[d@DCC] Letter to the Editor Re: Opinion: Patent Progress

From: Russell McOrmond <russell _-at-_ flora.ca>
To: eweek (at) ziffdavis.com
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 15:05:34 -0400 (EDT)

Re: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1122081,00.asp

  I am glad this type of story is being written.  There is a misconception
that software patents are generally supported by the software industry
that they are claimed to aid, even though the required economic studies to
prove this have never been done.  Patent offices have been expanding the
scope of their domain to software and business models, treating the issue
as a legal/enforcement issue when Intellectual Property is pure economic
public policy.

  When the very people that public policy is aimed at helping are largely 
opposed, you know that some bad politics are at play.


  This inappropriate expansion is seen first in the United States, and
then is pushed on the rest of the word by the US Trade negotiators who
push extremely aggressively for unlimited patentability worldwide.  They
are trying to impose this very backward way of looking at patent policy
(treating it as a legal rather than economic policy), and have
unfortunately being fairly successful in the short term in doing so.

  I believe that if proper economic analysis is done of patents in this
sector that the exclusion of software from patentability that the EU
parliament tried to implement (and the EPO has been negligently ignoring)  
would be implemented (and enforced against patent offices)  worldwide.


  It is interesting that this otherwise hidden concept is being made
visible in the mainstream media, and I suspect that the SCO defamation
case is helping.  The uncertainty and speculation around SCO shows just
how bad this problem can be when some undisclosed claimed infringement can
cause reputation harm to critical parts of the industry.  If deployments
of Linux are being delayed because of this, what legal recourse will the
Linux community have against SCO for this form of defamation, beyond the
inevitable bankruptcy of SCO as a leftover from the Dot.Bomb era?


  If the SCO case was a real copyright or patent infringement case, the
infringement would have been disclosed long before the story was brought
to the media.  If an infringement was disclosed, new code could have been
written to innovate-around that claimed infringement.  It would likely
have been cheaper to innovate-around than to even question whether SCO has
any legitimate rights to the particular UNIX code in the first place
(which is debatable as well).


Note:  I am a Canadian IT consultant, specializing in Free/Libre and Open 
Source Software.   I will soon be releasing a report on software patents 
for Industry Canada, ICT branch, which may be of interest to your 
magazine.

http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/software-patent2003.shtml

  The final version will be published by the end of this month.

---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> 
 Governance software that controls ICT, automates government policy, or
 electronically counts votes, shouldn't be bought any more than 
 politicians should be bought.  -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/


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