Patent
Patent is a form of extreme "[1]intellectual property" that allows owning
useful ideas, oppressing and bullying people and preventing others from
using ideas -- software patents are especially harmful to society and
[2]technology. Patents are currently along with [3]copyright likely the
most [4]harmful kind of "intellectual property" in technology -- even
though copyright is probably a more pressing issue at the moment because
it is the most common form of IP oppression, patents can be just as
harmful in individual cases. Of course we're not even talking about the
whole gigantic bullshit bureaucracy and business connected to patents that
just wastes man centuries of effort. Examples of patents in software are
minigames on loading screens in games (this patent has already expired),
[5]shadow volume algorithm for rendering shadows, [6]mp3 format (also
expired), various [7]compression techniques, even such broad ideas as
public key encryption (yes, the whole idea that's the basis of
[8]cryptography was patented and unusable until 1977) etc.
There is an article on software patents at
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-patents.en.html. There is even a
site and initiative dedicated to ending software patents at
https://wiki.endsoftwarepatents.org/wiki/Main_Page.
Patents are kind of similar to but also very different from copyright
([9]Richard Stallman stressed the differences and says it is dangerous to
think of copyright and patents as similar): while copyright applies to
[10]art and is granted automatically, patents apply to ideas (which should
ideally be new inventions but in practice can be just any trivially stupid
ideas), have to be registered and are kept recorded somewhere. Patents
also last a shorter time than copyright (generally 20 years as opposed to
copyright's lifetime plus 70 years) and are territorial, i.e. not
world-wide. These facts make patents a bit less disastrous than copyright,
however they still cause a great deal of damage -- not only do they
prevent technological progress (a new ideas such as a new efficient
[11]algorithm is simply prohibited to be used by anyone but it's "owner"
and those who the owner sells a license), they also allow so called patent
trolling (patent scams) -- patent trolling takes advantage of the fact
that it is practically impossible to safely check if some idea is not
patented, i.e. safe to use. There exist troll companies whose sole
business is to register trivial patents and then sue random people who
unknowingly implement this idea in their projects (there is e.g. a famous
video about how this happened to the developer of X-plane, trolled by
Uniloc company that had patented the idea of using a "play store" to
distribute programs) -- the companies often bully developers to off court
settlement for paying a lower free but this includes a contract that
prevents the affected developers from talking about this.
Granting and checking patents is also becoming progressively more
difficult, expensive and sometimes basically impossible, as any new filed
patent has to be checked for how "innovative" it is. This means someone
has to literally go through all ideas ever invented in computer science
(impossible even for the biggest brain on the planet) and check if the new
submitted idea is really new -- given that computer science progresses by
lightning speed, every day it is becoming more and more difficult to check
patents. As time for checking a patent is limited, the result is many
false positives, errors and grants of patents on trivial or non-innovative
ideas, which has disastrous consequences. And of course, we're not even
talking about corruption -- patents are highly lucrative and it would be
naive to believe there are no cases of someone just buying a patent grant.
Many (probably most) [12]free software proponents, and just many
programmers in general, including for example [13]Richard Stallman,
[14]John Carmack or [15]Donald Knuth, have highly criticized the existence
of software patents. [16]Richard Stallman himself has been warning of the
dangers and has likened the world of patents to a mine field because when
you're programming, you have no idea whether an idea you get and implement
in your program isn't in fact "owned" by anyone, programming itself poses
risk of stepping on mines (patents).
As a good [17]free software developer you should use
[18]licenses/[19]waivers to get rid of patents! Similarly to copyright,
your software should come with a license or waiver that ensure patents
won't prevent others from exercising the four essential freedom rights,
i.e. there should be a legal document that says you grant others rights to
any of your patented ideas hiding in your source code so that others are
safe from you suing them if they reuse your potentially patent-infected
code (still, there may unfortunately be hiding patents from third parties
which cannot be addressed). Some licenses, such as [20]GPL or [21]Apache
include patent grants, however others such as [22]MIT or [23]CC0 don't or
have to be slightly modified to do so. This is an issue because there is
for example no nice way of dedicating one's work completely to the
[24]public domain complete with patent grants, as [25]CC0, [26]Unlicense
and [27]WTFPL don't address the patent issue -- with these an extra patent
waiver has to be manually added! Unlike with copyright, patent waivers
aren't always completely necessary, it is very possible that in many
simple and non-innovative projects there are no patented ideas, however
one can never be sure, so it is better to use a patent waiver just in
case, one can never go wrong by including it.
Which patent waiver to use? You may for example copy-paste the waiver from
[28]our own wiki.
Some patents are [29]fun and bullshit, e.g. there exist bizarre patents
that claim to achieve impossible things such as [30]perpetuum mobile or
infinitely efficient [31]compression of random data (nicely analyzed at
http://gailly.net/05533051.html).
See Also
* [32]intellectual property
* [33]copyright
* [34]trademark
Links:
1. intellectual_property.md
2. tech.md
3. copyright.md
4. harmful.md
5. shadow_volume.md
6. mp3.md
7. compression.md
8. cryptography.md
9. rms.md
10. art.md
11. algorithm.md
12. free_software.md
13. rms.md
14. john_carmack.md
15. knuth.md
16. rms.md
17. free_software.md
18. license.md
19. waiver.md
20. gpl.md
21. apache_license.md
22. mit.md
23. cc0.md
24. public_domain.md
25. cc0.md
26. unlicense.md
27. wtfpl.md
28. wiki_rights.md
29. fun.md
30. perpetuum_mobile.md
31. compression.md
32. intellectual_property.md
33. copyright.md
34. trademark.md