summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/talermerchantdemos/blog/articles/en/stallman-mec-india.html
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'talermerchantdemos/blog/articles/en/stallman-mec-india.html')
-rw-r--r--talermerchantdemos/blog/articles/en/stallman-mec-india.html2167
1 files changed, 2167 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/talermerchantdemos/blog/articles/en/stallman-mec-india.html b/talermerchantdemos/blog/articles/en/stallman-mec-india.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5572bc5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/talermerchantdemos/blog/articles/en/stallman-mec-india.html
@@ -0,0 +1,2167 @@
+<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
+<!-- Parent-Version: 1.77 -->
+
+<title>Stallman's Speech at Model Engineering College About Software Patent
+Dangers - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
+
+<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/stallman-mec-india.translist" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+
+<h2>The Danger of Software Patents (2001)</h2>
+
+<p><strong>Richard Stallman</strong></p>
+<p> <em>Speech given at Model Engineering College, Government of Kerala,
+India, 2001</em>
+(<a href="http://audio-video.gnu.org/audio/rms-mec-india.ogg">audio
+recording</a>)</p>
+<hr class="thin" />
+
+<div><h3>Summary</h3>
+
+<p><a href="#intro">Introduction of the speaker</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#conf">Stallman's speech</a></p>
+
+<ul>
+ <li><a href="#conf1">There are two things wrong with the phrase
+ &ldquo;intellectual property.&rdquo;</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf2">Copyrights and patents have nothing to do with each
+ other.</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf3">How the patent system works.</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf4">You have to work with a lawyer.</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf5">Avoid the patent.</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf6">License the patent.</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf7">Challenge the validity of the patent.</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf8">Nobody can reinvent the entire field of software.</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf9">The relationship between patents and products varies
+ between the fields.</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf10">Program development is hampered by software
+ patents.</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf11">What can a country do to avoid this problem?</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf12">Preventing India from having software patents will
+ be up to the citizens of India.</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf13">Businesses should demand opposition to software
+ patents.</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#conf14">It's important for countries to work together
+ against this.</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<p><a href="#questions">Questions from the audience</a></p>
+
+<ul>
+ <li><a href="#questions1">Questions about software patents</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#questions2">Questions about free software</a></li>
+</ul>
+</div> <!-- Summary -->
+
+<div><h3 id="intro">Introduction of the speaker</h3>
+
+<p><strong>Prof. Jyothi John, Head of Computer Engineering Department
+introduces Stallman:</strong></p>
+
+<p> It's my privilege and duty to welcome the most distinguished guest
+ever we had in this college.</p>
+
+<p> Mr. Richard Mathew Stallman launched the development of the GNU
+operating system in 1984, the goal being to create a completely free
+Unix-like operating system. The organization that was founded in 1985
+to further this purpose is the Free Software Foundation.</p>
+
+<p> Stallman is a visionary of computing in our times, and is the
+genius behind programs such as Emacs, GCC, the GNU debugger and more.
+Most importantly, he's the author of the GNU General Public License, the
+license under which more than half of all free software is distributed
+and developed. The combination of GNU with Linux, the kernel, called
+the GNU/Linux operating system, now has an estimated twenty million
+users worldwide.</p>
+
+<p> Stallman's concept of free software talks about freedom, rather
+than about price. His ideas go a long way into ensuring development of
+software for the welfare of society, collectively developed by programmers
+who do not &ldquo;lock up&rdquo; their work, but rather release it for
+others to study, modify and redistribute.</p>
+
+<p> Stallman received the Grace Hopper award from the Association for
+Computing Machinery for 1991, in 1990 he was awarded MacArthur Foundation
+Fellowship &mdash; other recipients of this prestigious award include Noam
+Chomsky and Tim Berners-Lee. In 1996, an honorary doctorate of Technology
+from the Royal Institute, Sweden was awarded to him. In 1998, he received
+the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, along with Linus
+Torvalds. In 1999 he received the Yuri Rubinski Memorial award.</p>
+
+<p> Today, Stallman will be talking about the danger of software patents.
+In fact this is one of the most important aspect of the freedom of
+programming because the aspect of software patents may make all programmers
+potential lawbreakers because unknowingly they may be violating some of the
+patents registered by some other company.</p>
+
+<h3 id="conf">Stallman's speech</h3>
+
+<p> After that introduction, I am sure many of you want to know about free
+software. But unfortunately that's not what I am supposed to speak about.
+In fact, this topic, software patents, is <em>not</em> very closely related
+to the issue of free software. Software patents are a danger that affect
+all programmers and all computer users. I found out about them, of course,
+in working on free software because they are a danger to my project as well
+as to every other software project in the world.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf1">There are two things wrong with the phrase
+&ldquo;intellectual property.&rdquo;</h4>
+
+<p> There is a very unfortunate phrase that you may have heard. It is the
+phrase &ldquo;intellectual property.&rdquo; Now, there are two things
+wrong with this phrase.</p>
+
+<p> One &mdash; it prejudges the most important policy question about how
+to treat some kind of ideas or practices or works, or whatever. It assumes
+that they are going to be treated as some kind of property. Now, this is a
+public policy decision and you should be able to consider various
+alternatives to choose the best one. Which means you shouldn't name the
+whole field, name the question with a term that prejudges what kind of
+answer you use.</p>
+
+<p> But second and even more fundamental, that term is actually a
+catchall for totally different areas of law, including copyrights,
+patents, trademarks, trade secrets and various other things as well. Now
+these areas of the law in fact have almost nothing in common. What the
+laws say is totally different from one to the next. Their origins are
+completely independent and the public policy issues they raise are
+completely different. So, the only intelligent way to think about them is
+to pick one of them and think about it; think about them separately.</p>
+
+<p> So the intelligent way to talk about them is never to generalize about
+them but to talk about a specific one, you know, talk about copyrights, or
+talk about patents, or talk about trademarks, but never lump them all
+together as intellectual property because that's a recipe for simplistic
+conclusions. It's almost impossible to think intelligently about
+&ldquo;intellectual property&rdquo; and so I refuse to do that. I just tell
+people why the term is a mistake, and then if you ask me for my opinion on
+copyrights or my opinion on patents, it will take me an hour to tell you
+it. But they are two different opinions, and my opinion about trademarks
+is something completely different as well.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf2">Copyrights and patents have nothing to do with each other.</h4>
+
+<p> So the most important thing for you to start with is never mix
+copyrights and patents as topics. They have nothing to do with each
+other. Let me tell you some of the basic differences between copyrights
+and patents:</p>
+
+<ul class="blurbs">
+ <li> A copyright deals with a particular work, usually a written work,
+ and it has to do with the details of that work. Ideas are completely
+ excluded. Patents, by contrast &mdash; well, a patent covers an idea.
+ It's that simple, and any idea that you can describe, that's what a
+ patent might restrict you from doing.</li>
+
+ <li> Copyrights have to do with copying. If you wrote something
+ that was word for word the same as some famous novel, and you could prove
+ that you did this while you were locked up in a room and you have never
+ seen that novel, this would not be copyright violation because it's not
+ copying. But a patent is an absolute monopoly on using a particular idea.
+ And even if you could show that you thought of it on your own, that
+ would be considered totally irrelevant. It doesn't help you.</li>
+
+ <li> Copyrights exist automatically. Whenever anything is written,
+ it's copyrighted. Patents are issued through an expensive
+ application process. There is an expensive fee and even more expense
+ in paying lawyers, which of course tends to be good for big companies.
+ And the patent office says that it only issues patents for things
+ that are unobvious. However, practically speaking, in many patent
+ offices the criterion is unobvious to somebody with an IQ of fifty.
+ And they have all sorts of excuses to ignore the fact that whenever any
+ programmer looks at it, his first statement is &ldquo;this is absurd,
+ it's obvious.&rdquo; They say &ldquo;well, this is hindsight.&rdquo; So
+ they just have an excuse to completely ignore the judgment of everybody
+ who really is a programmer.</li>
+
+ <li> Copyrights last an extremely long time. In the US today it's
+ possible for copyrights to last for 150 years, which is absurd. Patents
+ don't last that long; they merely last for a long time &mdash; 20 years,
+ which in the field of software, as you can imagine, is a long time.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p> There are many other differences as well. In fact every detail is
+different. So the worst thing you should ever do is learn something about
+copyrights and suppose that the same is true of patents. No, more likely
+it's not true of patents. If it's true of copyrights, it's not true for
+patents. That would be a better guideline if you have to guess.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf3">How the patent system works.</h4>
+
+<p> Now most of the time when people describe how the patent system works,
+they are people with a vested interest in the system. And so they describe
+the patent system from the point of view of somebody who wants to get a
+patent and then point it at programmers and say
+&ldquo;hand me your money.&rdquo; This is natural, you know; when they
+sell lottery tickets, they talk about people who win, not people who lose.
+Of course most of the people lose, but they don't want you to think about
+that, so they talk about the ones who win. It's the same with patents.
+The patent system is a very expensive lottery for its participants. But of
+course, the people who run the system want you to think about the small
+chance you might win.</p>
+
+<p> So to redress this imbalance, I am going to explain what the patent
+system looks like from the point of view of somebody who might be the
+victim of a patent; that is, somebody who wants to develop software.
+ Suppose that you want to develop a program and you are in a country that
+has software patents. How do you have to deal with the patent system? </p>
+
+<p> Well, the first thing is you have to find out about the patents
+that might potentially affect your area. This is impossible, because
+patents that are in the pipeline, being considered by the patent office,
+are secret. Well, in some countries they are published after 18 months
+but that still gives plenty of time for them to be secret. So you might
+develop a program this year, which is perfectly legal and safe this year.
+And then next year, a patent could be issued and all of a sudden you
+could be sued. It happens. Or your users could get sued.</p>
+
+<p> For instance, in 1984 the Compress program was developed and, since it
+was free software, it was distributed by many companies along with Unix
+systems. Well, in 1985, a US patent was issued on the LZW compression
+algorithm used by Compress, and after a few years Unisys began squeezing
+money out of various companies.</p>
+
+<p> Well, since we in the GNU project needed a data compression program
+and since we could not use Compress, we began looking for some other
+compression program. We found out about&hellip; Somebody came forward
+and said: &ldquo;I have been working on this algorithm for a year and
+now I have decided I am going to contribute it to you, and here is
+the code.&rdquo; We were a week away from releasing this program when I
+just happened to see a copy of the New York Times, which doesn't happen
+very often, and it just happened to have the weekly patents column and
+I noted it and so I read it. It said that somebody had got a patent
+for inventing a new method, a better method of data compression. Well,
+that was not in fact true.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>When I saw this, I thought we'd better get a
+copy of this patent and see if it's a problem, and it turned out to cover
+exactly the algorithm that we were about to release. So this program
+was killed one week before it was released. And in fact that person,
+that patent holder, had not invented a better method, because in fact
+it wasn't new. But that doesn't matter, he had a monopoly.</p>
+
+<p> Eventually we found another compression algorithm which is used in the
+program that's known as GZIP. But this illustrates the danger that you
+face: even if you had unlimited resources, you couldn't find out about
+all the patents that might endanger your project. But you can find out
+about the issued patents because they are published by the patent office.
+So in principle, you could read them all, and see what they restrict,
+what they prohibit you from doing. Practically speaking though, once
+there are software patents there are so many of them that you can't
+keep up with them.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>In the US there are over a hundred thousand of
+them; maybe two hundred thousand by now. This is just an estimate.
+I know that 10 years ago they were issuing 10,000 a year and I believe
+that it has accelerated since then. So it's too much for you to keep
+track of them unless that's your full-time job. Now you can try to
+search for the ones that are relevant to what you are doing, and this
+works some of the time. If you search for certain keywords or follow
+links, you'll find some patents that are relevant to what you're doing.
+You won't find them <em>all</em>.</p>
+
+<p> A few years ago somebody had a US patent &mdash; maybe it's
+expired by now &mdash; on natural order recalculation in spreadsheets.
+Now, what does this mean? It means the original spreadsheets did the
+recalculation always from top to bottom. Which meant that if a cell
+ever depended on a lower cell, then it wouldn't get recalculated the
+first time; you'd have to do another recalculation to get that one.
+Clearly it's better to do the recalculation in the order, you know.
+If A depends on B, then do B first and then do A. This way a single
+recalculation will make everything consistent. Well, that's what the
+patent covered.</p>
+
+<p> Now, if you searched for the term spreadsheet, you would not have
+found that patent because that term did not appear in it. The phrase
+&ldquo;natural order recalculation&rdquo; didn't appear either. This
+algorithm &mdash; and it was indeed the algorithm that they covered,
+basically every imaginable way of coding this algorithm &mdash; the
+algorithm is called topological sorting, and that term did not appear
+in the patent either. It presented itself as a patent on a technique
+for compilation. So, reasonable searching would not have found this
+patent but it would still have been a basis to sue you.</p>
+
+<p> In fact you can't tell what a software patent covers even roughly,
+except by studying it carefully. This is different from patents in other
+areas, because in other areas there is some physical thing happening,
+and the details of that physical thing usually give you a sort of anchor
+so that you can tell whether it relates or not. But in software there
+is no such thing, and so it's easy for two totally different ways of
+saying something to cover, in fact, the same computation, and it takes
+careful study to see that they cover the same one. Because of this,
+even the patent office can't keep track. So, there is not one, but
+two patents covering LZW data compression. The first one was issued in
+1985 and I think the second one in 1989. But that one I think had been
+applied for even earlier. One of these patents belongs to Unisys and
+the other belongs to IBM.</p>
+
+<p> Now, this kind of mistake is not in fact that rare. It's not the
+only one. You see, patent examiners don't have a lot of time to spend
+on one patent. In the US they have an average of 17 hours per patent.
+Now that's not enough to carefully study all the other patents in the
+area to see if they are really the same thing. So they are going to
+make this kind of mistake over and over.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf4">You have to work with a lawyer.</h4>
+
+<p> So you won't find all the patents that might threaten you but you'll
+find some of them. Then what do you do? You have to try to figure out
+precisely what these patents prohibit. That is very hard, because patents
+are written in tortuous legal language which is very hard for an engineer
+to understand. You are going to have to work with a lawyer to do it.</p>
+
+<p> In the 1980's the Australian government commissioned a study of
+the patent system &mdash; the patent system in general, not software patents.
+This study concluded that Australia would be better off abolishing the
+patent system because it did very little good for society and caused a lot
+of trouble. The only reason they didn't recommend that was international
+pressure. So one of the things they cited was that patents, which were
+supposed to disclose information so that it would no longer be secret,
+were in fact useless for that purpose. Engineers never looked at
+patents to try to learn anything, because it's too hard to read them.
+In fact they quoted an engineer saying &ldquo;I can't recognize my own
+inventions in patent deeds.&rdquo; Now this is not just theoretical.</p>
+
+<p> A few years ago, an engineer in the US named Paul Heckel was
+suing Apple. He got a couple of software patents in the late 80's for
+a software package, and then when he saw Hypercard he looked at it and
+said &ldquo; this is nothing like my program,&rdquo; and didn't think
+anymore of it. But then later on, his lawyer explained to him that if
+you read his patents carefully, Hypercard fell into the prohibited area.
+So he sued Apple, figuring this was an opportunity to get some money.
+Well, once when I gave a speech like this, he was in the audience, and he
+said &ldquo;oh no that's not true, I just wasn't aware of the scope of my
+protection.&rdquo; And I said &ldquo;yeah, that's what I said.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p> So you are going to have to spend a lot of time working with a
+lawyer and explaining to the lawyer what project you are working on, so
+the lawyer can explain to you what the patents imply. This is going to
+be expensive, and when you're done the lawyer will tell you something
+like this: &ldquo;If you do something in this area, you are almost
+sure to lose a lawsuit. If you do something in this area, you are in
+a substantial danger, and if you really want to be safe you'd better
+stay out of this area, and, of course there is a substantial element
+of chance in the outcome of any lawsuit.&rdquo; So now that you have
+a predictable terrain for doing business, what are you going to do?</p>
+
+<p> Well, you have three options to consider:</p>
+
+<ul>
+ <li>you can try to <a href="#conf5">avoid the patent</a>,</li>
+ <li>you can try to <a href="#conf6">license the patent</a>,</li>
+ <li>or you can try to <a href="#conf7">challenge its validity</a>
+ in court</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p> Any one of these three is sometimes a viable alternative, and sometimes
+not.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf5">Avoid the patent.</h4>
+
+<p> First, let's consider avoiding the patent. Well, in some cases that's
+easy. You know, Unisys was threatening people using the patent on LZW
+compression; we just had to find another data compression algorithm and
+we could avoid that patent. Well, that was somewhat difficult because
+there were many other patents covering lots of other data compression
+algorithms. But eventually we found one that was not in the area that
+those others' patents cover; eventually we did. So that program was
+implemented. It actually gave better compression results and so we now
+have GZIP, and a lot of people use GZIP. So, in that one case it was
+considerable work but we were able to do it, to avoid that patent.</p>
+
+<p> But in the 80's, CompuServe defined an image format called GIF and
+used LZW compression in defining it. Well, of course once the uproar
+about these patents became known, people defined another image format
+using a different compression algorithm. They used the GZIP algorithm,
+and that format is called PNG format, which I suppose means
+&ldquo;PNG is Not GIF.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p> But there was a problem: lots of people had already started using
+GIF format, and there were many programs that could display GIF format
+and produce GIF format and they couldn't display PNG format. So the
+result was people felt it was too hard to switch. You see, when you
+are dealing with a data compression program used by somebody who says
+&ldquo;I want to compress some data,&rdquo; well, you can give him a
+different data compression program; if he can get sued for using this
+one and you give him another one, he'll switch; but if what he wants
+to do is make images that can be displayed by Netscape, then he can't
+switch, unless Netscape handles the other format&hellip; and it didn't.
+
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>It took years, I think, before Netscape started to handle PNG format.
+So people essentially said &ldquo;I can't switch, I just have&hellip;
+&rdquo; And so the result was, society had invested so much in this one
+format, that the inertia was too great for a switch, even though there
+was another superior format available.</p>
+
+<p> Even when a patent is rather narrow, avoiding it can be very hard.
+The PostScript specification includes LZW compression, which we in our
+implementation of postScript cannot implement. We support another kind
+of compression in some sense that is not correct, even though it does the
+useful job. So, even a narrow patent is not always feasible to avoid.</p>
+
+<p> Now, sometimes a feature gets patented. In that case, you can
+avoid the patent by taking out that feature. In the late 80's the users
+of the word processor XyWrite got a downgrade in the mail. That word
+processor had a feature where you could define a short word or sequence
+as an abbreviation. Whenever you typed in that short sequence and then
+a space, it would turn into a longer expansion. You could define these
+any way you liked. Then somebody patented this, and XyWrite decided to
+deal with the patent by removing the feature. They contacted me because
+in fact I had put a feature like that into the original Emacs editor back
+in the 70's, many years before this patent. So there was a chance that
+I could provide evidence that would enable them to fight the patent.</p>
+
+<p> Well, this showed me that I had at least one patentable idea in
+my life. I know because someone else patented it. Now, of course,
+you can respond to these patented features by taking the features out.
+But once your program starts being missing several features that users
+want, it might be useless as a program.</p>
+
+<p> Now you may have heard of Adobe Photoshop. We have a program called
+the GIMP which is more powerful and general than Photoshop. But there
+is one important feature that it doesn't have which is Pantone color
+matching, which is very important for people who want to actually print
+the images on paper and get reliable results. This feature is omitted
+because it's patented. And as a result, the program for one substantial
+class of users is crippled.</p>
+
+<p> If you look at programs today, you'll see that they often provide
+many features, and the users demand these features. If any important
+feature is missing, well, it's easy to leave it out, but the results
+may be very bad.</p>
+
+<p> Of course, sometimes a patent is so broad that it's impossible to
+avoid it. Public key encryption is essential for computer users to have
+privacy. The whole field was patented. That patent expired just four years
+ago; there could be no free software in the US for public key encryption,
+until then: many programs, both free and nonfree, were wiped out by the
+patent holders. And in fact that whole area of computing was held back
+for more than a decade despite strong interest.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf6">License the patent.</h4>
+
+<p> So, that is the possibility of avoiding the patent. Another
+possibility that is sometimes available is to license the patent. Now,
+the patent holder is not required to offer you a license that's his whim.
+The patent holder can say &ldquo;I'm not licensing this, you're just
+out of business, period!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p> In the League for Programming Freedom, we heard in the early 90's
+from somebody whose family business was making casino games &mdash;
+computerized of course &mdash; and he had been threatened by somebody
+who had a patent on a very broad category of computerized casino games.
+The patent covered a network where there is more than one machine, and
+each machine supports more than one kind of game and can display more
+than one game in progress at a time.</p>
+
+<p> Now, one thing you should realize is the patent office thinks that
+it's really brilliant. If you see that other people implemented doing
+one thing and you decide to support doing two or more &mdash; you know,
+if they made a system that plays one game and if you make it able to
+play more than one game &mdash; that's an invention. If it can display
+one game and you decide to set it up so that it can display two games at
+once, that's an invention. If he did it with one computer and you do it
+with a network having multiple computers, that's an invention for them.
+They think that these steps are really brilliant.</p>
+
+<p> Of course, we in computer science know that this is just a rule,
+you can generalize anything from one to more than one. It's the most
+obvious principle there is. Every time you write a subroutine, that's
+what you're doing. So this is one of the systematic reasons why the
+patent system produces, and then upholds patents that we would all say are
+ridiculously obvious. You can't assume, just because it's ridiculously
+obvious, that they wouldn't be upheld by a court. They may be legally
+valid despite the fact that are utterly stupid.</p>
+
+<p> So he was faced with this patent and the patent holder was not even
+offering him the chance to get a license. &ldquo;Shutdown!&rdquo;
+is what the patent holder said, and that's what he eventually did.
+He couldn't afford to fight it.</p>
+
+<p> However, many patent holders will offer you a chance of a license.
+But it will cost you dearly. The owners of the natural order
+recalculation patent were demanding five percent of the gross sales of
+every spreadsheet. And that, I was told, was the cheap pre-lawsuit price.
+If you insisted on fighting over the matter, they were going to charge
+more. Now you could, I suppose, sign a license like that for one patent,
+you could do it for two, you could do it for three. But what if there are
+twenty different patents in your program, and each patent holder wants
+five percent of the gross sales? What if there are twenty one of them?
+Then you are pretty badly screwed. But actually business people tell
+me that two or three such patents would be such a big burden that they
+would make the company fail in practice, even if in theory it might have
+a chance.</p>
+
+<p> So, a license for a patent is not necessarily a feasible thing to do,
+and for us, free software developers, we're in an even worse position
+because we can't even count the copies, and most licenses demand a fee per
+copy, so it's absolutely impossible for us to use one of those licenses.
+You know, if a license charged one millionth part of a rupee for each
+copy, we would be unable to comply because we can't count the copies.
+The total amount of money, I might have in my pocket, but I can't count
+it so I can't pay it. So we suffer some special burdens occasionally.</p>
+
+<p> But there is one kind of organization for which licensing patents
+works very well, and that is the large multinational corporations;
+the reason is that they own many patents themselves and they use them
+to force cross-licensing. What does this mean? Well, essentially the
+only defense against patents is deterrence: you have to have patents of
+your own, then you hope that if somebody points a patent at you, you will
+be able point a patent back and say &ldquo;don't sue me, because I'll
+sue you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p> However, deterrence doesn't work as well for patents as it does
+with nuclear weapons, and the reason is that each patent is pointed in
+a fixed direction. It prohibits certain specified activities. So the
+result is that most of the companies that are trying to get some patents
+to defend themselves with, they have no chance of making this a success.
+They might get a few patents, you know. So they might get a patent
+that points there, and they might get a patent that points there. OK,
+and then, if somebody over here threatens this company, what are they
+going to do? They don't have a patent pointing over there, so they have
+no defense.</p>
+
+<p> Meanwhile, sooner or later, somebody else will wander over there
+and the executive of the company will think &ldquo;gee, we're not as
+profitable as I would like, why don't I go just squeeze some money out
+of them.&rdquo; So they say first &ldquo;we're getting this patent for
+defensive purposes,&rdquo; but they often change their minds later when
+a tempting victim walks by.</p>
+
+<p> And this, by the way, is the fallacy in the myth that the patent
+system &ldquo;protects&rdquo; the &ldquo;small inventor.&rdquo; Let me
+tell you this myth, it's the myth of the starving genius. It's somebody
+who has been working in isolation for years, and starving, and has
+a brilliant new idea for how to do something or other. And so, now,
+he's starting a company and he is afraid some big company like IBM will
+compete with him, and so he gets a patent and this patent is going to
+&ldquo;protect him.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p> Well, of course, this is not the way things work in our field.
+People don't make this kind of progress in isolation this way. They are
+working with other people and talking with the other people and they
+are developing software usually. And so the whole scenario doesn't
+make sense, and besides, if he was such a good computer scientist,
+there was no need for him to starve. He could have got a job at any
+time if he wanted.</p>
+
+<p> But let's suppose that this happened, and suppose that he has his
+patent, and he says &ldquo;IBM, you can't compete with me 'cause I've got
+this patent.&rdquo; But here is what IBM says: &ldquo;Well, gee, let's
+look at your product, hmm, I have this patent, and this patent and this
+patent and this patent and this patent that your product is violating.
+So how about if we cross-license?&rdquo; And the starving genius says
+&ldquo;hmm, I haven't got enough food in my belly to fight these things,
+so I'd better give in.&rdquo; And so they sign a cross-license, and
+now guess what &mdash; IBM can compete with him. He wasn't protected
+at all!</p>
+
+<p> Now, IBM can do this because they have a lot of patents. They have
+patents pointing here, here, here, everywhere. So, anybody from almost
+anywhere that attacks IBM is facing a stand-off. A small company can't
+do it but a big company can.</p>
+
+<p> So IBM wrote an article. It was in Think magazine, I believe, issue
+number five, 1990 &mdash; that's IBM's own magazine &mdash; an article
+about IBM's patent portfolio. IBM said that it got two kinds of benefit
+from its 9000 active US patents. One benefit was collecting royalties
+from licenses. But the other benefit, the bigger benefit, was access
+to things patented by others. Permission to not be attacked by others
+with their patents, through cross-licensing. And the article said that
+the second benefit was an order of magnitude greater than the first.
+In other words, the benefit to IBM of being able to make things freely,
+not being sued, was ten times the benefit of collecting money for all
+their patents.</p>
+
+<p> Now the patent system is a lot like a lottery, in that what happens
+with any given patent is largely random and most of them don't bring any
+benefits to their owners. But IBM is so big that these things average
+out over the scale of IBM. So you could take IBM as measuring what the
+average is like. What we see is &mdash; and this is a little bit subtle
+&mdash; the benefit to IBM of being able to make use of ideas that were
+patented by others is equal to the harm that the patent system would have
+done to IBM if there were no cross-licensing &mdash; if IBM really were
+prohibited from using all those ideas that were patented by others.</p>
+
+<p> So what it says is: the harm that the patent system would do is
+ten times the benefit, on the average. Now, for IBM though, this
+harm doesn't happen, because IBM does have 9000 patents and does force
+most of them to cross-license, and avoids the problem. But if you are
+small, then you can't avoid the problem that way, and you will really
+be facing ten times as much trouble as benefit. Anyway, this is why
+the big multinational corporations are in favor of software patents, and
+they are lobbying governments around the world to adopt software patents
+and saying naive things like &ldquo;this is a new kind of monopoly for
+software developers, it has to be good for them, right?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p> Well, today, after you have heard my speech I hope you understand
+why that isn't true. You have to look carefully at how patents affect
+software developers to see whether they are good or bad, and explaining
+that is my overall purpose.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf7">Challenge the validity of the patent.</h4>
+
+<p> So, that is the possibility of licensing a patent. The third possible
+option is to go to court and challenge the validity of the patent.</p>
+
+<p> Now the outcome of this case will depend largely on technicalities,
+which means essentially on randomness, you know. The dice were rolled
+a few years ago, and you can investigate and find out what the dice
+came up saying, and then you'll find out whether you've got a chance.
+So it's mainly historical accident that determines whether the patent
+is valid &mdash; the historical accident of whether, or precisely which
+things, people happen to publish, and when.</p>
+
+<p> So, sometimes, there is a possibility of invalidating. So even if
+a patent is ridiculously trivial, sometimes there is a good chance of
+invalidating it and sometimes there is none.</p>
+
+<p> You can't expect the courts to recognize that it is trivial, because
+their standards are generally much lower than we would think are sensible.
+In fact, in the United States, this has been a persistent tendency.
+I saw a Supreme Court decision from something like 1954, which had a
+long list of patents that were invalidated by the Supreme Court starting
+in the 1800's. And they were utterly ridiculous, like making a certain
+shape of doorknob out of rubber, when previously they'd been made out
+of wood. And this decision rebuked the patent system for going far,
+far away from the proper standards. And they just keep on doing it.</p>
+
+<p> So you can't expect sensible results from that, but there are
+situations where, when you look at the past record, you see that there is
+a chance to invalidate a certain patent. It's worth the try, at least
+to investigate. But the actual court cases happen to be extremely
+expensive.</p>
+
+<p> A few years ago, one defendant lost and had to pay 13 million
+dollars, of which most went to the lawyers on the two sides. I think
+only 5 million dollars was actually taken away by the patent holder,
+and so there were 8 million to the lawyers.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf8">Nobody can reinvent the entire field of software.</h4>
+
+<p> Now, these are your possible options. At this point, of course, you
+have to write the program. And there, the problem is that you face this
+situation not just once but over and over and over, because programs today
+are complicated. Look at a word processor; you'll see a lot of features,
+many different things, each of which could be patented by somebody, or a
+combination of two of them could be patented by somebody. British Telecom
+has a patent in the US on the combination of following hypertext links
+and letting the user dial up through a phone line. Now these are two
+basically separate things, but the combination of the two is patented.</p>
+
+<p> So, that means if there are 100 things in your program, there are
+potentially some five thousand pairs of two that might be patented by
+somebody already, and there is no law against patenting a combination of
+three of them either. That's just the features, you know. There's going
+to be many techniques that you use in writing a program, many algorithms,
+they could be patented too. So there are lots and lots of things that
+could be patented. The result is that developing a program becomes
+like crossing a field of land mines. Sure, each step probably will not
+step on a patent, each design decision. Chances are it will be safe.
+But crossing the whole field becomes dangerous.</p>
+
+<p> The best way for a nonprogrammer to understand what this is like is
+to compare the writing of these large programs with another area in which
+people write something very large: symphonies. Imagine if the governments
+of Europe in the 1700's had wanted to promote progress in symphonic music
+by adopting a system of music patents, so that any idea that could be
+described in words could be patented if it seemed to be new and original.
+So you'd be able to patent, say, a three-note melodic motif which is
+be too short to be copyrightable, but it would have been patentable.
+And maybe they could have patented a certain chord progression, and maybe
+patented using a certain combination of instruments playing at the same
+time, or any other idea that somebody could describe.</p>
+
+<p> Well, by 1800 there would have been thousands of these music
+idea patents. And then imagine that you are Beethoven and you want
+to write a symphony. To write a whole symphony, you are going to have
+to do lots of different things, and at any point you could be using an
+idea that somebody else has patented. Of course, if you do that he'll
+say: &ldquo;Oh! You are just a thief, why can't you write something
+original?&rdquo; Well, Beethoven had more than his share of new musical
+ideas, but he used a lot of existing musical ideas. He had to, because
+that's the only way to make it recognizable. If you don't do that,
+people won't listen at all. Pierre Boulez thought he was going to totally
+reinvent the language of music, and he tried, and nobody listens to it,
+because it doesn't use all the ideas that they're familiar with.</p>
+
+<p> So you have to use the old ideas that other people have thought of.
+Nobody is such a genius that he can reinvent the entire field of software
+and do useful things without learning anything from anybody else.
+So in effect, those people, the patent holders and their lawyers, they
+are accusing us of being cheaters because we don't totally reinvent the
+field from scratch. We have to build on previous work to make progress,
+and that is exactly what the patent system prohibits us from doing.
+And we have to provide features that the users are accustomed to and
+can recognize, or they'll find our software just too difficult to use
+no matter how good it is.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf9">The relationship between patents and products varies
+between the fields.</h4>
+
+<p> Now, people sometimes ask me: why is software different from other
+fields? Sometimes, of course they ask this in a rather nasty fashion,
+they say: &ldquo;the other fields can deal with patents, why should
+software be an exception?&rdquo; Now that's a nasty way of putting it
+because it's making the assumption that it's wrong to want to escape
+from a problem. I could imagine I am saying: &ldquo;well, other people
+could get cancer, why shouldn't you?&rdquo; Clearly, if it's a problem,
+enabling any field to escape is good. But it is a good and serious
+question: are these fields the same issue? Do patents affect all these
+fields the same way? Is the right policy for software the same as
+the right policy for automobile engines or pharmaceuticals or chemical
+processes, you know, this is a serious question which is worth looking
+at.</p>
+
+<p> When you look at it, what you see is that the relationship between
+patents and products varies between the fields. At one extreme you have
+pharmaceuticals where typically a whole chemical formula is patented. So
+if you come up with a new drug, then it's not patented by somebody else.
+At the other extreme is software where, when you write a new program,
+you are combining dozens or hundreds of ideas, and we can't expect them
+all to be new. Even an innovative program, which has a few new ideas,
+has to use lots and lots of old ideas too. And in between you find the
+other fields. Even in other fields, you can get patent deadlock.</p>
+
+<p> When the United States entered World War I, nobody in the US could
+make a modern airplane. And the reason was that modern airplanes use
+several different techniques that were patented by different companies,
+and the owners hated each other. So nobody could get a license to
+use all these patents. Well, the US government decided that this was
+an unacceptable state of affairs, and essentially paid those patent
+holders a lump sum and said &ldquo;we have nationalized these patents;
+now, everybody, go make airplanes for us!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p> But the amount to which this happens, the frequency and the
+seriousness of it varies according to how many different ideas go in one
+product. It varies according to how many points of patent vulnerability
+there are in one product. And in that question, software is at the
+extreme.</p>
+
+<p> It's not unusual for a few people working for a couple of years to
+write a program that could have a million parts in it, different parts,
+which is maybe, say, 300,000 lines of code. To design a physical system
+that has a million different parts, that's a mega-project, that's very
+rare. Now you'll find many times people make a physical object with a
+million parts, but typically it's many copies of the same subunit and
+that's much easier to design &mdash; that's not a million different
+parts in the design.</p>
+
+<p> So, why is this? The reason is that, in other fields, people have
+to deal with the perversity of matter. You are designing circuits
+or cars or chemicals, you have to face the fact that these physical
+substances will do what they do, not what they are supposed to do. We in
+software don't have that problem, and that makes it tremendously easier.
+We are designing a collection of idealized mathematical parts which
+have definitions. They do exactly what they are defined to do.</p>
+
+<p> And so there are many problems we don't have. For instance, if we
+put an if statement inside of a while statement, we don't have to worry
+about whether the if statement can get enough power to run at the speed
+it's going to run. We don't have to worry about whether it will run at
+a speed that generates radio frequency interference and induces wrong
+values in some other parts of the data. We don't have to worry about
+whether it will loop at a speed that causes a resonance and eventually
+the if statement will vibrate against the while statement and one of them
+will crack.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>We don't have to worry that chemicals in the environment
+will get into the boundary between the if statement and the while
+statement and corrode them, and cause a bad connection. We don't have
+to worry that other chemicals will get on them and cause a short-circuit.
+We don't have to worry about whether the heat can be dissipated from this
+if statement through the surrounding while statement. We don't have
+to worry about whether the while statement would cause so much voltage
+drop that the if statement won't function correctly. When you look at
+the value of a variable you don't have to worry about whether you've
+referenced that variable so many times that you exceed the fan-out limit.
+You don't have to worry about how much capacitance there is in a certain
+variable and how much time it will take to store the value in it.</p>
+
+<p> All these things are defined a way, the system is defined to function
+in a certain way, and it always does. The physical computer might
+malfunction, but that's not the program's fault. So, because of all these
+problems we don't have to deal with, our field is tremendously easier.</p>
+
+<p> If we assume that the intelligence of programmers is the same as
+the intelligence of mechanical engineers, and electrical engineers and
+chemical engineers and so on, what's going to happen? Those of us with
+the easiest field, fundamentally, are going to push it further. We make
+bigger and bigger things and eventually it becomes hard again. That's why
+we can develop much bigger systems than the people in the other fields.
+They just have these hard problems to deal with all the time. In the
+other fields, it may be necessary to develop an idea. You may have the
+idea, but then you may have to try out lots of different ways to get
+it to work at all. In software it's not like that, you have the idea
+and what you go and do is you write a program which uses this idea,
+and then the users may like it or not. And if they don't like it,
+probably you can just fix some details and get it to work.</p>
+
+<p> There is another problem that we don't have to worry about:
+manufacturing of copies. When we put this if statement inside the
+while statement, we don't have to worry about how the if statement is
+going to be inserted into the while statement as a copy is being built.
+We don't have to worry either about making sure we have access to remove
+and replace this if statement if it should burn out. So all we have to do
+is type &ldquo;copy&rdquo; and it's an all-purpose copy-anything facility.
+People making physical equipment and physical products, they can't do
+that, these things have to be built piece by piece each time.</p>
+
+<p> The result is that for them, the cost of designing a system of a
+certain complexity may be (gesturing) this much and the factory may
+take this much to set up. So they have to deal with this much from the
+patent system. It's a level of overhead they can live with. For us,
+designing it may cost (gesturing) this much and manufacturing it may cost
+this much, so this much overhead from the patent system is crushing.</p>
+
+<p> Another way to look at it is that because we can &mdash; a few of
+us can &mdash; make a much bigger system, there are many more points
+of vulnerability where somebody might have patented something already.
+We have to walk a long distance through the mine field, whereas they
+they only have to walk a few feet through the minefield. So it's much
+more of a dangerous system for us.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf10">Program development is hampered by software patents.</h4>
+
+<p> Now, you have to realize that the ostensible purpose of the patent
+system is to promote progress. This is something that is often forgotten
+because the companies that benefit from patents like to distract you
+from it. They like to give you the idea that patents exist because they
+deserve special treatment. But this is not what the patent system says.
+The patent system says: the goal is to promote progress for society,
+by encouraging certain behavior like publishing new ideas; and after a
+certain &mdash; originally that was fairly short &mdash; time, everyone
+could use them.</p>
+
+<p> Of course there is a certain price that society pays as well, and so
+we have to ask the question: which is bigger, the benefit or the price?
+Well, in other fields, I am not sure. I am not an expert on other
+fields of engineering, I've never done them and I don't know whether
+having patents is good for progress in those fields.</p>
+
+<p> I have been in software since before software patents existed, and
+I know that software patents do a lot of harm and essentially no good.
+In the old days, ideas came along. Either people in a university had
+an idea, or somebody had an idea while he was working on developing
+software. And either way, these ideas got published, and then everyone
+could use them. Now why did the software publishers publish these ideas?
+Because they knew that the big job was writing the program.</p>
+
+<p> They knew that publishing the ideas would get them credit from the
+community, and meanwhile anybody else who wanted to compete with them
+would still have to write a program, which is the big job. So they
+typically kept the details of the program secret &mdash; of course some
+of us think that's wrong, but that's a different issue. They kept the
+details of the program secret and they published the ideas, and meanwhile
+the software development &mdash; because software development was going
+on &mdash; That provided the field with a steady stream of ideas, so
+ideas were not the limiting factor. The limiting factor was the job of
+writing programs that would work and that people would like using.</p>
+
+<p> So, in effect, applying the patent system to software focuses on
+facilitating a thing which is not the limiting factor, while causing
+trouble for the thing which is the limiting factor. You see the software
+patents encourage somebody to have an idea, but at the same time they
+encourage people to restrict its use, so in fact we are actually worse
+off now in terms of having ideas we could use, because in the past people
+had the ideas and published them and we could use them, and now they
+have the ideas and patent them and we can't use them for twenty years.
+In the mean time, the real limiting factor &mdash; which is developing
+the programs &mdash; this is hampered by software patents because of
+other dangers that I explained to you in the first half of this talk.</p>
+
+<p> So the result is that, while the system is supposed to be promoting
+progress in software, actually it is so screwed up it's just obstructing
+progress.</p>
+
+<p> Today we have some economic research showing mathematically how this
+can happen. You can find it in <a
+href="http://www.researchoninnovation.org">www.researchoninnovation.org</a>.
+I am not completely sure of the name of the paper, but it's one
+that shows that in a field where incremental innovation is typical,
+having a patent system can result in slower progress. In other words the
+system produces counter-intuitive results that are the opposite of what it
+was intended to do. This backs up the intuitive conclusion of every
+programmer who sees that software patents are absurd.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf11">What can a country do to avoid this problem?</h4>
+
+<p> So, what can a country do to avoid this problem? Well, there are
+two approaches: one is to address the problem at the issue of granting
+patents, and the other is to approach it at the point where patents are
+being enforced.</p>
+
+<p> Doing this at the stage of granting patents is not quite as easy
+as you might think. Now, I have been talking about software patents
+but strictly speaking you can't classify patents into hardware patents
+and software patents, because one patent might cover both hardware and
+software. So in fact my definition of a software patent is: a patent
+that can restrict software development.</p>
+
+<p> And if you look at many software patents you often find that the
+system they describe has a large part of the computer itself as part of
+the description of what's going on. That's a great way of making the
+whole thing seem complicated when it is really trivial. So it's a way
+they can get the patent office to decide it's unobvious.</p>
+
+<p> But there is a different criterion that can be used, a slightly
+different place to draw the line that still does a reasonable job, and
+that is between processes that transform matter in a specific way, and
+processes where the result is just calculation and display of information,
+or a combination of data processing and display steps &mdash; or others
+have put it as: mental steps being carried out by equipment. There are
+various ways of formulating this, which are more or less equivalent.</p>
+
+<p> Now this is not exactly the same as prohibiting software patents,
+because in some cases computers are used as part of specific physical
+equipment to make it do a specific thing. And software patents might be
+allowed if they are part of a specific physical activity. But that's not
+really a disaster. After all, once people are involved in a specific
+physical activity or a specific physical product, they are bringing
+into their whole business all those complexities of dealing with matter.
+So it's more like those other fields of engineering. Maybe it's okay to
+have patents on that narrow kind of software. As long as we can keep the
+core areas of software, the purely software activities safe from patents,
+we have solved the bulk of the problem.</p>
+
+<p> So that is a feasible approach and that's what people are working
+towards in Europe. However, that is not going to be any use in the
+United States because the United States already has tens of thousands,
+probably hundreds of thousands of software patents. Any change in the
+criteria for issuing patents does not help at all with the patents that
+already exist.</p>
+
+<p> So what I propose to the United States is to change the criteria
+for applying patents, to say that <em>purely software systems running
+on general purpose computing hardware are immune from patents</em>.
+They by definition cannot infringe a patent. And this way the patents
+can still be granted exactly the way they are now, and they can still,
+in a formal sense, cover both hardware implementations and software
+implementations as they do now. But software will be safe.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf12">Preventing India from having software patents will be
+up to the citizens of India.</h4>
+
+<p> That's the solution I propose to the US, but it could be used in
+other countries as well.</p>
+
+<p> Now, one of the tremendous dangers facing most countries today
+is the World Trade Organization, which sets up a system of corporate
+regulated trade &mdash; not free trade as its proponents like to call
+it, but corporate regulated trade. It replaces the regulation of trade
+by governments, that are somewhat democratic and might listen to the
+interest of their citizens, with regulation of trade by businesses,
+which don't pretend to listen to the citizens. So it's fundamentally
+antidemocratic and ought to be abolished.</p>
+
+<p> But it's crucial to note that the part of the GATT agreement which
+deals with patents does not require software patents. Many experts who
+have studied this, for instance in Europe, make this claim. And the
+reason is that they interpret technical effect as: there is a specific
+physical consequence or physical system going on. And so the software
+that doesn't do that doesn't have to be in the domain that patents
+can cover.</p>
+
+<p> So, at least you don't have to worry about the Word Trade Organization
+causing problems here, despite the tremendous problems they cause in
+other areas of life.</p>
+
+<p> Preventing India from having software patents will be up to you
+&mdash; to the citizens of India. I am a foreigner, I have no influence
+except when I can convince other people through the logic of what I say.
+There is a chance that you can do this. When the US started to have
+software patents, the public policy question was not considered at all.
+Nobody even asked whether it was a good idea to have software patents.
+The Supreme Court made a decision which was then twisted around by an
+appeals court, and ever since then, there were software patents.</p>
+
+<p> But when Europe started to consider officially authorizing software
+patents a few years ago, public opposition started to rise and became
+so strong that the politicians and the parties began paying attention
+to it, and started saying they were against it. In fact two attempts
+to authorize software patents have been blocked already in Europe.
+The French Minister of Industry says that software patents would be a
+disaster and under no circumstances should they be allowed in France.
+All of the German political parties have taken a stand against software
+patents.</p>
+
+<p> The battle is not yet over, you know. We have not conclusively
+blocked software patents in Europe, because the multinational companies
+and their servant, the United States government, is lobbying very hard,
+and they have ignorance on their side. It's so easy for somebody with
+a naive neo-liberal view to be persuaded that a new kind of monopoly
+has to be good!</p>
+
+<p> You have to look at the details of how software patents affect
+software development to see that they cause a problem. You have to
+study that economic research in its mathematics in order to see why you
+shouldn't assume that patents always promote progress. So, it's easy
+for IBM to send a lobbyist to someone and say: &ldquo;You should really
+adopt software patents, they are great for programming. And look, the US
+is ahead and the US has software patents. If you have software patents
+too, you might catch up.&rdquo; Well, you can't get more dominant than
+that, and the US was ahead in computers before it had software patents,
+it can't be because of software patents.</p>
+
+<p> It's important to understand that each country has its own patent
+system and its own patent laws and what you do in a certain country is
+under the jurisdiction of that country's patent law. So the result is,
+that if the US has software patents, the US becomes a sort of battleground
+where anybody using computers might get sued. If India avoids software
+patents, then India is not a battleground, and computer users in India
+do not face this danger of getting sued.</p>
+
+<p> It turns out that each country will issue patents to foreigners,
+just as to its own citizens. So in fact, in a place which has this
+scourge of software patents, foreigners can own those patents. There are
+lots of non-US companies that own US software patents, so they are all
+welcome to get involved in the fighting in the US. Of course it's we
+Americans who become the victims of this. Meanwhile, in India, if there
+are no software patents, that means both Indian companies and foreign
+companies are prevented from coming into India and attacking people with
+software patents.</p>
+
+<p> So, yes it is important that each country has its own patent law.
+That makes a big difference, but you've got to understand what difference
+it makes. Having software patents in a certain country is not an
+advantage for the developers in that country. It's a problem for anybody
+distributing and using software in that country.</p>
+
+<p> Now, if you in India are developing a program for use in the US,
+you may face the problem &mdash; or at least your client will face the
+problem &mdash; of US software patents. At least probably you can't
+get sued here. The client who commissioned the program and tries to use
+it might get sued in the US, and indeed you will have to deal with the
+problem &mdash; the US's problems &mdash; when you try doing business
+in the US. But at least you'll be safe here. You know, at least it is
+a big difference between your client got sued because your client told
+you to make a product and that product is patented, versus you get sued
+for making that product.</p>
+
+<p> If there are software patents in India, then you will get sued.
+Whereas in the current situation, at least you can say to the client:
+&ldquo;You told us to make this and we made it. So, I'm sorry this
+happened to you but it's not our fault.&rdquo; Whereas if there are
+software patents in India, you'll get sued yourself and there is nothing
+you can say about that.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf13">Businesses should demand opposition to software
+patents.</h4>
+
+<p> So the ultimate conclusion is that software patents tie all software
+developers, all computer users and essentially all businesses in a
+new kind of bureaucracy, which serves no beneficial social purpose.
+So it's a bad policy and it should be avoided.</p>
+
+<p> Businesses don't like bureaucracy. If businesses knew that they were
+threatened with a new kind of bureaucracy, they would oppose software
+patents very strongly. But most of them aren't aware of this.</p>
+
+<p> In the US, software patents have led directly to business method
+patents. What does this mean? A business method is basically how
+you make decisions about what to do in the business. And in the past,
+these decisions were made by humans but now sometimes they are made by
+computers, and that means they are carried out by software, and that means
+the decision policies can be patented. Software patents imply business
+method patents and business procedure patents. The result is that any
+business could find itself, you know, once they decide &ldquo;we're
+going to automate the way we carry out our procedures,&rdquo; now they
+get sued with a software patent.</p>
+
+<p> So if businesses only knew, they would be organizing through things
+like the chamber of commerce to demand opposition to software patents.
+But mostly they don't know, and therefore it's going to be your job
+to inform them. Make sure they understand the danger that they are
+facing.</p>
+
+<h4 id="conf14">It's important for countries to work together against
+this.</h4>
+
+<p> And then India may be able, with the help of other countries like
+France and Germany, to reject software patents. It is important for
+people in the Indian government to make contact with officials in European
+countries, so that this battle against software patents doesn't have to be
+fought one country at a time, so that countries can work together to adopt
+an intelligent policy. Maybe there should be a <em>no software patents
+treaty</em> that various countries can sign and promise each other aid,
+when they are threatened by economic pressure from the United States,
+as part of its economic imperialism.</p>
+
+<p> Because the United States likes to do that, you know. One of
+the provisions in the GATT agreement is that countries have the right
+to make compulsory licenses for making medicine, to address a public
+health crisis. And the South-African government proposed to do this for
+medicine against AIDS. Now, South-Africa has a very bad problem with
+AIDS; the figures I've heard was that a quarter of the adult population
+is infected. And of course, most of them can't afford to buy these
+medicines at the prices charged by the US companies.</p>
+
+<p> So the South-African government was going to issue compulsory licenses
+which, even under GATT, it's allowed to do. But the US government
+threatened economic sanctions. Vice-President Gore was directly involved
+with this. And then, about a year before the presidential election,
+he realized that this was going to look bad, so he dropped out of the
+effort.</p>
+
+<p> But this kind of thing is what the US government does all the time
+in regard to patents and copyrights. They don't even mind if people get
+patented to death.</p>
+
+<p> So it's important for countries to work together against this.</p>
+
+<p> For more information about the problem of software patents,
+see <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150329202214/http://www.progfree.org/Patents/Gif/Gif.html">www.progfree.org</a> [archived] and <a
+href="http://www.ffii.org">www.ffii.org</a>. And there is also a petition
+to sign, www.noepatents.org <a href="#Note1" id="Note1-rev">[1]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p> Please talk with all executives of businesses &mdash; any kind
+of businesses &mdash; about this issue. Make sure they understand
+the extent of the problems they face, and that they think of going to
+business organizations to have them lobby against software patents.</p>
+
+<h3 id="questions">Questions from the audience</h3>
+
+<p>Now I'll answer questions.</p>
+
+<p> Oh, by the way to any journalists who are here, I recommend writing
+articles about software patents separately from articles about free
+software. If you cover them in one article together, people may get the
+idea that software patents are only bad for free software developers
+and they are okay for other software developers. This is not true.
+If you think back of what I have said, hardly any of it relates to the
+question of whether the programs are free or not; the dangers are the
+same for all software developers. So please don't take the risk, the
+people will get confused. Write separate articles.</p>
+
+<h4 id="questions1">Questions about software patents</h4>
+
+<dl>
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, you said that companies like IBM are harmed
+about 10 times as much as they benefit?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: No. What I said is the harm that would have happened to
+ them is 10 times the benefit, but this harm is purely theoretical,
+ it doesn't occur. You see, they avoid it through cross-licensing.
+ So in fact, the harm does not happen.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: But it is only neutralized, they don't really benefit?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, they do you see, because the bad aspect, they avoid
+ through cross-licensing, and meanwhile they do collect money from some
+ other licenses. So they are benefiting in total. There is the small
+ benefit which happens and the big potential harm which does not happen.
+ So you have zero plus something for the benefit.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: But for that something will oppose this movement against
+patents?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Right, IBM favors software patents. I had with trouble
+ one, I couldn't hear all the words in your sentence. I don't know
+ whether there was a &lsquo;not&rsquo; in it. I couldn't tell, there are
+ two diametrically opposite meanings for what you just said, so what you
+ can do is make sure that the situation is clear. IBM favors software
+ patents, IBM thinks it stands to gain a lot from software patents. So
+ what it stands to gain is that the IBM and the other very big companies
+ would basically control software development, because it will be very
+ hard to do independent software development.
+
+ <p> To develop nontrivial programs you're going to have to infringe
+ patents of IBM's. Now if you are big and often lucky enough, you might
+ have some patents of your own and make IBM cross-license with you.
+ Otherwise you are completely at their mercy and you have to hope that
+ they just let you pay the money.</p>
+
+ <p> Is someone else asking?</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, what was the reason for the development of the
+software patent?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, in the US, there was no reason. Somebody tried to
+ get a patent that was a software patent, and, I think, the patent office
+ said no, so he took it to court and eventually went to the Supreme Court
+ and they, they didn't judge it as a public policy question, they judged
+ it in terms of what does the law say.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: So was it not the realization that &hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Sorry, I can't &hellip; could you try to pronounce your
+ consonants more clearly, I'm having trouble understanding the words.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: So was it not the realization that copyright is notoriously
+weak for protecting software?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Copyright is not only what?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Notoriously weak&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, I think the whole sentence is nonsensical. I don't
+ understand this term &ldquo;protecting software,&rdquo; and I don't
+ agree with you.
+
+ <p> Most programmers don't agree with you.</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: So when you are saying that you are not favoring protection
+of software and you yourself is giving General Public License, where do
+you get that power to issue General Public License?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: OK, you are asking questions about copyright and free
+ software which is not the topic now, I will accept questions about that
+ later on, but I gave a speech about software patents and I want to answer
+ questions about software patents.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir I have a question about software patents, the thing is
+that how can one protect where there is a functional element &hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Protect what?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Functional element&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: What's going to happen to them?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, how can we get a protection when there is a&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Protection from what? Somebody's gonna come with a
+ gun?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: No Sir &hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Basically the protection you need is the protection against
+ being sued for the program you wrote. Programmers need protection from
+ software patents.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: No, it's not the programmers themselves sir, there are
+companies who have invested in something.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: And do you want the company to get sued because in your
+ large program there are five different things that somebody, that five
+ different people already patented? Now it's clear to see the myth that
+ you are operating on, it's the naive idea that, when <em>you</em> develop
+ a program, <em>you</em> will have the patent. Well, the idea, that very
+ statement contains a mistake because there is no such thing as <em>the
+ patent.</em> When you develop a program with many different things in it,
+ there are many things, each of which might be patented by somebody else
+ already, and you find out about them one by one when they come to you,
+ saying: &ldquo;either pay us a lot of money, or else shut down.&rdquo;
+ And when you dealt with five of them, you never know when number six is
+ going to come along. It's much safer to be in the software field if you
+ know you are not going to get sued as long as you wrote the program
+ yourself.
+
+ <p> That's the way it was before software patents. If you wrote the
+ program yourself there was nothing to sue you about. Today you can
+ write the program yourself, it may even be a useful and innovative
+ program, but because you didn't reinvent the whole field, you use some
+ ideas that were already known, other people sue you. Now, of course,
+ those people who wanna go around suing you, they are going to pretend
+ that this extortion is protection for them. Protection from what?
+ Protection from having competitors, I guess. They don't believe in
+ competition, they want monopolies.</p>
+
+ <p> Well, to hell with them. It's not good for the public that they
+ should get what they want. This is a question of public policy. We have
+ to decide what is good for the citizens <em>generally</em>.</p>
+
+ <p><b>Audience</b>: [applause]</p>
+
+ <p>Not have somebody saying &ldquo;I wanna have a monopoly
+ because I think I am so important I should have one, so protect me from
+ anybody else being allowed to develop software.&rdquo;</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: You are suggesting that we should avoid making a
+battleground for patents, don't we still have to deal with the problem
+that there are a lot of American products being sold here and&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well&hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: &hellip; and we are still going to be mistaken&hellip;?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: No! No, you misunderstood. US developers may be in
+ trouble because of the patent system, and what effect will that have?
+ It means that there are certain products that won't be coming from the
+ US, and therefore they won't be sold in the US, or here. You see,
+ if a developer is in the US and there is a US software patent, that
+ software developer is going to get sued there, whether or not he tries
+ to deal with anybody in India, he is going to get sued. But the fact
+ that he is distributing the program in India is not going to cause him
+ an additional problem, because that's under the jurisdiction of India.
+ That's the one thing he will <em>not</em> get sued for. So, basically,
+ what it means is, whatever exists can be distributed in India, safely,
+ and the developers who are lucky enough to be in India will be safe
+ from this kind of gang warfare, and those who are unlucky enough to be
+ in the US will not be safe.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, are you basically against the very concept of
+intellectual property rights?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: As I said at the beginning, it is foolish to even
+ think about that topic. That topic is an overgeneralization. It lumps
+ together totally different things like copyrights and patents, and so any
+ opinion about &ldquo;intellectual property&rdquo; is a foolish one. I
+ don't have an opinion about intellectual property, I have opinions about
+ copyrights, and I have completely different opinions about patents, and
+ even in the area of patents, you know, I have different opinions in
+ different fields. Even that area is a big area. And then there are
+ trademarks which are also &ldquo;intellectual property&rdquo;; I think
+ trademarks are basically a good idea. The US has taken trademarks all
+ little too far but, basically it is reasonable to have labels that you
+ can rely on.
+
+ <p> So you shouldn't try to have an opinion about intellectual property.
+ If you are thinking about intellectual property, you are thinking at a
+ simplistic level. And any conclusions you reach will be simplistic. So,
+ do as I do, you know, pick one topic at a time and focus on it, and find
+ out the details about that one area, then you can think intelligently
+ about that area, and later on you can think intelligently about the
+ other areas too.</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: So there is an argument that if particular intellectual
+property right is not protected&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm sorry, what you are saying makes no sense at all and
+ is at this foolish general level&hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Let me complete sir, if that particular intellectual
+property right is not protected, it may impede the investment, and this
+impediment&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: This generalistic thinking is so simplistic, it's totally
+ stupid. It makes no sense at all. There is no principle of intellectual
+ property. Copyrights and patents and trademarks originated completely
+ separately, they have nothing in common, except later somebody else
+ made up this term &ldquo;intellectual property&rdquo; to call them all
+ by it.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, will you extend this concept to the physical
+property?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: No, I'm sorry, none of these things has anything to do with
+ physical property rights, they are totally different. What do you say
+ extend &ldquo;this concept&rdquo;? Which is &ldquo;this concept&rdquo;?
+ The idea that the term &ldquo;intellectual property&rdquo; is a
+ generalization that leads you into simplistic thinking, should we apply
+ that to physical property? No, they are totally different. They have
+ nothing in common.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: So the basis under which this intellectual property
+is protected is &ldquo;protect the labor,&rdquo; &ldquo;intellectual
+labor&rdquo;?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: No! No, you are totally wrong, you are totally wrong.
+ The purpose of&hellip; You have been brainwashed, you have been listening to
+ the propaganda of the companies that want to have these monopolies.
+ If you ask what legal scholars say is the basis of these systems,
+ they say that they are attempts &mdash; for copyrights and for patents
+ &mdash; they are attempts to manipulate the behavior of people to get
+ benefit for the public. Trademarks are a different issue, I think the
+ issues for trademark are completely different. So you are making an
+ overgeneralization also.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: So why can't we extend the very same principle&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: But in any case, your principle is <em>wrong</em>, and if
+ you take a look at that economic research on www.researchoninnovation.org,
+ you will see that you are making naive statements, naive blanket
+ statements that are simply not true. You got the silly idea that creating
+ a monopoly over some aspect of life <em>always</em>, <em>invariably</em>
+ makes that aspect of life thrive. Well, this is dumb. Occasionally it
+ might work, and occasionally it causes a lot of trouble.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Don't you think that the same kind of monopoly is created
+in favor of a party when he owns a physical property?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm sorry, I can't hear you.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, don't you think that the same kind of monopoly rights
+are created if a particular physical property is allowed to be owned by
+a person, just like an intellectual property?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Physical property can only be in one place at a time.
+ You know, only one person can sit in a chair at a time in the normal way.
+ [Applause] You know these are totally different issues. You know,
+ trying to generalize to the utmost is a foolish thing to do. We're
+ dealing with complicated laws that have many, many, many complicated
+ details and you are asking us to ignore all these details. We're dealing
+ with laws that have complicated effects in various fields and you are
+ asking us to ignore the details of their effects. Don't bother
+ judging&hellip; I think that if we are talking about a public policy
+ issue, we've got to look at the actual results of the policy, not some
+ myth as to what results a certain ideology would predict. I'm telling
+ you the real results, I'm telling you what I have seen and what other
+ programmers have seen.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, what about the LZW patent? Is it&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: What about the <em>what</em>?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: LZW patent?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: The LZW patent?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Yeah. Is it still in effect?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Yes, it is. Well, there are actually two LZW patents as
+ I explained to you, and they are both still in effect.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, so it's for 20 years?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Yeah, it's not 20 years yet.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, can you reduce the scope of the problem by reducing
+the period of the patent?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Definitely, you could. If there were software patents,
+ but they only lasted for, say, 5 years or three years, that would mostly
+ solve the problem. Yes it's a pain to have to wait 3 or 5 years, but
+ it's much, much less of a pain. But, but there is a difficulty there.
+ The GATT agreement says that patents must last 20 years. So, the only
+ way you could have something like software patents which lasted for 3
+ or 5 years is as follows.
+
+ <p> First, make it clear that ordinary patents do not apply, and second,
+ if you wish, you could create a different system of five-year software
+ idea monopolies. Well, it's not clear that there is any particular
+ benefit in these five-year software monopolies but it would be much
+ better than the current situation. So if you found the government
+ prepared to make this deal, well, I would say, we should take it. But,
+ but we have to realize, though, that the first step is to abolish
+ software patents strictly speaking, and that has to be part of this
+ deal.</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: So and patent has also now become victim of&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you at all, could you speak
+ louder?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, patent has now become a way of making money by
+businesses rather than promoting inventions?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Yes, a lot of them use it that way.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: So, sir, can we reduce this problem further by assigning
+the patent to the actual inventor rather than a business?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Not really. What you'll find is that, that aspect of the
+ relationship between the employee and the business is something that gets
+ negotiated; and the business has more clout, so they are always going to
+ end up arranging to have the employee hand the patent to the company.
+ The other thing is that it doesn't make a big difference who owns the
+ patent. The point is that you are prohibited from developing a program
+ using that idea, and it may make some difference precisely who has the
+ power to sue you. But what you really want is not to be sued at all.
+ So why look for a half-measure like this? It's much better just to say
+ that software shouldn't have patents.
+
+ <p> Okay, if you gonna pass a note, you'd better read it out loud.
+ Any other questions?</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: People who are being to Malaysia say that, if we buy a PC
+there, the amount of money we would pay for all the standard software
+is about a tenth of what we should pay in this country. In Malaysia
+they are little more relaxed about patents and copyrights?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, are you not sure what you are talking about?
+ Because you seem to mixing together copyrights and patents. I'm not
+ sure if what you are talking about has anything to do with the issue of
+ software patents.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Precisely what I want to know is about: this has something
+to do with patents?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Probably not.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Different countries depending on how much, whether they
+are part of WTO or not part of WTO&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: No, no.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: &hellip;I think matter&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: You see, I don't know for certain because I don't know
+ what's going on there. I've never been there. But I suspect that it's
+ a matter of copyright and has nothing to do with patents, because if you
+ are talking about the same programs&hellip; Remember, software patents
+ are primarily a restriction on software developers. So if it's the
+ same program and it was developed, say, in the US, the patent problems
+ they have are independent of, you know&hellip; the patent problems they
+ have are biggest in the US, not in either India or Malaysia. So, that
+ probably has to do with copyright, not patents, and that's a totally
+ different issue. We mustn't lump these issues together.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir earlier you've told that&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm sorry I can't hear you.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Earlier in your speech you've told that software that
+should be brought under the purvey of patents is what you defined that
+as what can be run on a general purpose machine.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm afraid I can't&hellip; Can anyone understand what
+ he's saying? I cannot understand your words. If you make an effort to
+ enunciate more clearly, I may be able to understand.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: You had spoken earlier that software that should be patented
+is, you defined that as, software that can be run on a general purpose
+machine&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm sorry I didn't say that software <em>should</em> be
+ patented, so I just can't make out these words. Maybe if you tell that
+ to someone else, the other person could say it and I could understand.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Software patents, like whatever you call software patents,
+like those are what can be run on a general purpose machine. So if some
+algorithm or some piece of software is capable of being executed on a
+general purpose machine, it should not be patented.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Yes. Now I can hear you, yes. One of the things I
+ proposed was that patent should not apply to software for general
+ purpose machines or the use of it on those general purpose machines.
+ So that if you develop that program or if you are using that program,
+ you couldn't be sued.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: We've an increasing number of software not being run on
+general purpose machines.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, then that would be covered still by software patents,
+ so it wouldn't be a total a solution, but at least it would be a partial
+ solution.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: So if the defining line is general purpose machines, don't
+you see there's a possibility that people could find loopholes in it,
+like, to find workarounds for&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm sorry. Do I see a possibility that people would
+ do what?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: &hellip; of finding loopholes or workarounds of converting
+what you would call software patents and to get it actually patented.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm sorry, I do not understand. Loopholes to do&hellip;
+ I'm sorry. What people would do, what software developers would do in
+ that situation is use general purpose machines more.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Some algorithm can be run on a general purpose machine
+&mdash; what I'd say that, that algorithm, I'm using it for some embedded
+device and go ahead and patent it.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Why you could try it, you misunderstood. The point is
+ that, you misunderstood what the solution is. The solution is that
+ if I am developing and using the software on general purpose machines,
+ then nobody can sue me for patent infringement. So yes, somebody could
+ get a patent, and maybe he could sue others who are doing specialized
+ things which involve particular hardware. But they couldn't sue me.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Excuse me sir, may I ask you a question.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Yes.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, you spoke of general purpose machines. In the sense,
+how would you define these machines, because these days you have a lot
+of custom made handheld devices etc. Now some way&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: No, handheld computers are general purpose when they are
+ not designed to carry out a specific computation or a specific physical
+ process. They're general purpose computers. They have general purpose
+ computer chips in them.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Then the idea would be contestable in a court of law as
+to whether it's a general purpose or not&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I guess, it will have to be, yeah. The precise details
+ of drawing those lines, one ends up having to leave to judges.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Thank you sir.</dt>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Germany and France, the only countries who has said no to
+patents in Europe&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, I don't know the full situation. Those are the just
+ the ones I know of. The last time there was a vote, there were going
+ to be a majority of <em>no</em> votes, and so they dropped the issue.
+ And I don't remember the other countries.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: There's no European community decision on this&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Not yet. In fact, the European Commission itself is
+ divided. One of the agencies &mdash; the one which unfortunately is the
+ lead agency on this issue &mdash; has been won over by the multinationals
+ and is in favor of software patents, and then the agency that tries to
+ encourage software development is against them, and so they're trying to
+ work against it. So if there is somebody who wants to get in touch with
+ the official in charge of the agency that is opposed to software patents,
+ I can put them in touch.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Is there any country that said &lsquo;no&rsquo; to software
+patents?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, there are countries which don't have them, but it's
+ not clear that there's any country which has affirmed this recently.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, could you please elaborate on the benefits the software
+development community got in European countries from this policy?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, the benefit is that you don't have to be afraid
+ someone will sue you, because of one of the ideas or a combination of
+ ideas that you used in a program that you wrote. Basically software
+ patents mean that if you write a program, somebody else might sue you
+ and say &ldquo;you're not allowed to write that program.&rdquo; The
+ benefit of not having software patents is you're safe from that.
+
+ <p> Now in India you have probably taken for granted that you are safe
+ from that. But that will only last as long as there are no software
+ patents in India.</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Are there any threats to India not acceding to the software
+regime?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well there's no software regime. The GATT agreement
+ doesn't require software patents. There is no treaty requiring software
+ patents.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Most people, if they had a chance to get a patent and make
+a lot of money out of it, they wouldn't pass it up&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, many people if they had a chance to get a gun and
+ make a lot of money from, they wouldn't pass it up.
+
+ <p>The point is, therefore, let we try not to hand them that opportunity.
+ For instance, we don't have a government agency handing out guns to
+ people on the street, and we should not have a government agency handing
+ out software patents to people on the street either.</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Being an advocate of this non-patency, have you ever
+faced any&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm having trouble hearing you. Please try to make an
+ effort to pronounce every sound clearly that I might understand.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: You being an advocate of this non-patency, have you faced
+any problems with these multinationals or something?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Have I faced any problems&hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: &hellip; so far in your life?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm sorry. What did he say?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Have you faced any problems with multinationals in your
+life?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, there are many. In the community where I develop
+ software, there are many examples of programs that had their features
+ taken out, programs that didn't have the feature put in the first place,
+ programs that were not even written for many years, because of this.
+ There are many examples of jobs we can't do, because we're not allowed
+ to do them.
+
+ <p> Now we collected examples of this, and we are looking for people to
+ write them up &mdash; you know, to look at each example and investigate
+ it fully and write down a clear description of what happened and what
+ the harm was and so on. We have had trouble finding people to do this.
+ We're looking for more. So someone who is really good at writing clear
+ English might want to volunteer for this.</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: I think he asked whether you had any threat to you by any
+multinational companies&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well they never threatened my life!</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Yeah that's the question!</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: No, but they do threaten our work. You know, they do
+threaten to sue us.</dd>
+</dl>
+
+<h4 id="questions2">Questions about free software</h4>
+
+<dl><dt><b>Volunteer</b>: There's a question from a gentleman at the
+back: &ldquo;If the multinational companies that produce hardware, like
+Intel, coming to a contract with big software companies to restrict free
+software by changing the microprocessor patents, how will you overcome
+such a hazard?&rdquo;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I see very little danger of that. Intel recently
+ developed a new computer architecture, and far from trying to stop us
+ from supporting it, they hired people to implement it.
+
+ <p> So it looks like we have now moved to free software questions.
+ I'd like to remind people that, until this last answer, I was not
+ speaking for the Free Software movement. I was speaking about something
+ of vital interest to every programmer which is: to be free to write
+ programs and not get sued for having written them, as long as you wrote
+ it yourself. And that is a freedom that you've taken for granted until
+ now, and it's a freedom you will lose if you have software patents.</p>
+
+ <p> Now however we're moving to the topic of free software, which is
+ what I spent most of my time working on, and the individual, the actual
+ software development project that I've lead, which is developing the GNU
+ operating system, which is a free software, Unix-like operating system
+ used by some twenty million people estimated today. So I am now going
+ to start answering questions about free software and GNU.</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: In the absence of a concrete revenue model for free
+software, will this also go bust like the dotcom?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I can't predict the future but I want to remind you
+ that the dotcoms were businesses. And free software is not primarily
+ a business. There are some free software businesses. Whether they
+ will succeed or ultimately fail, I don't know. But those businesses,
+ while they contribute to our community, they are not what our community
+ is all about. What our community is all about is having the freedom to
+ redistribute and study and change software. A lot of free software is
+ developed by volunteers, and the amount is increasing. No matter what
+ happens with the companies, that's not going away.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: I understand that companies like IBM are also investing
+considerably in making their systems and software compatible with free
+source code like Linux&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: You mean GNU?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: All right&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Yes, they call it Linux. Actually the system is mainly
+ GNU and Linux is one of the pieces.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>[From audience]</b> The kernel is hardly eighteen percent.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, really, that much? What I saw is three percent.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>[From audience]</b> You can see through a needle. Very
+insignificant.</dt>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: But, I also understand that they've invested around a
+billion dollars in doing so. Now my question is&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well that's not true.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: My question is: for a service that has no revenue model,
+will this be sustainable in the future, and if I change my business
+into&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm sorry, I can't predict the future. No one can.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: How can I&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: There are some God men who claim they can predict the
+ future. I'm not. I'm a rationalist.
+
+ <p> I can't tell you what's going to happen. What I can tell you is
+ that when IBM claims to have put a billion dollars into the GNU plus
+ Linux operating system, that is not entirely true. You have to look
+ carefully at what they're spending this money on, and you'll find they
+ are spending this money on various different things, some contribute
+ and some don't.</p>
+
+ <p> For instance, they are funding some work on developing the GNU/Linux
+ system. That's good, that contributes. They do develop some other free
+ software packages that they've contributed to the community. That's a
+ real contribution.</p>
+
+ <p> They are also developing many nonfree programs to make them run
+ with the GNU/Linux system and that is not a contribution. And they
+ are publicizing the system, well, it's not a primary contribution but
+ it does help, you know. Having more users is not our primary goal.
+ But it's nice, if more people would try our software, so that does help,
+ but then they're mistakenly calling this Linux which is not quite right,
+ and they're lobbying for software patents in Europe, which is bad. So,
+ you know, IBM is doing many different things. Some are good and some
+ are bad, and if you want to have a thoughtful view, it's important to
+ look at the individual actions. Do not try to add it up because that
+ just means you're missing the important aspects of the situation.</p>
+
+ <p> Are there any more questions?</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: [...]</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I can't hear you at all, I'm sorry [...] whispering.
+ I'm a little bit hard of hearing, and when you combine that with the
+ noise of the fans, and with the unusual accent, all three of those things
+ together make very hard for me to make out the words.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: This question is not about patent or copyright or anything
+like that. But this is one example what you said about &mdash; if
+statement and while statement &mdash; that you said something about the
+differences in the field of computer science and differences with other
+sciences, that is other engineering sciences. You said that if I change
+something in the if loop that's if statement, there won't be any effect,
+that you said&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: No I didn't say that.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: You said that! You said that there isn't any heating
+effect. I remember that&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm sorry, I know what I said. I said something that's
+ partly similar to that&hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: I'll tell the exact statement: you said there won't any
+heating effect.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Any whating effect?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Heating effect. Heating&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Oh yes we don't have to worry about how much heat the
+ if statement&hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Then what is it that cascading effect
+is? If I change the structure of the loop, there will be an effect.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Oh sure. The program will behave differently when you
+ change it, but I'm not saying that writing every program is easy, or that
+ we never make mistakes. I listed a lot of specific kinds of problems,
+ that would plague a mechanical or electrical engineer at every little
+ detail. Even each one detail gets to be very hard for them. Whereas for
+ us, the problems are because we do so much, we're doing it so fast,
+ we don't think carefully about each one thing. So we make mistakes.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: So you admit that there's an effect.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Of course. I never said otherwise, I'm sorry if you
+ thought so. Sure if you change your program it's going to do different
+ things.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, can you comment on the commercial distributions?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, you asked me to comment on the commercial
+ distribution of GNU/Linux systems? Well, I think that's fine. That's one
+ of the freedoms that free software gives you &mdash; the freedom to use
+ it in business, the freedom to distribute it as part of a business, the
+ freedom to sell copies in exchange for money. These are all legitimate.
+
+ <p> Now, one thing I am unhappy about is when the companies that do this
+ add some nonfree software to it.</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: That's the installation program?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Yeah, any nonfree software. Because the goal was: you
+ should be able to get a completely free operating system. Well, if
+ they have a thing in a store which says I'm the GNU/Linux system &mdash;
+ of course it says Linux &mdash; but inside of it there are some nonfree
+ programs, now you're not getting something that is entirely free anymore.
+ It doesn't entirely respect your freedom. So the real goal for which
+ we wrote the system is being lost.
+
+ <p> So that's a major problem that our community faces now, the tendency
+ to put free software together with nonfree software and make these
+ nonfree overall systems. And then, you know, it might seem that our
+ software is a success because there are many people using it. But if
+ you look at our real goal, our real goal is not popularity. Our real
+ goal is to spread a community of freedom, and we're not succeeding in
+ doing that if the people are using nonfree software still.</p>
+
+ <p> Unfortunately, I couldn't give both speeches. I can give a
+ speech about software patents, or I can give a speech about free
+ software. They're very different and each one of them is a long speech.
+ So unfortunately what that means is that I can't fully explain about free
+ software and the GNU project here. Am I giving another speech in Kochi?
+ Am I giving the free software speech in Kochi?</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: No.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Oh well. I gave that speech in Trivandrum.
+
+ <p> So I'll answer five more questions and then I'll have to call it
+ quits because it gets to be quite draining to answer so many.</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Excuse me sir, question from me again. Sir, this is a
+personal question. Me, as such, I love programming. I spend a lot
+of time in front of my system. And I was listening to some of your
+earlier speeches where you said that back in the 70's, the community of
+programmers had a sense of goodwill among them. They used to share code,
+they used to develop on it.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, a specific community of programmers which I belonged
+ to. This was not all programmers. It was one specific community.
+ Continue.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Yes sir. In that context, I feel particularly, me as such,
+I feel very hurt when I see the so-called interaction among programmers
+today. Because many of us are very good programmers, but we look at
+each other in different colors depending upon the tools we use &mdash;
+&ldquo;hey, he's a windows guy,&rdquo; &ldquo;hey, he's a GNU/Linux
+guy,&rdquo; &ldquo;hey, he's into Solaris systems,&rdquo; &ldquo;he's a
+network programmer.&rdquo; And unfortunately most of this prejudice comes
+from a lot of misinterpretation out of things like this. None of these
+people promote free software as such, and it hurts me as a programmer
+and many of my colleagues, and I work in an environment&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Could you speak a bit more slowly, I am hearing most
+ of it, but there was one point that I miss, so if you speak slowly I
+ will&hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Yeah, here we work with in an environment where you
+are judged according to the tools you use rather than the quality of
+work.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: To me that, well, in one sense there is a situation where
+ in a limited way that is rational. If there is a tool which is normally
+ used for doing fairly easy jobs and there are lot of people who now had
+ to do it, then I would imagine now, I wouldn't want, I might not pay as
+ much to them as somebody who does very hard jobs with a different tool
+ that's used for hard jobs. But it's true if you're talking about hard
+ jobs, it makes no sense that you'd be prejudiced about what tools people
+ are using. The good programmers can use any tools.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: That was not the focus here. The focus was that here it is
+a question of goodwill. Goodwill amongst programmers these days seems
+to be, you know, melted out into these little boxes of this system and
+that system, and that hurts.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I agree we should encourage people to learn about more
+ different things and we should never be prejudiced against people because
+ of some detail, you know the fact that this person likes Perl and this
+ person likes C, why should they hate each other&hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: It's not even that distinct. It's like this person works
+on GNU/Linux and this person works on Windows, which are the two major
+operating systems today in India at least.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, in that case, though, it's not just a prejudice,
+ you see. Windows is a system, a social system, that keeps people
+ helpless and divided [applause], whereas GNU/Linux is an alternative
+ that was created specifically to liberate people and to encourage them
+ to cooperate. So to some extent, this is not like: &ldquo;where you
+ born in this country or that country?&rdquo; No, this is like your
+ choice of politics. And it does make sense to criticize people for
+ their choices about important issues.
+
+ <p> So, I would say, a person who's using Windows, well, either he is
+ actively supporting this power structure, or at least maybe he's trapped
+ in it and doesn't have the courage to get out. In that case you can
+ forgive him, I guess, and encourage him. You know, there are different
+ situations of people; in any place there are people&hellip; different.
+ Some people are making more or less effort to try to improve things.
+ I believe in judging people as individuals, not as lumping them together
+ by their groups.</p>
+
+ <p> But this is, in this one case it is, somewhat of a political choice
+ with political consequences for society, and that's exactly where it
+ makes sense to criticize people.</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sorry to continue again on this, but I'm a little persistent
+about this. It's&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: This is your last chance.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Yes sir, thank you. Generally when statements like these
+are made, people who are not so much, you know, in connection with
+these things tend to assume that cooperative communities and sharing
+of source code and sharing of ideas and things like that don't exist in
+other environments, but they do, and that's very unfortunate that they
+think so.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm sorry&hellip; <em>What</em> don't exist in other
+ environments? I don't know which other environments you're talking about.
+ I don't understand.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Other programming environments, other operating
+systems.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well maybe there are some users developing some free
+ software that runs on Windows, in fact I'm sure there are&hellip;
+
+<p><em>Note: At this point, there was a short blackout, and both the
+recording and the transcript is incomplete here.</em></p></dd>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, maybe there, are there anymore questions? Could you
+ speak louder? I can't hear you at all.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir may I ask you a question?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Okay you can, sure.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: In free software system we will be distributing the source
+code also together with the software. So a person is entitled to change
+whatever he can in the source code. So don't you think there will be
+too many software versions of a particular software and this will in turn
+cause problems for a layman to find out which will suit him the most.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Practical experience is that this is not a problem.
+ And occasionally it happens, but not very often. Now, you see, the
+ reason is that the users want interoperability and with free software the
+ users are ultimately in control, and what they want they tend to get. The
+ free software developers realize that they had better &mdash; if they are
+ going to make incompatible changes they are likely to make users unhappy
+ and their versions are not going to be used. So they generally draw the
+ obvious conclusion and pay a lot of attention to interoperability.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: What I feel is that like I'll be just loading a software
+into my computer and the next morning I'll find a better version then
+again I'll have to change it. The next morning again something has
+been done to the source code and that's a better version, so don't
+you&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: In general you are not going be finding a better version
+ every day and the reason is that typically for any given program, there
+ is usually only one version that is widely used. Maybe there will be
+ two, once in a while there will be three &mdash; when there is no good
+ maintainer that might happen. So you are just not going to keep finding
+ out about more versions that are good every day; there aren't so many.
+ There won't be that many popular versions. There is one situation
+ where you can get a new version every day. That is when there is one
+ team doing a lot of work on development then every day you can get their
+ latest version. That you can do. But that's only one version at any
+ given time.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Sir, don't you think we will have to implement an
+organization which will take into consideration all these updations and
+it will just provide a single software which will have all the updations
+right?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I'm sorry, I didn't hear that. Shouldn't we have an
+ organization that would do something with all these versions, but I
+ don't know what.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Like, say I have developed a version of&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Did anyone else hear what she said? Could anyone else
+ tell me what she said?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: The thing is that&hellip;</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: It's a very valuable skill to learn to speak slowly and
+ clearly. If you ever want to give a speech, which as part of your career
+ you will, it's very helpful to learn to enunciate clearly and slowly.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Thank you, Sir. Sir, the thing is that, don't you feel that
+we require an organization which will just perform a number of updations
+together and make available a software which will club all the updations
+up to that date?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: You are saying, take various different applications and
+ put them together?</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Yes Sir.</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I will tell you. A lot of organizations are doing that;
+ in fact every one of the GNU/Linux distributions is exactly that.
+ Debian does that, Red Hat does that&hellip; We to some extent do that
+ also for the GNU packages. We work on making sure they work together.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Excuse me Sir. We have talked lot against patents. In US
+conditions have you ever been forced to put forward any applications
+for patents?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: No. But no one can force me to make a patent application.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Also do you own any patents?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: I do not own any patents. Now, I have considered the
+ possibility of applying for patents to use them as part of a <em>mutual
+ strategic defense alliance</em>.</dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Do you mean to say that if I have twenty patents with me,
+I donate it to the FSF and you maintain it for me?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Well, not the FSF. It would be a separate specialized
+ organization that would exist specifically, so that we would all
+ contribute our patents and the organization would use all of these
+ patents to shelter anyone who wishes shelter. So anyone can join the
+ organization, even somebody who has no patents. And that person gets the
+ shelter of this organization. But then we all do try to get patents so
+ as to make the organization stronger so it can protect us all better.
+ That's the idea, but so far no one has been able to get this started.
+ It's not an easy thing to do, and part of the reason is that applying
+ for a patent is very expensive &mdash; and a lot of work as well.
+
+ <p>So this will be the last question.</p></dd>
+
+<dt><b>Q</b>: Why can't the Free Software Foundation start its own
+distribution?</dt>
+
+ <dd><b>A</b>: Oh well, the reason is that Debian is almost what we want,
+ and it seems better to be friends with Debian and try to convince them
+ to change it a little, rather than say &ldquo;well, we are not going to
+ use it; we are going to make our own thing.&rdquo; And also it seems
+ likely to be more successful too because, after all, there are a lot
+ of people working on Debian already. Why try to make an alternative to
+ that large community. Much better to work with them and convince them
+ to support our goals better &mdash; if it works, of course, and we have
+ our ways to go on that.</dd>
+</dl>
+
+<p> So that was the last question, I can't stay all day answering
+questions, I'm sorry. So at this point I am going to have to call a halt
+and get going, and go have lunch. So thank you for listening.</p>
+
+<p>[Applause].</p>
+
+
+<h3>Footnote</h3>
+
+<p> <a href="#Note1-rev" id="Note1">[1]</a>
+In 2014, this petition against software patents is <a
+href="http://web.archive.org/web/20061205023601/http://noepatents.org/index_html?NO_COOKIE=true">
+archived</a><!-- [Dead as of 2019-03-23], and a more recent one (now closed) can be found at <a
+href="http://stopsoftwarepatents.eu/">stopsoftwarepatents.eu</a> -->.
+</p>
+<p>For more information about the problem of software patents,
+see also our <a href="http://endsoftpatents.org">End Software Patents</a>
+campaign.</p>
+</div>
+
+</div><!-- for id="content", starts in the include above -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
+<div id="footer">
+<div class="unprintable">
+
+<p>Please send general FSF &amp; GNU inquiries to
+<a href="mailto:gnu@gnu.org">&lt;gnu@gnu.org&gt;</a>.
+There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a>
+the FSF. Broken links and other corrections or suggestions can be sent
+to <a href="mailto:webmasters@gnu.org">&lt;webmasters@gnu.org&gt;</a>.</p>
+
+<p><!-- TRANSLATORS: Ignore the original text in this paragraph,
+ replace it with the translation of these two:
+
+ We work hard and do our best to provide accurate, good quality
+ translations. However, we are not exempt from imperfection.
+ Please send your comments and general suggestions in this regard
+ to <a href="mailto:web-translators@gnu.org">
+ &lt;web-translators@gnu.org&gt;</a>.</p>
+
+ <p>For information on coordinating and submitting translations of
+ our web pages, see <a
+ href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+ README</a>. -->
+Please see the <a
+href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting translations
+of this article.</p>
+</div>
+
+<!-- Regarding copyright, in general, standalone pages (as opposed to
+ files generated as part of manuals) on the GNU web server should
+ be under CC BY-ND 4.0. Please do NOT change or remove this
+ without talking with the webmasters or licensing team first.
+ Please make sure the copyright date is consistent with the
+ document. For web pages, it is ok to list just the latest year the
+ document was modified, or published.
+
+ If you wish to list earlier years, that is ok too.
+ Either "2001, 2002, 2003" or "2001-2003" are ok for specifying
+ years, as long as each year in the range is in fact a copyrightable
+ year, i.e., a year in which the document was published (including
+ being publicly visible on the web or in a revision control system).
+
+ There is more detail about copyright years in the GNU Maintainers
+ Information document, www.gnu.org/prep/maintain. -->
+
+<p> Copyright &copy; 2001, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2019
+Free Software Foundation, Inc.</p>
+
+<p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
+href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative
+Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.</p>
+
+<!--#include virtual="/server/bottom-notes.html" -->
+
+<p class="unprintable">Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2019/03/23 11:26:56 $
+<!-- timestamp end -->
+</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</body>
+</html>