- From: Peter Berenyi <ber@sa.eol.hu>
- Date: Wed, 01 Jan 2003 05:37:02 +0100
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
- CC: gnu@gnu.org, "Mécs Imre" <mecsimre@axelero.hu>
I am talking to the libre software community here, not the W3C folks, but you may listen as well. You can even learn something. _____________________________________________________________ Libre Patent Manifesto, version 0.1 I know most of you in the libre software community have a strong anti software patent stance and I can understand the reasons behind it rather well. However, merely stating the drawbacks of software patents, documenting the damage they have already done to the software industry and projecting future damages has not proven effective. It is time to stand up and fight back. As the lobbying power of the libre software community is proven to be too weak to prevent pro software patent legislation in a number of regions all over the world and things are getting worse by the day, we should consider using other means to preserve and/or promote freedom in this important field. The first question to ask: Is this fight about money? The short answer is YES. Most of us make our daily living by writing and re-writing, installing, configuring, adatpting and updating libre software to satisfy customers' need. In this activity we believe we can deliver more useful, more reliable and more secure systems than the competition, at a fraction of the cost. We belive that on a level playing ground we have a good chance to win over the competition. However, brand new Patent Laws, specifically crafted to stop this tide of freedom are starting to make the ground aslope by restricting our right to write, use and share libre software for a number of applications. We have already lost some money by losing orders because of this artificially generated Patent Inflation, and if we do not stop this process now, we can lose even more later. I ask again: Is this fight about money? The even shorter answer is NO. It is about a way of life. Most of us could make a comfortable living by selling our expertise to big companies. We could spend our lives on developing and debugging closed source code for them, let them claim their copyright for it and let them release it under restrictive licenses; we could live in secrecy, under hierarchy, we could follow simple directions. We would not be allowed to let anyone to study our work or adapt it for her own needs, nor could anyone redistribute it without prior permission to do so from our bosses, much less could anyone outside the team we work for improve it. So this fight is not just about money, it is about freedom. It is about the right to start our own small venture, about the right to work alone or with close friends while still enjoying the support of countless co-workers all around the globe. It is about competition, about the only working model of software development that prevents the formation of monopolies, this way it is about technology, reliability and security at a reasonable price, hence it is also about consumers' rights. This said, how can we fight software patents most effectively? History teaches us a lesson. Seventeen years ago, when Richard M. Stallman released the GNU Manifesto, there were no software patents allowed, so copyrigtht law applied outside its original field was the primary vehicle of software appropriation. One could have faught this trend by fighting distortion of copyright law itself. It would have been a noble but fruitless venture. Instead, he took this twisted law and used it to formulate a course of action, that restored the state of affairs according to common sense. It did it indeed: by now we have terabytes and terabytes of source code at our command, all released under GNU/GPL. The beautiful catch is that any further escalation of copyright only strengthens GPL. I propose to do the same thing for software patents. This proposal is not new, but I believe I have a key element that was missing from previous attempts on the subject. In: http://swpat.ffii.org/analysis/inflation/index.en.html Generally it is believed that large corporations like IBM and Siemens are interested in extending the patent system, because they profit from keeping small companies out. But that is at best half of the truth. In fact, large corporations are not those who benefit most from the patent system. Some smaller companies who focus entirely on developping patents rather than products are even better fit for survival in a patent-cluttered environment. Companies like Qualcomm, Priceline, TechSearch etc and many others can be a pain in the neck for Siemens or IBM and may be causing these companies to lose more than they can gain through software patents. The main problem with patents that they do not come for free as copyright does. To have a patent requires some additional work and a registration fee. It is a real problem with people at best not really interested in patenting anything, if not opposing the very idea of software patents altogether. But if it is already an ongoing business to develop only patents, not products, it should be even more profitable in the present twisted legal environment to also quit developing anything and only finance and manage other people's patentable ideas for a fixed (possibly rather high) percent of prospective income. True, this kind of business seems to be absolutely improductive, even for the naked eye, but it should work, nevertheless. Having said this, I propose: Let us encourage the development of a business infrastructure described above and use it to secure as many Libre Software Patents as possible. Let this business infrastructure do the hard work and let it pay the registration fees as well and let them have (most of) the prospective income. By a Libre Software Patent I mean one which grants an irrevocable and unrestricted rolyalty-free license for Libre Software implementations, but which requires royalties to be payed for any other application by default. I also propose a further conditional royalty-free license for all parties who either do not have software patents themselves or if they have any, those are all unrestricted RF licensed patents or Libre Software Patents in the present sense. This additional license is revocable as soon as said party gets a single software patent that is not licensed for unrestricted RF use in libre software. I can see the possibility of a loophole (by cross-licensing) in this construct, so it may be a further requirement that said party should not even implement any non-free third-party patents in its products in order to be eligible to this license. I also propose a policy regarding standards bodies like W3C. We should grant to anyone an RF license for all Libre Software Patents, but with a "field of use" clause, limited to implementations of Recommendations issued by said Standards Body, and only to what is required by the Recommendation, as long as this Standards Body only issues Recommendations dependent on either unrestricted RF Patents or Libre Software Patents. As soon as a single Recommendation is issued which is dependent on any other patent, this license is void, and the Standards Body has to negotiate all Libre Software Patent it is interested in with its respective owners. In this context "Libre Software" means a software that is licensed in a way that 1. it can be used for any purpose by anyone 2. anyone can study it and adapt it to one's own needs 3. anyone can redistribute it without special permissions 4. anyone can modify it and freely redistribute the modified copies 5. in order to satisfy 1-4, the source code should be distributed along with the software That's it. We will also need a good online database of all Libre Software Patents to be able to monitor any possible third party infringement. I think this kind of policy would make large corporations interested in closed source software development to turn around and do all the hard lobbying work against pro-software patent legislation for us. As soon as they start seeing the money rather go than come, they will have no other option. In the meantime, the LSP (Libre Software Patent) while protecting the interests of the libre software community, would not do much harm to the wider industry, certainly not more than the GPL itself. For while GPL'd code can not be used in proprietary software at all, an LSP can be used that way, provided the implementor negotiates a license fee with the owner. I also think, that although this proposal has much to be improved, it is already something to be taken very seriously. Copyright Peter Berenyi, 2002 This document is published under GNU/GPL Ver. 2.0. You can use it for any purpose, you can study it and adapt it to your needs, you can freely redistribute copies of it provided this copyright notice is preserved and finally, you can improve it and release your improvements to the public under GNU/GPL ver. 2.0 or later, as described in http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html _________________________________________________________________ Back to the present W3C Patent Policy issue. You see, meme-complexes like the one above are readily come to mind. If they replicate fast enough to have a decisive influence on the course of history is another matter. It depends entirely on the environment in which they find themselves. For example if you would adopt section 3.3 of the present draft of W3C Patent Policy (the one concerning the "filed of use" restriction), it would give them a jump-start. Once such a process is started, it is next to impossible to stop it. It grows exponentially until (external) limits are reached. Considering the history of W3C, I do not think you really support a patent policy that would prevent GPL implementations of web standards. I believe there should have been some external pressure for you to even consider such a thing. But you could perhaps educate your masters about the likely consequences of such a policy. If they realize that they would not be perfectly happy with it, they may even release the pressure. _________________________________________________________________ www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org from December 2002 By Date http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment/2002Dec/ GPL patent grant for 19 patents http://www.advogato.org/article/89.html http://www.levien.com/patents.html Patent Policy Working Group Royalty-Free Patent Policy Section 3.3 http://www.w3.org/TR/patent-policy/#def-RF W3C Current Patent Practice http://www.w3.org/TR/patent-practice SFS Position http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html#comment BSA Responds to EU Software Patent Directive Adoption http://www.bsa.org/europe-eng/press/newsreleases/2002-02-21.936.phtml Protecting Information Innovation against the Abuse of the Patent System http://swpat.ffii.org/ -- Peter Berenyi Systems Administrator email: ber@sa.eol.hu mobile +36 20 411 0580
Received on Tuesday, 31 December 2002 23:37:07 UTC