able to run them at all. Some versions of treacherous computing would require the operating system to be specifically authorized by a particular company. Free operating systems could not be installed. Some versions of treacherous computing would require every program to be specifically authorized by the operating system developer. You could not run free applications on such a system. If you did figure out how, and told someone, that could be a crime.