4. I also noticed a link to his commentary from early this on

s/from early this on/from early this year on/

One could accuse them of intellectual cowardice. Or at the very least, engaging in a campaign of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Yeah, Lev, on second reading it does seems to smell more like FUD. -- Smiles, Les.

...

2. Even though Patentology is correct in pointing that the GPL ... Plus, patents != copyright, just because they share the IP umbrella. For the most part it should be pretty trivial for an individual to not violate copyright when writing software, but it can be impossible to even know if you are violating a patent.

Yes, Tim. Agreed. And, keeping straight the difference between copyright and patents, I notice the recent movement to criminalize copyright violation (when once it was just a civil matter). Then I fantasize about a world in which knowingly or negligently putting in a bogus patent application would be a criminal offence -- attempting to obtain a monopoly by deception. More another time... -- Smiles, Les.

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Les Kitchen wrote:

...

...

2. Even though Patentology is correct in pointing that the GPL   (and copyleft) technically relies on copyright law, he omits   to mention that that's only a defence against a system that's   largely biassed against free flow of ideas and methods and   code.

Plus, patents != copyright, just because they share the IP umbrella. For the most part it should be pretty trivial for an individual to not violate copyright when writing software, but it can be impossible to even know if you are violating a patent. The interesting part with software and its protection by copyright

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 1:21 PM, Tim Cuthbertson wrote: that I see: software=speech. Thus, at least in my mind, if one: a. pulls a software patent b. implement it c. distribute the implementation *in source code only* (as any "artistic creation") then this way of distributing should be protected by the "right to freedom of expression". Now, the mileage may vary from legislation to legislation. I know that Aus. laws doesn't have an *explicit* protection for the right to free speech, but by the US system of laws (I don't know which of their constitution amendments) the protection of free speech should trump the existence of the patent (I remember that mid-90-ies have seen some squabbles over the export of crypto software - not patented but classified as ammunition - that were solved by printing the source code in books/T-shirts, etc and exporting them as such until their gubt. gave up). Personally, I'm highly tempted to give the above a try. Any opinions about other risks, please? Regards, Adrian

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 6:34 PM, Ben Sturmfels wrote:

Thanks for the patent related discussion folks. I'll look forward to telling you about the presentation I made in Sydney, hopefully at the next Free Software Melbourne meeting.

Can I suggest taking further patent discussion to the End Software Patents Australia list? That way others can be involved too. Can I suggest as a topic of discussion (sometime): "The need of national identity for FOSS"? Rationale: "End Software Patents Australia" doesn't *seem* to have enough ammunition in raising to *Australian* politicians the point of "But is the *Australian* FOSS movement that suffers because of the software patents".

See: http://wiki.freesoftware.asn.au/AustralianFreeSoftwareProjects - not that many IMHO. Adrian

On 22 May 2012 18:59, Adrian Colomitchi wrote:

...

See: http://wiki.freesoftware.asn.au/AustralianFreeSoftwareProjects - not that many IMHO.

You would need to identify why the list is so short first. How many Australia open source software authors know about it I don't know how many. By the number of entries, I suspect not too many of them. Which leads me to think that the "FOSS national identity" is a topic

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 7:27 PM, George Patterson wrote: that worth discussing: - if deemed important, probably we would see more efforts to create awareness of the list existence - if deemed not (so) important, the fact the list is short is not a problem.

and if they do, why isn't it listed there? Well, the way I see: it's a *Wiki*, so if they know about it it should be easy to add their projects. I don't know if adding/editing that page is restricted, I suspect it is not

A promising big one is the Serval project http://www.servalproject.org/ A short run down, it's a application that allows phone calls  to be made (or even sending text messages) via mesh networking where theres limited infrastructure. Think after a natural disater and the phone exchange has water flowing through it. If you spot something that needs attention such as a broken pipeline or landslide, you can upload the photo to the "Rhizome" and it will migrate via mesh connected phones untill it gets to someone to that can either address it or get a message to the outside world. The sender and receiver do not need to be online at the same time.

Sounds quite good.

Serval is being developed at Flinders University. Can you ask them to attempt adding the project to the list *if interested*? Or, if you are a contributor yourself, can *you* try to add it?

Adrian

From what I know about this Ric Richardson, he sounds like a huge patent

Hi, sorry I'm late to the discussion, and Ben, I'm deeply sorry I couldn't make it to your speech despite being in Sydney (I had another engagement). If they post the video, please let us know. troll. I may have my facts wrong, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the understanding that he came up with a DRM system for detecting when software moves from one machine to another to prevent it from being copied. He used it to protect his own software, then when Microsoft used similar technology, he sued them, won, and was lauded by the media as an "Aussie battler" who "beat up big bad Microsoft." I'm usually the last person to defend Microsoft, but honestly, I don't know what's worse for freedom of expression: a DRM scheme that makes your software break if you modify your own computer, or suing a company for building similar technology to you. But the DRM aside, this is the perfect example of why the patent system is completely broken. This guy obviously used the technology to protect his own software. If it wasn't useful to him, he wouldn't have invented it. The fact is that patents are usually by-products of software engineering -- usually a tiny piece of a larger whole that was developed along the way (such as a DRM technology). You are compensated for inventing the technology by being able to use it in your own product -- you don't *need*to take further royalties unless you're greedy. If some guy from Australia hadn't invented a way of determining when a machine is significantly changed, chances are pretty bloody high that someone at Microsoft would have. Therefore, the patent system served no "benefit" to society (if inventing a DRM system can be called a benefit), because society would have of course invented the same technology with or without Richardson. Does Richardson therefore deserve a small cut of every sale of Windows XP? He bloody well does not! I can never quite justify why I think software deserves a special exemption from the patent system. I think what it comes down to is that *so very very little* of what we invent is actually non-obvious. I don't wish to deride software engineers in any way -- we do a lot of good work. But the fact is that nearly all solutions are obviously derivable from the problem definition. Ask any software engineer how to stop someone from installing a copy of a program on multiple computers and they will probably invent something that infringes on Richardson's patent. Unfortunately, lawyers, judges and juries don't appreciate the obviousness of most of these inventions. (I use the word obvious not in the sense of "trivial", or to imply that someone would immediately think of the solution. But in the sense that if you sat down for awhile to work it out, you could come up with something close enough to infringe upon the patent.) As for the article ... well a lot of this is complete trolling. "And if you were to pick a person at random on the streets, the chance that they would have an opinion about whether or not genes should be patentable would be very much greater than the possibility that they are even aware there is a debate around software patents." This is the first time I've seen an argument that "the average person doesn't know it's a problem, so therefore it's not a problem." Is this guy really a lawyer? "Your honour, although witnesses have testified to my client's guilt in great detail, if you were to pick a person at random on the streets, the chances are that they wouldn't know my client is guilty. Therefore, is it really such a great crime?" Progressive and conservative governments both back something so therefore it must be good? The patent system was supposed to provide a net benefit to society, and maybe it doesn't always work, but it's the best thing we have? Start-ups and open source software still exists, so what are you complaining about? These aren't even arguments!!

On 22 May 2012 22:37, Matt Giuca wrote:

From what I know about this Ric Richardson, he sounds like a huge patent troll. I may have my facts wrong, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the understanding that he came up with a DRM system for detecting when software moves from one machine to another to prevent it from being copied. He used it to protect his own software, then when Microsoft used similar technology, he sued them, won, and was lauded by the media as an "Aussie battler" who "beat up big bad Microsoft."

My understanding, based on media coverage (so I might be wrong), is it is a bit more complicated then that. It seems that Ric Richardson tried to license his patent to Microsoft. Negotiations failed. Ric Richardson claims they used his ideas as presented to Microsoft in the negotiations after the negotiations failed. Microsoft claim that they implemented something different. *If* Ric Richardson's claims are true, its hard to defend Microsoft's actions even if you assume that the Patent system is broken. On the other hand it is also possible that Ric Richardson's licensing demands were excessive (I can't remember the details now). -- Brian May

On Wed, 23 May 2012, Matt Giuca wrote:

To put it another way, if the idea can be quickly conveyed in a meeting with lawyers, then it is an idea and not an invention and should never have been patented. Patents are awarded for inventions, not ideas -- something the system seems to have forgotten.

Sometimes the critical thing is not to have the idea, but to have tested hundreds of ideas and found the one that worked. Consider the NetApp WAFL filesystem and the patent dispute with Sun about ZFS. The concepts of WAFL, ZFS, and BTRFS aren't particularly difficult to understand for anyone who has a good knowledge of computer science. It's easy to have ideas for things that might work, but getting them to work IRL is hard. Presumably NetApp implemented more than a few different data structures for filesystems before coming up with one that works well. The fact that the WAFL design can be quickly described in broad terms to anyone with a good knowledge of CD doesn't make it less of an invention IMHO. There are a lot of really good documentaries about the history of engineering. Pretty much every technological development that they feature is something that was retrospectively obvious once it's been shown to work. But the historical record is of people who devised the inventions often had a lot of trouble getting finance because no-one thought that it would work. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

By the way, I just saw this story hit Slashdot: http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/05/19/1518200/software-patents-good-for-op... Good discussion there (out of a pretty lousy summary). I noticed that Ben Sturmfels commented too. Best comment was thishttp://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2861507&cid=40054149 : It is as if someone is trying to create the impression there is an ongoing

'debate' about about the pros and cons of software patents. There is no debate. Software patents are harmful nonsense. and this is the general consensus amoung [sic] people who write software (supposedly the people that these patents 'protect'). I'm sure you could scrape up some guy who swears blind that smoking cured his sinus problems but that doesn't mean an article 'Smoking - good for your health?' should hit the front page.