[DMCA-Activists] RMS on the Software Patents Fight

[Seth Johnson]

> http://kwiki.ffii.org/SwpatcninoEn

How to fight software patents - singly and together

By: Richard M. Stallman 
Thursday September 09, 2004 (04:10 PM GMT)
       

Software patents are the software project equivalent of land
mines: Each design decision carries a risk of stepping on a
patent, which can destroy your project. 
 
Developing a large and complex program means combining many
ideas, often hundreds or thousands of them. In a country that
allows software patents, chances are that some substantial
fraction of the ideas in your program will be patented already by
various companies. Perhaps hundreds of patents will cover parts
of your program. A study in 2004 found almost 300 U.S. patents
that covered various parts of a single important program. It is
so much work to do such a study that only one has been done. 

Practically speaking, if you are a software developer, you will
usually be threatened by one patent at a time. When this happens,
you may be able to escape unscathed if you find legal grounds to
overturn the patent. You may as well try it; if you succeed, that
will mean one less mine in the field. If this patent is
particularly threatening to the public, the Public Patent
Foundation may take up the case; that is its specialty. If you
ask for the computer-using community's help in searching for
prior publication of the same idea, to use as evidence to
overturn a patent, we should all respond with whatever useful
information we might have. 

However, fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the
danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes
will eliminate malaria. You cannot expect to defeat every patent
that comes at you, any more than you can expect to kill every
monster in a video game: sooner or later, one is going to defeat
you and damage your program. The U.S. patent office issues around
100,000 software patents each year; our best efforts could never
clear these mines as fast as they plant more. 

Some of these mines are impossible to clear. Every software
patent is harmful, and every software patent unjustly restricts
how you use your computer, but not every software patent is
legally invalid according to the patent system's criteria. The
software patents we can overturn are those that result from
"mistakes," where the patent system's rules were not properly
carried out. There is nothing we can do when the only relevant
mistake was the policy of allowing software patents. 

To make a part of the castle safe, you've got to do more than
kill the monsters as they appear -- you have to wipe out the
generator that produces them. Overturning existing patents one by
one will not make programming safe. To do that, we have to change
the patent system so that patents can no longer threaten software
developers and users. 

There is no conflict between these two campaigns; we can work on
the short-term escape and the long-term fix at once. If we take
care, we can make our efforts to overturn individual software
patents do double duty, building support for efforts to correct
the whole problem. The crucial point is not to equate "bad"
software patents with mistaken or invalid software patents. Each
time we invalidate one software patent, each time we talk about
our plans to try, we should say in no uncertain terms, "One less
software patent, one less menace to programmers: the target is
zero." 

The battle over software patents in the European Union is
reaching a crucial stage. The European Parliament voted a year
ago to reject software patents conclusively. In May, the Council
of Ministers voted to undo the Parliament's amendments and make
the directive even worse than when it started. However, at least
one country that supported this has already reversed its vote. We
must all do our utmost right now to convince an additional
European country to change its vote, and to convince the newly
elected members of the European Parliament to stand behind the
previous vote. Please refer to www.ffii.org for more information
on how to help and to get in touch with other activists. 

Copyright 2004 Richard Stallman. Verbatim copying and
distribution of this entire article are permitted worldwide
without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved. 


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