************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * February 2003 * * * ************************************* News and Comments Software testing of the "very early access" version of Eclipse/DDT that was described last month has gone well. The few brave souls who are using it report good things about this new feature that will be included with DB/C DX 13. This month's article is about another of my pet peeves - software patents. I realize that this topic isn't of daily concern to readers of this newsletter, but it is an important issue. If you plan to ignore the article or just skim it, I suggest you skip down to the third paragraph from the end that starts with "You may scoff...". As always, your feedback is appreciated. don.wills@dbcsoftware.com ****************************************************************************** Software Patents by Don Wills Software patents are evil. Unlike patents of physical objects and processes, software patents provide society with little, if any, benefit. Instead of benefits, software patents actually harm consumers. The only parties that benefit from software patents are big companies and a few old, dying companies. Patents and copyrights are generally considered to be fundamental for free markets to function. Without patents and copyrights, there would be little incentive for anyone to create anything new. Any new idea or other creation would be quickly stolen by others and thus the inventor would not gain from having made the invention or creation. The result would be that much less invention would occur and society would stagnate. As a society, we have agreed to grant creators a government-protected monopoly on their creations for a limited period of time. In return, the creations pass into the public domain after the monopoly protection expires so that they may be freely used by all. On balance, our system of patents and copyrights provides benefits for both creators and society as a whole. Copyrights protect a specific expression of something, whether music, art, or writing including software. The term of copyright protection in the USA was recently extended to 95 years. Among most of western society, and even among the most ardent open-source advocates, it is widely recognized that copyrights provide great benefit to society. The benefit of copyrights is well worth their cost (harm) to society. The only real debate about copyrights is how long the time should be before they expire. (In response to corporate lobbying, the US Congress has extended the term of copyrights eleven times since 1960!) Patents are very different from copyrights. Patents protect ideas, processes, and other non-obvious inventions. Because patents are much broader than copyrights, they are generally more valuable. Many countries have standardized on a time period of 20 years for patents. Until about 15 years ago, it was generally agreed that mathematical formulas, algorithms, laws of nature and logic, and similar things were not patentable. Then the US Patent office started granting such patents. At first, the patents were for rather limited, obscure algorithms. But through the years, much more general software patents have been granted. Some of the more infamous software patents that have been granted are: . Amazon.com's one click patent (US patent 5,960,411) . Priceline.com's "name your own price" patent (US patent 5,794,207) . Unisys's patent on GIF file compression (expired US patent 4,558,302) The major problem with software patents is that just about anything can and has been patented. Most agree that there are many thousands of "junk" software patents in existence. Proponents of software patents say that the system isn't broken because "junk" patents can be invalidated by the legal system. That might be how the patent system would work in a perfect world. However, that's not how it works today. If someone patents something that you believe should not be patented, you must sue the owner of the patent to prove that the patent is invalid. Most patent lawsuits cost millions of dollars. So instead of fighting software patents, most large companies do one of two things - they either pay the royalties, or they trade patent rights with other companies. Microsoft, IBM, HP, Sun, Oracle and many others generally don't pay software patent royalties to each other because of intellectual property (IP) sharing agreements that they have negotiated with each other. The rest of us are not so fortunate. A company can only get into that elite club if it has a bunch of software patents. There are companies that have been created solely for the purpose of owning and enforcing patents (e.g. Walker Digital - www.walkerdigital.com). The only staff of such companies are lawyers and secretaries. They are the true vultures of our patent system. Another class of companies that tend to abuse software patents are dying companies. Neither class of companies provides major benefit to society. The Unisys GIF patent is a good example of this harm. Unisys apparently didn't even know they owned the GIF patent until 5 years before it was set to expire. In 1995, they magically "found" the old patent and started shaking down companies of all sizes for royalties. Microsoft has recently filed for several patents covering the .NET Framework Class Library. The November 2002 DB/C Newsletter points out that the .NET FCL is essentially the same thing as the Java Class Library. There wouldn't appear to be anything novel in the .NET Framework, but no company would be stupid enough to try to invalidate Microsoft's .NET patents. With $40 billion in cash, Microsoft can out-lawyer almost any company. Companies in the Microsoft/IBM/... IP club don't have to worry about the .NET patents. However, all of the rest of us do. There is (was?) an open source project called Mono that is building an open-source version of .NET and the .NET Framework Class Library. Given that Microsoft has recently identified open-source software as its primary enemy (see its latest quarterly 10-Q SEC filing), it would appear that the .NET patents are nothing more than weapons for Microsoft to use to destroy its enemies. Who knows where the computer industry would be today if the hundreds of fundamental algorithms (e.g. quick-sort, B+ trees, hash tables) had been patented in the 60's when they were first used? It's just speculation, but I'd bet that we wouldn't have invented the Internet yet. We might all be running operating systems derived from IBM mainframe operating systems, because IBM would have owned the majority of software patents and would have been able to hold onto their customer base without having to innovate because no upstarts could compete with them. You may scoff and say that software patents aren't a concern of yours, but what if Datapoint had patented AIM? Fortunately, Datapoint created AIM about 5 years before software patents started being granted. From what I know of Datapoint during its years of slow death, I suspect that they would have used an AIM patent as a weapon to cripple the development of DATABUS compiler/runtime products like DB/C DX. Datapoint's inventive years came just a few years too early. But for Microsoft, today's legal climate is just right for using software patents as a weapon to destroy competitors and thwart change. That's what I expect Microsoft will do with their .NET patents. Because of their unique nature and because of the inaccessible legal system, software patents produce more harm than good to society as a whole. Therefore, as a society, we should review the basic premise about whether or not software patents should exist. On balance, are they good or bad for society in the long run? My opinion is that they are bad and that software patents should be abolished. Here are other resources on this topic: . Article - "The Problem with Patents" by Lawrence Lessig http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,4296,00.html . Web site of the League for Programming Freedom http://lpf.ai.mit.edu . Web site concerned with software patents in Europe http://swpat.ffii.org . Article describing the history of software patents http://www.bitlaw.com/software-patent/history.html . Article about the latest changes to the term of copyrights http://www.clwbar.org/resipsa/jan99/copyright.html ****************************************************************************** DB/C DX Class Schedule Class: DB/C DX Fundamentals Date: June 2003 Location: Oak Brook, Illinois For information, send email to admin@dbcsoftware.com. ****************************************************************************** Subscribing to the DB/C Newsletter If you don't already have the DB/C Newsletter delivered to your email address and would like to have it emailed to you monthly, just send an email message to 'dbcnews-subscribe@dbcsoftware.com'. The newsletter will be delivered to the email address from which the message was sent.