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Comments please: Editing and further examples are welcome via this Wiki page: http://www.dclug.org.uk/wiki/?id=edit/Software%20patents Where possible, I'd like to keep it specific to the area of inter-operability. It comes across a little disjointed so far - a cascade if ideas rather than a cohesive whole. This is to help me crystallise my ideas ready for the DTI conference on the 14th. --------------------------------------------------------- Software patents vs inter-operability. I develop inter-operability software for GNU/Linux applications - making user data available outside the limitations of the original application. It's not just about knowing which application can load a file but providing the data in a format that any application can use. Developing code for this area is entirely concerned with building on the code of others. Nothing I do is intrinsically new because software itself is always built on existing foundations. I need full and free access to each application to provide communication so that the data remains as generic as possible, without losing any of the complexity that makes it useful. It is ridiculous to try to claim that my work infringes patents because software is the expression of ideas, a communication between developers and machines. The growth of what is deemed patentable must be checked and the vagueness of the patent office stance must be eliminated. Patents on software would directly harm innovation because software grows from other software. Software evolves, gradually and in generally very small steps. It is wrong to consider such steps as patentable because no software exists in isolation - any one piece of software requires other software, there is always prior art. Software does not even need the restriction of patents - there is no cost of reproduction, no cost of duplication. Patents are unnecessary and counter-intuitive in software development. Copyright alone is and will remain sufficient simply because copyright already exists longer than the software. Or are we to consider patenting our emails? The written or spoken word is a form of communication just like a computer program. English is a language just like C or Fortran. Programmers are interpreters, converting ideas from a human language into a machine-readable language. Copying and duplicating emails and other digital formats does not diminish the original - the author has lost nothing by the act of copying, his/her copy still exists. Copyright deals with attributing the authorship of the original, licences can and do deal with the rest. Patents do not encourage innovation in software - patents encourage secrecy, protectionism and isolationist attitudes. Unlike hardware, software does not grow by being restricted, it grows from communication, improvement, review, upgrade and in an incremental, undifferentiated, path. There is no justification for restricting the growth of something that costs nothing to copy. What is worse is when patents are alleged to apply across languages. That is tantamount to saying that a patent on an elevator button applies to the controls of a microwave! Patents cannot be extended to dissimilar languages because the implementation (the technical step) in the patent declaration CANNOT be directly implemented in another language. If a patent can work across languages, then it is a patent of an IDEA, not a technical step. That is illegal even under the widest scope of patents. Equally, a software technique cannot always be applied between applications or platforms, even when written in the same language. Developers are well aware of the problems of porting - the same idea requires radically different implementations on different applications, platforms or architectures. Again, the methods of porting a software technique rely on existing software - another layer of inter-operability. --------------------------------------------------- -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.dclug.org.uk/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.williamsleesmill.me.uk/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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