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By heimdal31, Section IP Articles
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. 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.
Lawsuit to remove copyright for software | 27 comments (25 topical, 2 editorial, 6 hidden)
Lawsuit to remove copyright for software | 27 comments (25 topical, 2 editorial, 6 hidden)
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