Stop software patents!

Sign the latest petition (2009-01-30):

The E.U. commission is considering adopting the software patent system in Europe. I believe that software patents will become the death of software development, as is already happening in the U.S.A. Most developers can not afford the enormous amounts of time and money that a patent law will require them to invest in their software products. Because they are required to join the grim but petty legal quibbles about the rights to use trivial algorithms, they will have no time left to get on with the real problems of software development.

• In the U.S.A., there are over 100,000 software patents. Every week, approx. 350 new software patents are awarded. Note that it is not possible to write any moderately useful program without unwittingly infringing various patents. This is totally absurd if you realise what this means: anyone who writes software is legally required to know all relevant patents by heart, just to make user s/he never accidentally breaks any of them. Practice has proven that free software is not exempt from these laws. Taking this idea even further: since topic-specific searching is not guaranteed to provide all relevant patents, the only way to ensure that one's software product will not be threatened by lawsuits is to know all 100,000 patents by heart. After all, as they say, there is no excuse for ignorance.
• It is common practice that a patent is not awarded to the inventor of the idea, but rather for the company s/he works for. When the inventor leaves, the company retains the rights, and the patent may even be used against the inventor. This leads to the accumulation of patents in large companies, making life very hard for small companies and individuals. For example, IBM alone holds approx. 30% of the software patents. If IBM doesn't like you program, you can be sure they will find a few among the 30,000 IBM patents that your program infringes. Patents do not protect the ideas of creative people, but only increase the power of large companies.
• The patent office grants trivial patents and does not do proper research on prior art. Instead, it is left to others, for example the victims of a lawsuit, to refute a patent infringement claim. Furthermore, anyone filing a patent may claim that the invention was created up to a year previous to filing. This means that someone else with more money than you may patent ideas in your software, and you won't have any legal means to defend yourself.

Adobe's statement against software patents

Oracle's statement against software patents

General information

• Innovation threatened by `software patents' (in German) - `Die EU-Entscheider wissen noch nicht, dass die Idee der Patentierbarkeit von Programmierkonzepten bei europäischen Softwareunternehmen nicht beliebt ist. Darauf angesprochen erklärte einer der federführenden EU-Politiker: "Das kann nicht sein. Unser Grünbuch stützt sich auf die Expertise von IBM!"' In other words, the EU commission was advised by IBM.
• The EU plans to extend patent law to software - "It would be possible to use patents to get a monopoly on the use of a business method or an electronic commerce method by patenting as such its implementation in a program for computers"
• Patent library at IBM - Mere individuals are actually allowed free access to the patent information they are supposed to abide by, if they are willing to take a few years to download and read all the legalese--but they aren't going to see it without having to infringe the various patents required by any software to download the information, particularly the GIF patent!
• Patents - the death of free software? - "You can't write any software without infringing on somebody's patent [...] You can't possibly afford to defend yourself--the average cost of a patent infringement lawsuit is $500,000."
• Preparing for the intellectual-property offensive - `The filer of a patent can claim that the invention was created up to a year previous to filing.'
• League for Programming Freedom
• Freepatents.org
• Net Overloads US Patent Agency

Examples of software patents

• Sample of 55 software patents awarded within one week in july 1992
• Microsoft's patent on HTML style sheets (january 1999) - `The W3C has actively promoted the use of stylesheets on the Web since 1994. '
• patent on omitting a space between modem commands (enforced)
• Running attempt to enforce patent on the Y2K `windowing' technique
• Patent on RSA encryption, DSA encryption, etc.
• Attempts to patent internet agents
• Running attempt to enforce patent on all realistic video games
• Some attempts to enforce absurd patents
• More enforced absurd patents
• Patent on running multiplayer games over a network through server-client
• Patent on malloc-like memory allocation (Microsoft, 1997)
• Patent on graphical tree editing combined with program generation (Microsoft, 1996)
• Patent on data conversion for use on different machines
• Patent on using a standard API to draw graphics
• Patent on parsing source code comment blocks by other programs
• Patent on detection and prevention of running multiple instances of a program at once