path: root/patent-madness.rst

Interview with Gary Edwards (ODF) and the madness of software patents
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:date: 2005-10-13T10:00:00
:category: computer
:tags: FLOSS, patents

If there is one line which could make anybody clearly understand madness
of the current U.S. practice of patenting everything, then it is this
one from `the interview with Gary Edwards`_ (one of co-authors of Open
Document Format):

    Microsoft’s new strategy in this second war is patents. They’re
    filing patents on how you use XML. They can’t *own* XML, so they are
    filing patents on ideas of how you *implement* XML. They're current
    goal is to file **at least 300 patents per day**, and they claim
    that they want to double and triple that amount yearly.

When I was in the law school, our professors used examples of Thomas
Alva Edison or Alexander Graham Bell (or their `Czech equivalents`_) to
explain why patents are useful for dissemination of groundbreaking
inventions and stimulating development, but there is no way that
Microsoft’s people would create 300 such groundbreaking inventions a
day. And the `only real software patent which IMHO would be worthy of
patenting`_ is in public domain. Well, `somebody is great`_ and somebody
has to fake it via legal methods.

.. _`the interview with Gary Edwards`:
    http://madpenguin.org/cms/index.php/?m=show&id=5304
.. _`Czech equivalents`:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franti%C5%A1ek_K%C5%99i%C5%BE%C3%ADk
.. _`only real software patent which IMHO would be worthy of patenting`:
    http://dblp.org/rec/journals/spe/KnuthP81
.. _`somebody is great`:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth