patents

Australian attempt to abolish software patents

Interesting activities in Australia where:

“Over 500 members of the Australian software industry have have signed an open letter urging their government to abolish software patents. Signatories include free software luminaries Andrew Tridgell and Jonathan Oxer. In 2008 the Australian government began a Review of Patentable Subject Matter. While we missed the 2009 public consultation period, we hope to influence the government’s response to the Review, due in February 2011. The letter will be presented to Minister Kim Carr in early August.”

(via Slashdot)

Posted on by mklang

Against Intellectual Property

A new version of the book Against Intellectual Property by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine is out now (download it here). The print version will be published by Cambridge University Press (around July 2008).

Reviews: Stephen Spear November 2007 review in the Focus

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.

Credits (pdf)
Chapter 1: Introduction (pdf)
An overview of the central theme: intellectual property is in fact intellectual monopoly and hinders rather than helps innovation and creation.
Chapter 2: Creation Under Competition (pdf)
Would the world be devoid of great or lesser works of art without copyright?
Chapter 3: Innovation Under Competition (pdf)
What would happen to innovation without patents?
Chapter 4: The Evil of Intellectual Monopoly (pdf)
Why are patents so bad anyway?
Chapter 5: The Devil in Disney (pdf)
What is the big deal with copyright?
Chapter 6: How Competition Works (pdf)
How would artists and innovators get paid without copyrights and patents?
Chapter 7: Defenses of Intellectual Monopoly (pdf)
What is the conventional wisdom and why it is wrong.
Chapter 8: Does Intellectual Monopoly Increase Innovation? (pdf)
This is the heart of the matter: there is no evidence that intellectual monopoly serves the purpose that both the U.S. Constitution and economic logic dictates. There is no evidence it “works” to increase creation and innovation.
Chapter 9: The Pharmaceutical Industry (pdf)
But what about life-saving drugs?
Chapter 10: The Bad, the Good, and the Ugly (pdf)
A look at various policy options.
References (pdf)


Posted on by mklang

Handbook of Applied Cryptography

The Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot and Scott A. Vanstone is available free online for download. This is an important book – in my discussions with online activists I try to explain the importance of them doing all they can to protect themselves. This is certainly a step in the right direction.

  • Chapter 1 – Overview of Cryptography ps pdf
  • Chapter 2 – Mathematics Background ps pdf
  • Chapter 3 – Number-Theoretic Reference Problems ps pdf
  • Chapter 4 – Public-Key Parameters ps pdf
  • Chapter 5 – Pseudorandom Bits and Sequences ps pdf
  • Chapter 6 – Stream Ciphers ps pdf
  • Chapter 7 – Block Ciphers ps pdf
  • Chapter 8 – Public-Key Encryption ps pdf
  • Chapter 9 – Hash Functions and Data Integrity ps pdf
  • Chapter 10 – Identification and Entity Authentication ps pdf
  • Chapter 11 – Digital Signatures ps pdf
  • Chapter 12 – Key Establishment Protocols ps pdf
  • Chapter 13 – Key Management Techniques ps pdf
  • Chapter 14 – Efficient Implementation ps pdf
  • Chapter 15 – Patents and Standards ps pdf
  • Appendix – Bibliography of Papers from Selected Cryptographic Forums ps pdf
  • References ps pdf
  • Index ps pdf

The book is not under a particularly generous license but it is available. Make sure you read the copyright notice.

Posted on by mklang

On the fringes of copyright

The New York Times has an article about a chef who has tried to sue a competitor for infringement of intellectual property.

The suit…charges that Edâ??s Lobster Bar copies â??each and every elementâ?? of Pearl Oyster Bar, including the white marble bar, the gray paint on the wainscoting, the chairs and bar stools with their wheat-straw backs, the packets of oyster crackers placed at each table setting and the dressing on the Caesar salad.

There has been a growth in restaurants and chefs attempting to use of intellectual property arguments (copyright trademarks, patents and trade dress) to protect their businesses. As far as I have seen they have had little success.

Copying someone else’s bar or restaurant idea or menu may be a bit tacky and sad but this cannot be used to create intellectual property rights in these areas. If we were to begin protecting restaurants in this way then why not all parts of the service industry? Why stop there when we could begin using intellectual property to prevent our peers from dressing or behaving in the same way as we do?

Restaurants, food manufacturers, wine makers etc etc regularly explore, reverse engineer and learn from their competitors. There is no intellectual property limiting their ability to conduct these activities. Despite this lack of property protection there seems to be no limit to the amounts of human ingenuity and creativeness in relation to food and drink.

Maybe intellectual property should consider limiting the scope of protection and return to free market systems as opposed to creating false monopolies.

Posted on by mklang

The Third Draft

The third draft of the GPLv3 has been released. The draft is a result of feedback from various sources (general public, official discussion committees, and two international conferences held in India and Japan). The draft incorporates significant changes since the previous draft (July 2006). This draft is planned to be the penultimate draft prior to the formal release of the official GPLv3.

Changes in this draft include:

* First-time violators can have their license automatically restored if they remedy the problem within thirty days.
* License compatibility terms have been simplified, with the goal of making them easier to understand and administer.
* Manufacturers who include the software in consumer products must also provide installation information for the software along with the source. This change provides more narrow focus for requirements that were proposed in previous drafts.
* New patent requirements have been added to prevent distributors from colluding with patent holders to provide discriminatory protection from patents.

    The draft will be open for comments and discussion for sixty days. Following this the FSF will release a “last call” draft, followed by another thirty days for discussion before the FSF’s board of directors approves the final text of GPL version 3.

    Richard Stallman, president of the FSF and principal author of the GNU GPL, said, “The GPL was designed to ensure that all users of a program receive the four essential freedoms which define free software. These freedoms allow you to run the program as you see fit, study and adapt it for your own purposes, redistribute copies to help your neighbor, and release your improvements to the public. The recent patent agreement between Microsoft and Novell aims to undermine these freedoms. In this draft we have worked hard to prevent such deals from making a mockery of free software.”

    Posted on by mklang

    A European Spine?

    “The British Government has issued a response to a recent petition calling for ‘the Prime Minister to make software patents clearly unenforcible’. The answer is reassuring but perhaps doesn’t go far enough, and gives no specific promises to bring into line a patent office that grants software patents (according to the petition) ‘against the letter and the spirit of the law’. The Gowers Review that it references gives detailed insight into the current British position on this debate, most interestingly recommending a policy of ‘not extending patent rights beyond their present limits within the areas of software, business methods and genes.'” (via Slashdot)

    OMG! Does this mean that there are European countries, part of the EU which actually may have a spine? That they are prepared not to toe the EU competition of who can sellout their values the fastest in order to please the US?

    Originally I thought that European Unity was a good idea since it would enable Europeans to take a stand against the cultural and economic superiority of the States – but we haven’t seen much of that yet…

    Posted on by mklang

    You Cannot Patent Software

    …and yet there are software patents.

    In a long draft article entitled “You Canâ??t Patent Software: Patenting Software Is Wrong” – Peter Junger states that which most lawyers fail to see. Maybe because they are blinded by economics?

    Computer programs are texts, not machines as some lawyers have confused themselves into believing, and thus they may be copyrighted and protected by the First Amendment, but they are not patentable as machines. Computer programs are indeed processes, but they are not patentable processes because what they process is information and what they produce is information, not some modification of material goods or articles of commerce. The simple fact is—though the reasons for it may be hard for most lawyers to grasp—that, as the title of this article puts it: “You can’t patent software: patenting software is wrong.”

    A nice, old school, scholarly legal paper which hammers home it’s point. It’s a good way to start the week with a work like this.

    Posted on by mklang

    GPLv3 info from FSF

    The Free Software Foundation wishes to clarify a few factual points about the Second Discussion Draft of GNU GPL version 3, on which recent discussion has presented inaccurate information.

    1. The FSF has no power to force anyone to switch from GPLv2 to GPLv3 on their own code.  We intentionally wrote GPLv2 (and GPLv1) so we would not have this power.  Software developers will continue to have the right to use GPLv2 for their code after GPLv3 is published, and we will respect their decisions.

    2. In order to honor freedom 0, your freedom to run the program as you wish, a free software license may not contain “use restrictions” that would restrict what you can do with it. Contrary to what some have said, the GPLv3 draft has no use restrictions, and the final version won’t either.

    GPLv3 will prohibit certain distribution practices which restrict users’ freedom to modify the code.  We hope this policy will thwart the ways some companies wish to “use” free software — namely, distributing it to you while controlling what you can do with it.  This policy is not a “use restriction”: it doesn’t restrict how they, or you, can run the program; it doesn’t restrict what they, or you, can make the program do.  Rather it ensures you, as a user, are as free as they are.

    3. Where GPLv2 relies on an implicit patent license, which depends on US law, GPLv3 contains an explicit patent license that does the same job internationally.

    Contrary to what some have said, GPLv3 will not cause a company to “lose its entire [software] patent portfolio”.  It simply says that if someone has a patent covering XYZ, and distributes a GPL-covered program to do XYZ, he can’t sue the program’s subsequent users, redistributors and improvers for doing XYZ with their own versions of that program.  This has no effect on other patents which that program does not implement.

    Software patents attack the freedom of all software developers and users; their only legitimate use is to deter aggression using software patents.  Therefore, if we could abolish every entity’s entire portfolio of software patents tomorrow, we would jump at the chance.  But it isn’t possible for a software license such as the GNU GPL to achieve such a result.

    We do, however, hope that GPL v3 can solve a part of the patent problem.  The FSF is now negotiating with organizations holding substantial patent inventories, trying to mediate between their conflicting “extreme” positions.  We hope to work out the precise details of the explicit patent license so as to free software developers from patent aggression under a substantial fraction of software patents.  To fully protect software developers and users from software patents will, however, require changes in patent law.

    Posted on by mklang