Comments on: Open-source allies go on patent offensive

Red Hat and OSDL's new patent efforts take a different tack in trying to deter some intellectual-property attacks.

[Mendz]

Patents vs. Patents

If you can't beat them, join them. Now the battle becomes a race. Truly, everyone has the right to protect themselves -- open source or proprietary. Hopefully, it stays as a way to protect and not to enforce licensing for gain (translate: extortion). Remember Eolas?

[lucien64]

It's a good idea...

As soon as you have some "killer patents" in your portfolio, all those nice patents from Microsoft et al. will become worthless, as they will need to cross license with the Open Source community.

Wouldn't it be nice to own the "Windows" patent or the "Virtual memory" patent or the "server" patent or any other basic patent (not older than 20 years...).

You could simply stop the civilized world(wide web).

[lucien64]

Education on patent law

In this case, people should be educated in patent law. You cannot patent "published" items as they are then considered "prior art".

Posting "intentive" programs in a publicly accessable database would discard the patent. It's very hard to manage by open source.

[hadaso]

It is not enough to publish

Publishing is insufficient. If the fact that something was published (i.e., that there is "prior art") is not known to vthe patent examiner who then grants a patent, it becomes very expensive to invalidate the patent, so even if it later becomes well known the the patent shouldn't have been granted, it is still risky to use it unless you have very deep pockets...

Government Sanctioned Monopolies Vs. Innovation

People say that patents exist to provide companies that create things an opportunity to make money, without fear of others ripping off the idea and putting them out of business.

With software patents this changes. If Thomas Edison made the light bulb and patented it. (Which I think he did) Someone could have possibley found another way to make a light and that would have been legal.

With software patents it seems that a lot of the end results get restricted. I heard somewhere that Microsoft has a patent for a menu appearing from the bottom of the screen. That implies to me that even if my code is completely different if in the end what I do is the same Ill be litigated to the ground. I could extend this example to say providing support for a file format you didnt invent yourself, but the code to import it you wrote.

Theres another company that claimed rights to video offered via Internet (which I heard about a while back), even though so many other people toiled to build the technology.

What this boils down to is people Patenting mathematic equations, everyone with access to a compiler effectively being an inventor, and know way of knowing who has what restricted.

The system is completely overrun and only those with enough money to handle the accounting and legal research are able to benefit from the system.

Even those "little guys" who can best benefit from these software patents hardly benefit since theres almost no way to find out who is violating and its almost impossible to police and patrol. Especially for them.

So only the big guys with the patent aresenals really benefit and even most of them are only intrested in staving off others claims.

Thus we see big companies letting Linux use their patents and also why we dont see companies like Nvidia realeasing open source drivers, in fear of patent claims.

For the hundred thousandth time, get rid of software patents. Copyrights are good enough.