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Lawsuit to remove copyright for software


General News

By heimdal31, Section IP Articles
Posted on Wed Dec 15th, 2004 at 14:27:55 EST

According to a CNN article Greg  Aharonian has sued in US District Court in San Francisco to have the copyright protection for software stripped and just leave patents, which would be the end of the GPL. According to the article:

Aharonian argues in his complaint that software copyright laws violate the right to due process enshrined in the U.S. Constitution because they do not provide clear boundaries for appropriate use. That means industry players and courts do not have a clear idea of the rules.

Aharonian runs his own website BustPatents.com where he complains about the quality coming out of the Patent Office.  Of course, he is not arguing that Business Method patents are bad, just that the government patent examiners are not doing a bad job of winnowing the wheat from the chaff.

Now, according to FFII.org, Gregory Aharonian is a bad guy who is actually for software patents and actually has attacked Lawrence Lessig, among others.

It does appear that Mr. Aharonian may be a bit prescient because, according to this Wired article, back in 2000 Aharonian was arguing the danger was "the real patent superpowers. . . gather revenue-generating patents en masse. While the industry battles over Amazon's two patents, he says, companies like IBM and Walker Digital will continue to quietly hoard stacks of software patents every year, grabbing new patents...[sending] stock valuations rocketing up by the hundreds of millions."  Sounds like a familiar complaint to most IPW readers.

Wired has this to say about his site:

Patnews, a sort of Drudge Report for the patent world, targets corporations, patent attorneys, bad patents, and, invariably, the PTO for the failures of the patent system. Patnews' 3,900 subscribers, and the many more who read forwarded copies, view him alternately as a self-serving wonk, a tireless public advocate, and a pain in the ass.

Equal parts intellectual property newswire and PTO scandal sheet, Patnews features chunks of patent text, patent-related news reports, and reader email, with Aharonian's bellicose opinions sprinkled throughout. Headlines like "Worst Internet Patent Claim of 1999" (for Sony's method of "automatically downloading and storing internet web pages") enliven an otherwise dry subject.

Aharonian's caustic sense of humor and his ability to synthesize patent issues have attracted an eclectic mix of subscribers and fans: patent lawyers, academics, software executives, and, most important, the PTO patent examiners who provide him with inside information. "He has done a lot of good," says UC Berkeley law professor and Patnews subscriber Robert Merges. "He shoots from the hip. But he's also given frustrated patent examiners an anonymous forum that they've never had."

I do not have a Pacer account, so I can't look up anything on the lawsuit.  My guess is that it has little chance of going anywhere.

My note is that if you removed copyright protection from code then the GPL is more than eviscerated.  If the only way to protect software was via patents, then the only people who would have protectable software would be the big boys who could afford the thousands it would require to acquire a patent.

Lest you think this is a disguise attack from some big software company, I'd point out that the Business Software Alliance is on record in the CNN story as against this--and that many of the big software companies do not have huge patent portfolios.  MS has only recently begun applying for patents.

So, while this may sound like a good idea on first blush, it would destroy the GPL and leave us only with BSD style Open Source.

< Three Takes on the Coming Marginalisation of MS-Windows (27 comments) | The 1956 Western Electric Co., and AT&T Consent Decree as text (13 comments) >
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Lawsuit to remove copyright for software | 27 comments (25 topical, 2 editorial, 6 hidden)
Church of the Numerati. (4.57 / 7) (#19)
by ColonelZen (tzellers lieth within pobox of thy kingdom com) on Sat Dec 18th, 2004 at 14:08:08 EST
(User Info)
Well, this idea that programs are not expressive is absurd.  Probably half the loc I write are either directly or just by habit and best practice designed to communicate the ideas to following maintainers.  Viz: when I write a subclass I frequently write a new accessor for the same variable that appears in the superclass but with a different name to distinguish how that variable is used in the subclass context; this method will do nothing different than the superclass method, it is not needed for "functionality" it is there for human use only.

The best way to fight idiocy is with more idiocy.

Hark!  I have just had a Revelation, received a sacred calling!

I hereby declare and create the Church of the Numerati, a calling and mission to bring people a closer understanding of the Nature of the Universe and Mind of God through Logic.

We are not exclusionary.  Those who believe as we need not forswear other beliefs and are in fact encouraged to compare and contrast and to seek enlightenment by reconciliation of other doctrines with our dogma wherever possible.

All Working Programs, in Whatever Language and Form are Hereby Considered Sacred Writings.  What Better Testimony of the Sanctity of the Human Mind than Expression of Ones Own Divine Thoughts in Dynamic and Reactive Form Outside Ones Body?  What Holier Purpose Can There Be than to Express Our Own Poor Understanding of the Mind of God than to Demonstrate that It Works in the Wider World, and to Share that with Ones Brothers and Sisters?

Thou Art Encouraged and Called Upon to Write Programs, to Express Algorithms and to Demonstrate Holy Logic, to Show the Nature of the Universe in Programs and Yes, even Lowly Scripts.

Thou Art Sanctified and Blessed to Share Thine Programs with Thy Brothers and Sisters in This Church of the Numerati and Communicate Thy Wisdom Revealed by the Sweat of Thy Brow to Other Seekers.

-- TWZ

Re: Lawsuit to remove copyright for software (4.40 / 10) (#16)
by harlan wilkerson on Fri Dec 17th, 2004 at 05:23:43 EST
(User Info)
His complaint suffers from two fatal flaws. First the Supreme Court has never found any property right in Article 1 section 8. Absent a property right, a due process complaint is moot. For example, in Florida Prepaid (a patent infringement case) they held that:

"Moreover, a state actor's negligent act causing unintended injury to a person's property does not "deprive" that person of property within the meaning of the Due Process Clause"

Even if it did, section 5 of the Fourteenth amendment gives Congress "power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, and etc. That is hardly a license for the courts to repeal those statutes. In fact he should petition the Congress to adopt a single federal idea-expression test on the basis of the equal protection clause. The courts could do that on their own though without changing one stanza of the existing copyright act.

The arbitrary nature of the copyright protections that he complains about aren't imposed by statute at all. He admits that much when he says ideas, methods, etc. are already excluded from copyright protection. The courts introduced doctrines like non-literal copying or the use of different standards in different federal districts to test the limits of the idea-expression dichotomy. For example, The 2nd Circuit's Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test in Altai was adopted and elaborated upon by the 10th in Bando, but the 1st circuit uses a different test adopted in Lotus that others - like the 10th Circuit- have rejected. Thus, it isn't true that "software copyright laws violate due process" because the laws are silent about these matters.

I must confess that I have not read anything this fellow had written. I had a feeling of deja vu though while reading this.

If you had been paying close attention, you could have caught him briefly saying the same thing in a Groklaw article around the time of the Grokline project launch, but there was no hint there about this lawsuit, or any analysis of his remarks. The page you cite about his bashing of Lessig says:

While the big names may get at least a chance for an answer, the choice of information made accessible by GregNews has over the years become very narrowly subservient to his policy goals, and critics are even denied read-only access.

I guess some things never change...;-)

Re: Lawsuit to remove copyright for software (4.00 / 7) (#17)
by JCausey (jcausey@ip-wars.net) on Fri Dec 17th, 2004 at 12:01:11 EST
(User Info) http://www.ip-wars.net
Aharonian has posted a copy of his complaint and setup a web page to explain his actions and I assume the future course of the lawsuit.

I've just started skimming through the complaint.  I did note that he cites the Computer Associates International Inc. v. Altai Inc. case (available here at ip-wars.net) quite a bit in one part.

Jeff

  • Aharonian knows by heimdal31, 12/17/2004 16:33:15 EST (4.57 / 7)
Re: Lawsuit to remove copyright for software (3.66 / 6) (#11)
by peragrin (falconr@juno.com) on Wed Dec 15th, 2004 at 16:48:00 EST
(User Info) home.rochester.rr.com/degarmoind/Peragrin
You while making some very good point don't understand licensing.

ALL Open Source licensing require copyrights, including the GPL, IBM's CPL, BSD's, Apache, MPL, ASPL, etc.

Taking software copyrights out would leave not only linux but all current software out hanging.

Unix, AIX, Tru64, IRIX, most of those aren't covered under Patents but under copyright.  I would be willing to bet large chucks of Windows is only under copyright & trade secrets.  

If this guy gets his way i am going to patent Graphical user interfaces.  the uses of 2 Dimentional windows to display text and graphics, represted through the use small squares I call pixels.  Sometimes I use vector orenination to draw objects, and sometimes I will use straight pixel mapping.  

Then all you Losers will owe me billions.  and don't ask for help from MSFT, cause they won't indemify you.  
I thought once I was found but it was only a dream

  • Re: Lawsuit to remove copyright for software by heimdal31, 12/15/2004 18:11:12 EST (4.00 / 6)
    • Re: Lawsuit to remove copyright for software by peragrin, 12/15/2004 19:15:45 EST (3.60 / 5)
      • You are correct by heimdal31, 12/15/2004 23:23:04 EST (3.60 / 5)
Rate This Article (3.60 / 10) (#3)
by postbot on Wed Dec 15th, 2004 at 01:28:06 EST
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Rate this article by voting for this comment.

  • Re: Rate This Article by pgk, 12/15/2004 04:57:00 EST (3.00 / 3)
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Bye bye spambot (none / 0) (#26)
by Potential Recruit on Tue Nov 28th, 2006 at 11:06:04 EST
This used to be a spambot post that is flooding the site. Due to volume, I had to resort to this while I work to block access by these bots. My apologies - thanks for your patience.

Jeff

Bye bye spambot (none / 0) (#27)
by Potential Recruit on Tue Nov 28th, 2006 at 12:10:19 EST
This used to be a spambot post that is flooding the site. Due to volume, I had to resort to this while I work to block access by these bots. My apologies - thanks for your patience.

Jeff

Lawsuit to remove copyright for software | 27 comments (25 topical, 2 editorial, 6 hidden)
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~ Greg &nbsp;Aharonian has sued in US District Court in San Francisco to have the copyright protection for software stripped
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