Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 23 June 2009 05:25
Business IT -
Technology
Page 3 of 4
Former New Zealand Open Source Society president Peter Harrison said the organisation was opposed to software patents due to both ideological and practical reasons.
"From an ideological point of view we wish to protect the right of all people to express themselves. For software developers the issue of software patents
is identical to "book patents" - that is, imagine if a author could not only copyright the content of a book - but the very concept," he said.
"Imagine if a chef wrote a cook book - and took out a patent for 'book describing recipes'. Not specific recipes mind you, any kind of recipe.
"Although you can recognise that book patents would quickly make writing anything legally impossible - needing a lawyer to write any book - it isn't appreciated that software patents have this exact effect. Software developers - that is people who write software much like a author writes a book - are left open to legal assault not for plagiarism, but for creating something that 'infringes' some general idea.
"So when I say there is an 'ideological' objection we simply mean that we object to software patents for the same reason authors would object to 'book' patents or "plot" patents. Currently book and plot patents are not explicitly excluded - and if I were an author that would worry me. As a software developer it does worry me.
From the practical side of things, Harrison said, "when patents were first introduced the idea was that small inventors would be able to license their ideas and make a profit. Big companies would have to compensate inventors for their ideas rather than simply take them. This sounds like a good idea until you realise that in actuality it has had the precise opposite effect.
"Most patents are now gained by large companies, not individual inventors. Rather than patents being used to make useful inventions public they are being used to protect monopolistic behaviour. My primary experience with this has been Microsoft's patents around XML use for word processing documents.
"Microsoft's office productivity software is one of their primary cash cows. Open source software like OpenOffice.org is now threatening that revenue flow. One of the primary means Microsoft has of preventing people moving to other products is to control the file format used to save documents. By ensuring documents can't be opened by other products they lock users into their products.
