Patent Laws and the Software Industry
JOBY JOHN
Patent Laws and the Software Industry
On the occasion of 'International Day against software patents', the Hindu had extensively covered the issues of software patents and software freedom. The two articles below highlight the issues around software patenting.
Courtesy: The Hindu
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Black-and-white, with some grey areas
Anand Parthasarathy
IT majors see the patents issue as that linked with intellectual property
Bangalore: For the mainstream global IT players, software patenting is a clear-cut issue, and they have no time for ifs and buts: They are for it. In the wake of the ongoing public consultations on the Patent Manual, which throws up issues related to software patenting, The Hindu spoke to India leaders of some key IT players to find out what they thought:
Naresh Gupta, Sr. Vice President, Print & Publishing Business Unit Adobe, and Managing Director, Adobe India, a leader of the imaging software and solutions business, says: "We believe in safeguarding of intellectual property rights. Adobe invests significant resources towards innovation and we expect protection of our Intellectual Property Rights, to be able to sustain business."
Chip leader Intel responded with a statement of the company's position on IPR, from Bruce Sewell, US-based senior vice-president and general counsel of Intel Corporation: "Intellectual property is an important component of any standard. It can be used to shape the standard and ensure that people can understand the risks and costs of participating. That's important if you want the standard to be broadly applicable and widely adopted."
From his academic vantage point as Director of the Indian Institute
of Information Technology — Bangalore (IIIT-B), S. Sadagopan, provided
a somewhat nuanced view: "Software in many countries (including India)
is covered under copyright and not patent; the inventors want to
'protect' their invention so that they get the credit and 'copycats'
have no 'free ride.' With the success of IT, software patents can be
very lucrative; often such 'greed' leads to 'overdoing' of the
protection. In turn, it leads to the other extreme reaction that
denounces any protection."
Success story
"MP3 has been an enormously successful case of software patent; but it is perhaps just one among the handful of such hugely successful ones!" Prof Sadagopan adds: "Many of us would like a moderate regime, where algorithms are not patented; of course, there must be some protection available for unusual algorithms and implementations that have immediate product implications (like MP3)."
Clearly software patents is a black-and-white issue for the larger
industry players — but outside experts might find some shades of grey
in the scenario.
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September 24, 2008
Will patenting take the byte out of IT here?
Deepa Kurup
There has been little debate on patent laws and the software industry. Today is World Day Against Software Patents.
IT software, services and outsourcing industry has been rooting for software patenting
Delhi Patent Office receives around 50 applications for software patents every month
BANGALORE: Picture this. Indian mathematicians came up with the concept of the "zero" — often touted as India's greatest contribution to civilisation — and got a patent for it. By now they would have raked in inestimable amounts in royalty. Seems preposterous? Members of the Free Software community say that patenting every other algorithm would be somewhat in the same league.
While there has been substantial discussion on how patents will affect the pharmaceutical sector, there has been little debate about its implications on the software industry. To the layman, software patenting sounds like an abstract issue applicable to an even more abstract domain. However, with a growing software industry which is trying to spread its indigenous roots, the issue becomes an important one.
Traditionally, software comes under the Copyright Law (just like any literary work) and anyone who writes a program owns it. After Indian Parliament in 2005 scrapped an ordinance which declared "software in combination with hardware" patentable, the controversial and ambiguous clause — "software per se" — has now resurfaced in a recently formulated Patent Manual.
And how will the common man be affected by this proposed change in the patent manual? For example, when Global Patent Holdings patented usage of images on websites, a bunch of small and big companies had to cough up to $50 million each. And where does this cost reflect? "The consumer will find that products will get a lot more expensive. Take a DVD player which has about 2,000 patents (many of them software-related). Every time a local company makes a DVD player, they have to pay royalties and the costs will naturally be reflected on the sale price," says Sunil Abraham of Centre for Internet and Society, a research and advocacy organisation.
Backdoor entry
The Free Software community feels that patents will make a backdoor entry, courtesy this manual and that ongoing public consultation (by the Patent Office) does not take their voices into account. Mr. Abraham says: "We feel that the powerful software lobbies around are pushing for this clause. If allowed, it will affect the basis of innovation, and will in turn affect the industry." While the Bangalore consultation was "postponed indefinitely," the Patent Office in its Delhi meeting said this issue called for an "exclusive meeting with the software industry."
The powerful IT software, services and outsourcing industry has been rooting for software patenting. Under the guile of the seemingly innocuous clause in the Indian Patent Bill 2005, software companies and the MNC lobby is trying to carve out a slice for the specific "software embedded with hardware" industry saying that it will increase the value of indigenous home-grown software, pump up software exports and thereby rake in greater revenue.
However, the other side of the story is worth telling. Software, per se, is simply a set of instructions to carry out a certain process. Software experts put forth the argument that big corporations — with money, muscle and hired talent — will seek to impose patents along the software value chain, starting from source code to the recent demand for "embedded software."
Sources in the Delhi Patent Office say that they receive around 50 applications for software patents every month. In the U.S. 25,000 patents are granted every year. In a software-driven world, blurring the lines between software and software "per se" could be risky. "Patenting is an expensive and tedious process. The challenge for every programmer would be to verify each time, to see if any two lines of his code would infringe upon a patent. In the U.S., a single verification can cost as much as $5,000. The fundamental issue is that if I arrive at anything independently, should I not use it only because someone had got it patented before me?" asks a senior official at Red Hat, an open source service provider.
A paper written by members of the Alternative Law Forum (ALF), the case against software patenting is presented as a very basic one. "Software evolves much faster than other industries, even with its own hardware industry. Microprocessors double in speed every two years. So, a patent that lasts up to 17 years (minimum period -15) is alarming. In this field, the idea underlying may remain the same but a product has to be replaced on an average of every two years," it states. The paper also points out that in software "research costs are little because ideas are as abundant as air."
Prashant Iyengar of ALF feels that patent laws will effectively
curtail innovation, like it has done in the U.S. "Software, unlike
other industries in India, is end-driven but is also on a "body
shopping" model. Given that, a strong start-up company will be either
be shut down or bought over if patent laws come in," he explains.
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Printer-friendly versionComments
by Arjiit (not verified) on Mon, 2008-09-29 14:23Regarding Software patents
You have to look at the history of patents to find out how they (I mean the big fishes) brought this idea to help them monopolize the industry.
During the 70's, the American courts declined patent applications for an algorithm to convert decimals to binary, because it was thought that computer software is a set of mathematical instructions. Things started to change within a decade - check out the Diamond vs. Diehr case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Diehr).
"The inventors, respondents, filed a patent application for a "process for molding raw, uncured synthetic rubber into cured precision products." The process of curing synthetic rubber depends on a number of factors including time, temperature and thickness of the mold. Using the Arrhenius equation (ln(v)=CZ+x) it is possible to calculate when to open the press and to remove the cured, molded rubber. The problem was that there was, at the time the invention was made, no way to obtain an accurate measure of the temperature without opening the press." (from the Wiki)
This marked the beginning of the long attempts to bring software under patent law. Further rulings, like "In re Alappat" and "State Street v. Signature Financial" basically legalised this in the US. The US Govt. started playing a big role during Clinton's presidency by fielding Bruce Lehman (a well known software corporation lobbyist) as the Patent Commissioner. And since 1995, they started issuing patents for various softwares.
But the software giants forget the issue of my right to information - I have a right to know all about whatever bullshit is running on my PC. And I have a right to mend it if it's broke. And by claiming patents, they are trying to curb my rights. Free software is not like free icecream, it's rather like free speech - and this forms the basis of the free software movement.
The dangers of software patents can be realised if you look at this article by Bruce Perens - The Monster Arrives: Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source Developers (http://technocrat.net/d/2006/6/30/5032) - this is how the software giants are trying to deal with this. Cowards.
And another one - http://progfree.org/Patents/industry-at-risk.html - describes how the patent regime proves to be a risk for the industry.
And the thing I'd like to say to these pro-patent IT leaders - you couldn't stop us from making Open Office read and save documents in MS Word format by keeping the MS format a secret; you couldn't stop us from creating Samba by keeping the Windows file system a secret; you'll never be able to curb the Open Source revolution - so just pack it.
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