IEEE Supports Software Patents In Wake of Bilski

Mark Atwood points out this critical commentary on the IEEE's response to the outcome of In Re. Bilski, which points out the contrast between work done by IEEE luminaries like Donald Knuth and lobbying for software patents.

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IEEE doesn't support Open access

[ivoras]

Any organization which is as openly against open access to scientific articles (journals, conference proceedings) yet continues to wave its clout as IEEE does deserves to die out in infamy.

Re:The top 10 Bilski losers (besides Bilski &

[jgrahn]

The IEEE may consider itself and its most influential members to be among those who gain from the Bilski ruling and software patents, but here's my top ten list of losers:
1. The free software and open source communities
2. Software patent abolitionists
3. Small and medium-sized companies who can't or don't want to play the patent game
4. The proponents of bogus treatments: Linux Foundation, Open Invention Network etc.
5. The Patent Absurdity movie
6. Red Hat
7. Google's foray into new markets (Android, WebM)
8.Salesforce.com (Marc Benioff)
9. The "captive court" theory
10. IBM's open source credibility

You forgot us normal programmers, free software guys or not. Who wants to come up with a neat design, get himself or his company into trouble for it, and be forced to go back and tear out that neat design again?

Re:Tear up your membership cards

[XanC]

Please quit spamming this forum about this not being news.

You seem to be arguing that there is no such thing as a last straw, a tipping point. You seem to assume that everybody knows everything about IEEE's positions and history. You seem to believe that it's illogical for people to react to an organization doing something that they disagree with.

None of these are necessarily true. We're glad to hear that your opinion of IEEE was already so fully formed, but please let the rest of us react as we will.

I cancelled mine long ago

[mangu]

When they started publisinhg so many papers on watermarking and other forms of DRM I realized that the IEEE is no longer an institute of Engineers.

It has become now an institute of the electronics industry.

freely searchable database?...

[chichilalescu]

As I understand it, there's someone saying there are so many patents / laws that no one can be sure not to break them; you're saying that everyone is free to read those patents / laws, so this is not an issue. I remember that some time ago there was a story about some contracts (some company and their customers) that were written so that normal people couldn't really read them, and a judge decided the contract was void because of this. And I don't see a reason why someone should own an idea, just because he had it first. so what? subsequent discoveries of the same idea are still because someone worked for it. Today you can't claim patents help because someone steals ideas to claim as their own; there's arxiv for proving that you did what you did. My personal belief is that we are passed the point in human history where the concept of "intellectual property" is of any use. The thing is that today, if someone proves their worth as an inventor / programmer / artist / whatever, they will most likely be able to find at least a decently paid job, if not grants or something similar. It might take time, it might be problematic, but the only stable solution to the fact that information is so cheap will be to give up the idea of ownership of information.

Re:No win, No loose

[falconwolf]

It appears that the case is: No one won, No one lost.

Wrong, the Supreme Court left the door to software patents open and as long as software patents are allowed individual programmers, open source projects, small businesses, on up to medium businesses loses. The only ones to win are the mega-corporations that have the resources, money, to patent everything they can which they can then cross-license to other mega-corporations.

Falcon

Re:Patents as ex post facto

[Anonymous Coward]

There are so many patents / laws, that no one can be confident that he's in full compliance. ...and the reason there are so many patents is because the idea of IP is fundamentally flawed.

The problem as I see it reduces to this:

The ultimate standard for a trivial extension to an existing idea is whether two individuals independently think of the extension.

This is almost always the case, so almost everything is trivial.

The reason why average joe programmer or small business runs into these practices is precisely because they independently arrive at the idea that's patented, and then later discover it's patented. In my mind, the fact that they could come to the same idea independently invalidates the patent as being trivial.

Re:Patents as ex post facto

[falconwolf]

every patent is published, in a freely searchable database.

But is the source code published? A searchable database doesn't mean much if the searcher can't see how something was done. If more than one person creates a product that does X but they do it in different ways, it's too bad for those who do not get to the patent office in tyme to file a patent.

The first patent act was written in 1790, three years after the Constitution was written. I don't think it really departs from the founding father's intent, considering they were all involved in it. Thomas Jefferson was even the first patent examiner.

Two things here. One is that even when Thomas Jefferson was patent examiner a working copy was required so that the average professional in the industry could duplicate what was being patented. I doubt the compleat source code for software patents is included though. And two, software already enjoys copyrights. And even those copyrights don't include the compleat source code. According to Copyright Witness [copyrightwitness.com] only the first 25 pages of source code is needed.

Falcon