Bonum Certa Men Certa

New Evidence Arrives to Support Patent System Overhaul While EFF Pressures Congress



Boston University seal



Summary: A new study from Boston helps show that the patent system is flawed, just as the EFF argues

THE EFF managed to get a discussion about the patent system going. Red Hat's Open Source site summarises some of the key points that the EFF has been passing around the Web:



A new website—defendinnovation.org—neatly summarizes the EFF's position on software patents as well as the organization's proposed changes to the current patent system:

1. A patent covering software should be shorter: no more than five years from the application date. 2. If the patent is invalid or there's no infringement, the trolls should have to pay the legal fees. 3. Patent applications should be required to provide an example of running software code for each claim in the patent. 4. Infringers should avoid liability if they independently arrive at the patented invention. 5. Patents and licenses should be public right away. Patent owners should be required to keep their public records up-to-date. 6. The law should limit damanges so that a patent owner can't collect millions if the patent represented only a tiny fraction of a defendent's product. 7. Congress should commission a study and hold hearings to examine whether software patents actually benefit our economy at all.



Boston University has meanwhile released another one of its studies [1, 2, 3] about the patent system in the US. The BBC covered it:

The direct cost of actions taken by so-called "patent trolls" totalled $29bn (€£18.5bn) in the US in 2011, according to a study by Boston University.

It analysed the effect of intellectual rights claims made by organisations that own and license patents without producing related goods of their own.

Such bodies say they help spur on innovation by ensuring inventors are compensated for their creations.


With more scholarly work in the area we'll be better equipped to change the system for the better, led by influential groups like the EFF. Quoting The H:

Further information about the EFF's new patent reform project and details of each of the proposals can be found on the official Defend Innovation web site. On the site, users can also add their signatures and comments to a white paper that will be taken to the US Congress.


They actually take this up with politicians. This is a productive route. This needs to be done before software patents spread to the EU, like a lot of the policies that the US exports over time to the whole world (e.g. DMCA). Glyn Moody warns:

Once the Unitary Patent comes in, EPO patents will automatically be valid in all countries that have joined the scheme (Italy and Spain haven't.) The question then becomes: so where can the EPO's patents be challenged? In an excellent article on the Unitary Patent, Richard Stallman provides us with the answer:

"A small but crucial detail in the [Unitary Patent] plan is that appeals against the EPO's decisions would be decided based on the EPO's own rules. The EPO could thus tie European business and computer users in knots to its heart's content."

As we've seen, the EPO has already been granting software patents (tens of thousands of them according to Stallman) despite the European Parliament decision not to accept them; currently, those patents can be contested in national courts. But come the Unitary Patent, it won't be possible to do that; instead, the validity of the EPO patents will be decided according to the EPO's rules. It's easy to see that this will lead to a flood of software patents being validated across Europe, bringing with them the insane, destructive lawsuits that are currently tearing the US computer world to pieces. Needless to say, the knock-on effects for open source would be terrible if that happened.


We'll catch up with this next month.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Brett Wilson LLP Sent Over 5 Kilograms (or Over 12 Pounds) of Legal Papers! Because Writing About Microsoft Abuses is 'Illegal'.
How do you guys sleep at night? On a big pile of Microsoft money?
Extremism as a Weapon Against GNU/Linux (Microsoft Lunduke)
He ought to know the Halloween Documents. Wasn't he a Microsoft employee when these came out?
 
Microsoft-Sponsored Propaganda Site Has Removed False 'Hit Piece' About Dr. Stallman (With Fake and Misrepresented Imagery) But Only After 4 Years
So they only removed that page some time around 2025, i.e. about 4 years after it had been published
Always Check Your Inputs
Garbage in, garbage out. Or wrong assumptions, wrong corollary.
Dan Neidle Said That Tax Evasion Facilitator Mr Zahawi (Working to Silence Bloggers Through Brett Wilson LLP) Targeted Not Only Him (But The Others Kept Quiet)
"Mr Neidle said after repelling Mr Zahawi he was contacted by bloggers and tweeters who had received similar threats. They deleted their work “and in most cases never commented publicly on anything again”."
SLAPP Funding Transparency Urgently Needed in the UK and Elsewhere (in Practice, Not Just in Theory)
Writing about crime - including Microsoft crime - is not a crime
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 09, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, July 09, 2025
Elodie Bergot Still Doing Illegal Things at the EPO, Based on the Local Staff Committee Munich
They keep taking away from the staff while compelling the staff to do illegal things
Gemini Links 09/07/2025: Extreme Testing and Golang Documentation in Geminispace
Links for the day
Vice President of the European Patent Office (EPO) Complains That Techrights Gives Visibility to Legal and Technical Issues at the EPO
"Follow-up on enquiries relating to Dir. 1218 and 1001"
Slopwatch: linuxsecurity.com and Various Slopfarms That Lie About "Linux" and Are Promoted by Google News
Google does not seem interested in tackling this problem
Links 09/07/2025: War Updates and Microsoft Moving to India to Cut Costs
Links for the day
GNU/Linux Was Always a 'Movement' of Inclusion of Tolerance
Even the licences themselves remove access barriers
Links 09/07/2025: "Subprime AI Crisis" and "OpenAI May Be in Major Trouble Financially"
Links for the day
Huge Piles of Legal Papers ('Paper DDoS') Do Not Impress Judges and Regulators
they just make judges and regulators even more suspicious of the eagerness to resort to 'paper DDoS'
Lunduke Isn't Even Hiding His Anti-Linux Agenda (From "Linux Sucks" to "Linux is Pedophiles")
just trying to make a lot of trouble
Some People Use Computers to Get Actual Work Done
Tolerance and inclusion must extend to acceptance that some people don't agree with you, might never agree with you, and imposing what allegedly works for you on them is unreasonable
Example of "Old" Things That Still Work
The notion that something being "old" implies it must be discarded is typically advanced by those looking to sell more of something
Some Scheduled Maintenance Later Today
Typically the most vulnerable service during short interruptions is IRC
Computers Are Just a Tool
People don't get married because they love weddings, folks don't join the army because they love war, and most drivers don't drive to work because they love cars
Apple Way Past Its Prime
Apple deserves a decline
The FSF's SysOps Team Recovered From Serious Hardware Issue Within Hours
About half a day ago I noticed that all/most GNU/FSF sites were not reachable and thus reached out to a contact for any details
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 08, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, July 08, 2025
Slopwatch: Turning Bugs Into FUD About "Linux", Getting Basic Facts Wrong
all the screenshots are of fake articles; we don't want to link to any
Technical Reasons, Not Politics: With Wayland "it feels a lot like Linux from 20-25 years ago, which is horrendously frustrating, because it feels like we wasted one or two decades of progress and stability"
Lately, quite a few benchmarks were published to show Wayland compares poorly compared to what we had
PCLinuxOS Recovering From Fire
It looks like a nightmare scenario, where even backups onsite get destroyed
Links 09/07/2025: More Heatwaves, Officials Culled in Russia
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/07/2025: XScreensaver and Resurrection
Links for the day
Links 08/07/2025: "Cyberattack Deals Blow to Russian Firmware" and "Cash Remains King"
Links for the day
FSF40 T-shirt message
by Alex Oliva
Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Creativity, Gotify with NUT Server, and Sudo Bugs
Links for the day
More on "Lunduke is Actually Sending His Audience to Attack People"
"pepe the frogs"
Links 08/07/2025: Sabotage of Networking Infrastructure, Microsoft XBox Game Pass Deemed “Unsustainable”
Links for the day
Dalai Lama Succession as Evidence That Determined, Motivated People Can Reach Their Nineties
And we need to quit talking about their death all the time
Many Lawyers (for Microsoft) and 1,316 Pages to Pick on a Litigant in Person Who Exposed Serious Microsoft Abuses
Answers must be given
Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Ancillary Justice and Small Web July
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 07, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, July 07, 2025