Debian, SFLC Publish Patent Advice For Community Distros

An anonymous reader writes "The Debian Project is pleased to announce the availability of the Community Distribution Patent Policy FAQ, a document meant to educate Free Software developers, and especially distribution editors, about software patent risks. The FAQ has been prepared by lawyers at Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) at the request of and with input from the Debian Project. While the document does not constitute legal advice, it provides insights on dealing with software patents, which might be applicable to other community-driven Free Software distributions. The Debian Project maintains a critical stance towards software patents: we consider software patents a threat to Free Software and we believe they provide no advantages in promoting software innovation."

Re:What's wrong with software patents?

[rtfa-troll]

But I have yet to see a rational argument for why physical inventions but not virtual inventions should be patentable.

There are lots of clear rational arguments against software patents

Freedom of speech;

Software source code is a form of Speech; it is a method of communication from one programmer to another about mathematical concepts and their usage. Free software, in particular (though probably not most "Open Source" software) is often political speech. As such, under the UN Convention on Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Constitution of the USA, it is the most highly protected form of free speech. Software patents attempt to interfere with that and are clearly criminal.

mathematics / algorithms

A program is; simply; a large integer. Running a program is, exactly running a series of mathematical operations on that large integer. Mathematics is explicitly recognised as non patentable in most patent regimes.

A similar argument can be stated in terms of algorithms. Software patents always claim a "method and aparatus". The reason for this that a pure algorithm is recognized as not patentable, only things with

the nature of software development

Software is developed differently from bridges electronics and other areas of physical engineering. In other areas we much more start with a design, apply known techniques and get to a given end. New forms of bridges come out of separate explicit research where prototypes are built and actual work is done separately from the development process. This means that advances come more slowly and explicitly from research to development. In software, every new software development effort includes and should include new ideas explicitly. Once these ideas are developed it is very easy to package them up into libraries and make them available. The same ideas are re-invented repeatedly. At the same time, it is almost unheard of for a software developer to benefit from reading a software patent. Finally, a bridge builder will probably take days or weeks to consider a single idea. A programmer will probably use a hundred patentable ideas in a single day. The only reason that the programmer is able to work at all is that software patents are a new idea so 99.9% of those ideas will already have been used by someone else. In other areas, a patent search taking several days may be done for every new idea.

• there is no need for patents because ideas are continually re-invented;
• software ideas are cheap; the loss of one single new idea is not a big worry
• patents do not provide the benefit they should to the software development process.
• software can be developed by home developers who can't afford patent lawyers.
• the cost of patents to software development is much higher than to other areas
• handling software patents properly would need 1000 lawyers for every programmer

I'm not nearly the first person to put these forward. If you haven't heard them before, then you might want to have a look at Groklaw [groklaw.net], the league for programming freedom [progfree.org]. There is a long list of reasons given on the end software patents web site [swpat.org].

Re:What's wrong with software patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having been a developer for a small-medium company for 25 years I can only see software patents helping multi-nationals. We have never patented anything and the company would have gone broke long ago if we tried. We simply don't have the resources, Once a multi-national company gets a big enough portfolio it becomes hard for another to sue as they are probably infringing on each other and only the lawyers will end up making much profit. The only exception to this is you patent troll company, We have never needed patents to protect our 'software inventions' but I'm sure with all the ridiculous obvious things that have been able to be patented we would be infringing some. Patents are a big hammer waiting to fall on any small software house should the holders decide.