Kodak wins Java patent suit

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Against Software Patents and full rational

Read "Against Software Patents" By The League for Programming Freedom
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/against-software-patents.html
It explains why software should be treated differently to other technology.

The above paper was refered to by Bill Gates in his 1991 "Challenges and Strategy" Memo
http://discuss.sarahsbookstores.com/Bill_Gates_Challenges_And_Strategy_Memo
PATENTS: If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then the have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can. Amazingly we havn't done any patent exchanges tha I am aware of. Amazingly we havn't found a way to use our licensing position to avoid having our own customers cause patent problems for us. I know these aren't simply problems but they deserve more effort by both Legal and other groups. For example we need to do a patent exchange with HP as part of our new relationship. In many application categories straighforward thinking ahead allows you to come up with patentable ideas. A recent paper from the League for Programming Freedom (available from the Legal department) explains some problems with the way patents are applied to software.

Even using patent exchange agreements, Patents are inherently bad for software industy.

Business methord and software patents are detrimental to the software industry as a whole, but it is also one of the major driving forces to an interesting trend amongst most of the major IT vendors.

Applying game theory to long term software industry market, for both open and proprietary vendors, based on software patents...

1) Small software developers are unlikely to benefit from the overall balance of payments from licensing of their own and other vendors software patent portfolios, since other software vendors are just as likely to hold other software patents that the developer uses in his own products.

2) Larger software vendors are unlikely to benefit from payments from licensing of their software patent portfolio, as per above small sofware developers plus the software vendor is likely to hold the lion's share of the sofware target market, profit from software patent licensing will be much smaller in proportion to the overall sales of the vendors own products.

3) Third party intellectual property "holding companies", that do not actively participate in selling actual software, are the only class of organization that can benefit from licensing of their software patent portfolios. In most cases these entities have a very tenuous relationship to the ongoing development of the software methords patented.

In 1981 US courts ruled that software and business methord could, without legislation ot the contrary, be patented. From 1981 to 1989, with a few exceptions the entire IT industry just ignored the issue of software patents.

As Bill Gates rightly stated " If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today". The Silicon valley revolution would not have taken place. From 1991 to 1997, the major software vendors slowly began build software patent portfolios and entering into cross licensing arrangements and most of the smaller vendors still ignored the issue entirely.

From 1997 on, driven by the greed of the Venture capitalists of the DotCom era, vendors and other groups began gobbling up businesses based not upon the current business viability, but the so-called intellectual property the business held. Most in the software industry still ignored these third party parasites, but larger vendor also began expanding their software patent portfolios.

Complex cross licensing arangements are increasingly becoming a legal quagmire. Microsoft is facing a number of lawsuits from companies which Microsoft did enter into a formal relationship, for example Timeline Inc
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/29419.html

Kodak had a formal relationship with Sun and the SCO Group is also suing IBM based upon the exact same class of legal cross licensing relationship that Bill Gates suggested as a solution to patents back in 1991.

However
While software patents remain a threat to the entire software industry, including Linux, the patent issue is pushing many companies, including IBM, HP, SUN, Oracle, SAP and Novell are turning to a simpler form of cross licensing arrangement - the GNU General Public License, or GPL and LGPL.

Only GPL and LGPL like so-called "viral" licenses effectively grants all downstream users the right to freely use the sofware. A license that even the largest of patent portfolio holders, such as IBM, are adopting to collaboratively develop new software. This, along with customer demand, is the major reason that Linux is being widely adopted and not one or more of the BSD based distributions.

Posted by: David Mohring   Posted on: 10/04/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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