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<title>The Danger of Software Patents
- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
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<h2>The Danger of Software Patents</h2>
<p>by <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a></p>

<p>This is the transcript of a talk presented by Richard M. Stallman
on 8 October 2009 at Victoria University of Wellington.</p>

<dl>
<dt>SF:</dt>
<dd><p>My name is Susy Frankel and on behalf of myself and Meredith
Kolsky Lewis, I'd like to welcome you to this seminar hosted by the
New Zealand Centre for International Economic Law.  Brenda Chawner,
who is part of the Victoria University School of Information
Management, rather than the Centre I just named being part of the Law
Faculty, is really responsible for bringing Richard Stallman back to
New Zealand and hosting his tour of New Zealand, including this stop
here in Wellington tonight.  She's unfortunately unable to be with us
at this moment because she's doing what we do in universities which is
teach.</p>

<p>So it's my pleasure to welcome you to the lecture &ldquo;The Danger
of Software Patents&rdquo;.  Richard Stallman has a suite of lectures
that he offers, and after discussion with Brenda, I chose this topic
precisely because for the first real time in New Zealand history, we
have a somewhat prolonged, but important, debate about patent law
reform, and many of you in the room are responsible for the debate
relating to software patents.  So it seemed very topical, very timely.
So thank you, Richard, for making that offer.</p>

<p>Richard Stallman needs little introduction.  Nonetheless, for some
of you who have not heard of him previously, he has launched the
development of the GNU operating system.  I had never heard GNU said
before, and I went online to YouTube (where would we be be without
YouTube)&hellip;</p></dd>

<dt>RMS:</dt>
<dd>Oh, you shouldn't recommend YouTube, because they distribute in a
patented video format.</dd>

<dt>SF:</dt>
<dd>Good point.  I only recommend it for the point that I thought do
you say G&nbsp;N&nbsp;U or GNU?</dd>

<dt>RMS:</dt>
<dd>Wikipedia says that.  [The answer is, pronounce it as a one
syllable, with a hard G.]</dd>

<dt>SF:</dt>
<dd>Yes, but live I heard you say it on YouTube.  But nonetheless, the
important point is that it's not proprietorial.  But the most
interesting point is that Richard has received many honors for his
work.  My favorite, and therefore the one that I'm going to mention,
is the Takeda Award for Social and Economic Betterment, and I imagine
we're going to hear a lot of that tonight, so join me in welcoming
Richard.</dd>

<dt>RMS:</dt>
<dd><p>First of all, I'd like to mention one of the reasons why I'm
drinking this [a can or bottle of a cola which is not coke] is there's
a worldwide boycott of Coca-Cola Company for murdering union
organizers in Colombia.  Look at the
site <a href="http://killercoke.org">killercoke.org</a>.  And they're
not talking about the effects of drinking the product&mdash;after all,
the same might be true of many other products&mdash;it's murder.  So
before you buy any drink product, look at the fine print and see if
it's made by Coca-Cola Company.</p>

<p>I'm most known for starting the free software movement and leading
development of the GNU operating system&mdash;although most of the
people who use the system mistakenly believe it's Linux and think it
was started by somebody else a decade later.  But I'm not going to be
speaking about any of that today.  I'm here to talk about a legal
danger to all software developers, distributors, and users: the danger
of patents&mdash;on computational ideas, computational techniques, an
idea for something you can do on a computer.</p>

<p>Now, to understand this issue, the first thing you need to realize
is that patent law has nothing to do with copyright law&mdash;they're
totally different.  Whatever you learn about one of them, you can be
sure it doesn't apply to the other.</p>

<p>So, for example, any time a person makes a statement about
&ldquo;intellectual property,&rdquo; that's spreading confusion,
because it's lumping together not only these two laws but also at
least a dozen others.  They're all different, and the result is any
statement which purports to be about &ldquo;intellectual
property&rdquo; is pure confusion&mdash;either the person making the
statement is confused, or the person is trying to confuse others.  But
either way, whether it's accidental or malicious, it's confusion.</p>

<p>Protect yourself from this confusion by rejecting any statement
which makes use of that term.  The only way to make thoughtful
comments and think clear thoughts about any one of these laws is to
distinguish it first from all the others, and talk or think about one
particular law, so that we can understand what it actually does and
then form conclusions about it.  So I'll be talking about patent law,
and what happens in those countries which have allowed patent law to
restrict software.</p>

<p>So, what does a patent do?  A patent is an explicit,
government-issued monopoly on using a certain idea.  In the patent
there's a part called the claims, which describe exactly what you're
not allowed to do (although they're written in a way you probably
can't understand).  It's a struggle to figure out what those
prohibitions actually mean, and they may go on for many pages of fine
print.</p>

<p>So the patent typically lasts for 20 years, which is a fairly long
time in our field.  Twenty years ago there was no World Wide
Web&mdash;a tremendous amount of the use of computers goes on in an
area which wasn't even possible to propose 20 years ago.  So of course
everything that people do on it is something that's new since 20 years
ago&mdash;at least in some aspect it is new.  So if patents had been
applied for we'd be prohibited from doing all of it, and we may be
prohibited from doing all of it in countries that have been foolish
enough to have such a policy.</p>

<p>Most of the time, when people describe the function of the patent
system, they have a vested interest in the system.  They may be patent
lawyers, or they may work in the Patent Office, or they may be in the
patent office of a megacorporation, so they want you to like the
system.</p>

<p>The <cite>Economist</cite> once referred to the patent system as
&ldquo;a time-consuming lottery.&rdquo; If you've ever seen publicity
for a lottery, you understand how it works: they dwell on the very
unlikely probability of winning, and they don't talk about the
overwhelming likelihood of losing.  In this way, they intentionally
and systematically present a biased picture of what's likely to happen
to you, without actually lying about any particular fact.</p>

<p>It's the same way for the publicity for the patent system: they
talk about what it's like to walk down the street with a patent in
your pocket&mdash;or first of all, what it's like to get a patent,
then what it's like to have a patent in your pocket, and every so
often you can pull it out and point it at somebody and say,
&ldquo;Give me your money.&rdquo;</p>

<p>To compensate for their bias, I'm going to describe it from the
other side, the victim side&mdash;what it's like for people who want
to develop or distribute or run software.  You have to worry that any
day someone might walk up to you and point a patent at you and say,
&ldquo;Give me your money.&rdquo;</p>

<p>If you want to develop software in a country that allows software
patents, and you want to work with patent law, what will you have to
do?</p>

<p>You could try to make a list of all the ideas that one might be
able to find in the program that you're about to write, aside from the
fact that you don't know that when you start writing the program.
[But] even after you finish writing the program you wouldn't be able
to make such a list.</p>

<p>The reason is&hellip; in the process you conceived of it in one
particular way&mdash;you've got a mental structure to apply to your
design.  And because of that, it will block you from seeing other
structures that somebody might use to understand the same
program&mdash;because you're not coming to it fresh; you already
designed it with one structure in mind.  Someone else who sees it for
the first time might see a different structure, which involves
different ideas, and it would be hard for you to see what those other
ideas are.  But nonetheless they're implemented in your program, and
those patents could prohibit your program, if those ideas are
patented.</p>

<p>For instance, suppose there were graphical-idea patents and you
wanted to draw a square.  Well, you would realize that if there was a
patent on a bottom edge, it would prohibit your square.  You could put
&ldquo;bottom edge&rdquo; on the list of all ideas implemented in your
drawing.  But you might not realize that somebody else with a patent
on bottom corners could sue you easily also, because he could take
your drawing and turn it by 45 degrees.  And now your square is like
this, and it has a bottom corner.</p>

<p>So you couldn't make a list of all the ideas which, if patented,
could prohibit your program.</p>

<p>What you might try to do is find out all the ideas that are
patented that might be in your program.  Now you can't do that
actually, because patent applications are kept secret for at least
eighteen months; and the result is the Patent Office could be
considering now whether to issue a patent, and they won't tell you.
And this is not just an academic, theoretical possibility.</p>

<p>For instance, in 1984 the Compress program was written, a program
for compressing files using the <abbr title="Lempel-Ziv-Welch">
LZW</abbr> data compression algorithm, and at that time there was
no patent on that algorithm for compressing files.  The author got the
algorithm from an article in a journal.  That was when we thought that
the purpose of computer science journals was to publish algorithms so
people could use them.</p>

<p>He wrote this program, he released it, and in 1985 a patent was
issued on that algorithm.  But the patent holder was cunning and
didn't immediately go around telling people to stop using it.  The
patent holder figured, &ldquo;Let's let everybody dig their grave
deeper.&rdquo; A few years later they started threatening people; it
became clear we couldn't use Compress, so I asked for people to
suggest other algorithms we could use for compressing files.</p>

<p>And somebody wrote and said, &ldquo;I developed another data compression
algorithm that works better, I've written a program, I'd like to give
it to you.&rdquo;  So we got ready to release it, and a week before it was
ready to be released, I read in the <cite>New York Times</cite> weekly
patent column, which I rarely saw&mdash;it's a couple of times a year
I might see it&mdash;but just by luck I saw that someone had gotten a
patent for &ldquo;inventing a new method of compressing data.&rdquo;
And so I said we had better look at this, and sure enough it covered
the program we were about to release.  But it could have been worse:
the patent could have been issued a year later, or two years later, or
three years later, or five years later.</p>

<p>Anyway, someone else came up with another, even better compression
algorithm, which was used in the program gzip, and just about
everybody who wanted to compress files switched to gzip, so
it sounds like a happy ending.  But you'll hear more later.  It's not
entirely so happy.</p>

<p>So, you can't find out about the patents that are being considered
even though they may prohibit your work once they come out, but you
can find out about the already issued patents.  They're all published
by the Patent Office.  The problem is you can't read them all, because
there are too many of them.</p>

<p>In the US I believe there are hundreds of thousands of
software patents; keeping track of them would be a tremendous job.  So
you're going to have to search for relevant patents.  And you'll find
a lot of relevant patents, but you won't necessarily find them
all.</p>

<p>For instance, in the 80s and 90s, there was a patent on
&ldquo;natural order recalculation&rdquo; in spreadsheets.  Somebody
once asked me for a copy of it, so I looked in our computer file which
lists the patent numbers.  And then I pulled out the drawer to get the
paper copy of this patent and xeroxed it and sent it to him.  And when
he got it, he said, &ldquo;I think you sent me the wrong patent.  This
is something about compilers.&rdquo; So I thought maybe our file has
the wrong number in it.  I looked in it again, and sure enough it said,
&ldquo;A method for compiling formulas into object code.&rdquo; So I
started to read it to see if it was indeed the wrong patent.  I read
the claims, and sure enough it was the natural order recalculation
patent, but it didn't use those terms.  It didn't use the term
&ldquo;spreadsheet&rdquo;.  In fact, what the patent prohibited was
dozens of different ways of implementing topological sort&mdash;all
the ways they could think of.  But I don't think it used the term
&ldquo;topological sort&rdquo;.</p>

<p>So if you were writing a spreadsheet and you tried to find relevant
patents by searching, you might have found a lot of patents.  But you
wouldn't have found this one until you told somebody, &ldquo;Oh, I'm
working on a spreadsheet,&rdquo; and he said, &ldquo;Oh, did you know
those other companies that are making spreadsheets are getting
sued?&rdquo; Then you would have found out.</p>

<p>Well, you can't find all the patents by searching, but you can find
a lot of them.  And then you've got to figure out what they mean,
which is hard, because patents are written in tortuous legal language
which is very hard to understand the real meaning of.  So you're going
to have to spend a lot of time talking with an expensive lawyer
explaining what you want to do in order to find out from the lawyer
whether you're allowed to do it.</p>

<p>Even the patent holders often can't recognize just what their
patents mean.  For instance, there's somebody named Paul Heckel who
released a program for displaying a lot of data on a small screen, and
based on a couple of the ideas in that program he got a couple of
patents.</p>

<p>I once tried to find a simple way to describe what claim 1 of one
of those patents covered.  I found that I couldn't find any simpler
way of saying it than what was in the patent itself; and that
sentence, I couldn't manage to keep it all in my mind at once, no
matter how hard I tried.</p>

<p>And Heckel couldn't follow it either, because when he saw
HyperCard, all he noticed was it was nothing like his program.  It
didn't occur to him that the way his patent was written it might
prohibit HyperCard; but his lawyer had that idea, so he threatened
Apple.  And then he threatened Apple's customers, and eventually Apple
made a settlement with him which is secret, so we don't know who
really won.  And this is just an illustration of how hard it is for
anybody to understand what a patent does or doesn't prohibit.</p>

<p>In fact, I once gave this speech and Heckel was in the audience.
And at this point he jumped up and said, &ldquo;That's not true, I
just didn't know the scope of my protection.&rdquo; And I said,
&ldquo;Yeah, that's what I said,&rdquo; at which point he sat down and
that was the end of my experience being heckled by Heckel.  If I had
said no, he probably would have found a way to argue with me.</p>

<p>Anyway, after a long, expensive conversation with a lawyer, the
lawyer will give you an answer like this:</p>

<blockquote><p>If you do something in this area, you're almost certain
to lose a lawsuit; if you do something in this area, there's a
considerable chance of losing a lawsuit; and if you really want to be
safe you've got to stay out of this area.  But there's a sizeable
element of chance in the outcome of any lawsuit.</p></blockquote>

<p>So now that you have clear, predictable rules for doing business,
what are you actually going to do?  Well, there are three things that
you could do to deal with the issue of any particular patent.  One is
to avoid it, another is to get a license for it, and the third is to
invalidate it.  So I'll talk about these one by one.</p>

<p>First, there's the possibility of avoiding the patent, which means,
don't implement what it prohibits.  Of course, if it's hard to tell
what it prohibits, it might be hard to tell what would suffice to
avoid it.</p>

<p>A couple of years ago Kodak sued Sun [for] using a patent for
something having to do with object-oriented programming, and Sun
didn't think it was infringing that patent.  But the court decided it
was; and when other people look at that patent they haven't the
faintest idea whether that decision was right or not.  No one can tell
what that patent does or doesn't cover, but Sun had to pay hundreds of
millions of dollars because of violating a completely incomprehensible
law.</p>

<p>Sometimes you can tell what you need to avoid, and sometimes what
you need to avoid is an algorithm.</p>

<p>For instance, I saw a patent for something like the fast Fourier
transform, but it ran twice as fast.  Well, if the ordinary FFT is
fast enough for your application then that's an easy way to avoid this
other one.  And most of the time that would work.  Once in a while you
might be trying to do something where it runs doing FFT all the time,
and it's just barely fast enough using the faster algorithm.  And then
you can't avoid it, although maybe you could wait a couple of years
for a faster computer.  But that's going to be rare.  Most of the time
that patent will to be easy to avoid.</p>

<p>On the other hand, a patent on an algorithm may be impossible to
avoid.  Consider the LZW data compression algorithm.  Well, as I
explained, we found a better data compression algorithm, and everybody
who wanted to compress files switched to the program gzip
which used the better algorithm.  And the reason is, if you just want
to compress the file and uncompress it later, you can tell people to
use this program to uncompress it; then you can use any program with
any algorithm, and you only care how well it works.</p>

<p>But LZW is used for other things, too; for instance the PostScript
language specifies operators for LZW compression and LZW
uncompression.  It's no use having another, better algorithm because
it makes a different format of data.  They're not interoperable.  If
you compress it with the gzip algorithm, you won't be able to
uncompress it using LZW.  So no matter how good your other algorithm
is, and no matter what it is, it just doesn't enable you to implement
PostScript according to the specs.</p>

<p>But I noticed that users rarely ask their printers to compress
things.  Generally the only thing they want their printers to do is to
uncompress; and I also noticed that both of the patents on the LZW
algorithm were written in such a way that if your system can only
uncompress, it's not forbidden.  These patents were written so that
they covered compression, and they had other claims covering both
compression and uncompression; but there was no claim covering only
uncompression.  So I realized that if we implement only the
uncompression for LZW, we would be safe.  And although it would not
satisfy the specification, it would please the users sufficiently; it
would do what they actually needed.  So that's how we barely squeaked
by avoiding the two patents.</p>

<p>Now there is GIF format, for images.  That uses the LZW
algorithm also.  It didn't take long for people to define another
image format, called PNG, which stands for &ldquo;PNG's Not
GIF&rdquo;.  I think it uses the gzip algorithm.  And we
started saying to people, &ldquo;Don't use GIF format, it's
dangerous.  Switch to PNG.&rdquo; And the users said,
&ldquo;Well, maybe some day, but the browsers don't implement it
yet,&rdquo; and the browser developers said, &ldquo;We may implement
it someday, but there's not much demand from users.&rdquo;</p>

<p>Well, it's pretty obvious what's going on&mdash;GIF was a
de facto standard.  In effect, asking people to switch to a different
format, instead of their de facto standard, is like asking everyone in
New Zealand to speak Hungarian.  People will say, &ldquo;Well, yeah,
I'll learn to speak it after everyone else does.&rdquo; And so we
never succeeded in asking people to stop using GIF, even
though one of those patent holders was going around to operators of
web sites, threatening to sue them unless they could prove that all of
the GIFs on the site were made with authorized, licensed
software.</p>

<p>So GIF was a dangerous trap for a large part of our
community.  We thought we had an alternative to GIF format,
namely JPEG, but then somebody said, &ldquo;I was just looking
through my portfolio of patents&rdquo;&mdash;I think it was somebody that
just bought patents and used them to threaten people&mdash;and he
said, &ldquo;and I found that one of them covers JPEG format.&rdquo;</p>

<p>Well, JPEG was not a de facto standard, it's an official
standard, issued by a standards committee; and the committee had a
lawyer too.  Their lawyer said he didn't think that this patent
actually covered JPEG format.</p>

<p>So who's right?  Well, this patent holder sued a bunch of
companies, and if there was a decision, it would have said who was
right.  But I haven't heard about a decision; I'm not sure if there
ever was one.  I think they settled, and the settlement is almost
certainly secret, which means that it didn't tell us anything about
who's right.</p>

<p>These are fairly lightweight cases: one patent on JPEG,
two patents on the LZW algorithm used in GIF.  Now you might
wonder how come there are two patents on the same algorithm?  It's not
supposed to happen, but it did.  And the reason is that the patent
examiners can't possibly take the time to study every pair of things
they might need to study and compare, because they're not allowed to
take that much time.  And because algorithms are just mathematics,
there's no way you can narrow down which applications and patents you
need to compare.</p>

<p>You see, in physical engineering fields, they can use the physical
nature of what's going on to narrow things down.  For instance, in
chemical engineering, they can say, &ldquo;What are the substances
going in?  What are the substances coming out?&rdquo; If two different
[patent] applications are different in that way, then they're not the
same process so you don't need to worry.  But the same math can be
represented in ways that can look very different, and until you study
them both together, you don't realize they're talking about the same
thing.  And, because of this, it's quite common to see the same thing
get patented multiple times [in software].</p>

<p>Remember that program that was killed by a patent before we
released it?  Well, that algorithm got patented twice also.  In one
little field we've seen it happen in two cases that we ran
into&mdash;the same algorithm being patented twice.  Well, I think my
explanation tells you why that happens.</p>

<p>But one or two patents is a lightweight case.  What
about MPEG2, the video format?  I saw a list of over 70
patents covering that, and the negotiations to arrange a way for
somebody to license all those patents took longer than developing the
standard itself.  The JPEG committee wanted to develop a
follow-on standard, and they gave up.  They said there were too many
patents; there was no way to do it.</p>

<p>Sometimes it's a feature that's patented, and the only way to avoid
that patent is not to implement that feature.  For instance, the users
of the word processor Xywrite once got a downgrade in the mail, which
removed a feature.  The feature was that you could define a list of
abbreviations.  For instance, if you define &ldquo;exp&rdquo; as an
abbreviation for &ldquo;experiment&rdquo;, then if you type &ldquo;exp-space&ldquo; or &ldquo;exp-comma&rdquo;, the &ldquo;exp&rdquo; would change automatically to
&ldquo;experiment&rdquo;.</p>

<p>Then somebody who had a patent on this feature threatened them, and
they concluded that the only thing they could do was to take the
feature out.  And so they sent all the users a downgrade.</p>

<p>But they also contacted me, because my Emacs editor had a feature
like that starting from the late 70s.  And it was described in the
Emacs manual, so they thought I might be able to help them invalidate
that patent.  Well, I'm happy to know I've had at least one patentable
idea in my life, but I'm unhappy that someone else patented it.</p>

<p>Fortunately, in fact, that patent was eventually invalidated, and
partly on the strength of the fact that I had published using it
earlier.  But in the meantime they had had to remove this feature.</p>

<p>Now, to remove one or two features may not be a disaster.  But when
you have to remove 50 features, you could do it, but people are likely
to say, &ldquo;This program's no good; it's missing all the features I
want.&rdquo; So it may not be a solution.  And sometimes a patent is
so broad that it wipes out an entire field, like the patent on
public-key encryption, which in fact put public-key encryption
basically off limits for about ten years.</p>

<p>So that's the option of avoiding the patent&mdash;often possible,
but sometimes not, and there's a limit to how many patents you can
avoid.</p>

<p>What about the next possibility, of getting a license for the
patent?</p>

<p>Well, the patent holder may not offer you a license.  It's entirely
up to him.  He could say, &ldquo;I just want to shut you down.&rdquo;
I once got a letter from somebody whose family business was making
casino games, which were of course computerized, and he had been
threatened by a patent holder who wanted to make his business shut
down.  He sent me the patent.  Claim 1 was something like &ldquo;a
network with a multiplicity of computers, in which each computer
supports a multiplicity of games, and allows a multiplicity of game
sessions at the same time&rdquo;.</p>

<p>Now, I'm sure in the 1980s there was a university that set up a
room with a network of workstations, and each workstation had some
kind of windowing facility.  All they had to do was to install
multiple games and it would be possible to display multiple game
sessions at once.  This is so trivial and uninteresting that nobody
would have bothered to publish an article about doing it.  No one
would have been interested in publishing an article about doing it,
but it was worth patenting it.  If it had occurred to you that you
could get a monopoly on this trivial thing, then you could shut down
your competitors with it.</p>

<p>But why does the Patent Office issue so many patents that seem
absurd and trivial to us?</p>

<p>It's not because the patent examiners are stupid, it's because
they're following a system, and the system has rules, and the rules
lead to this result.</p>

<p>You see, if somebody has made a machine that does something once,
and somebody else designs a machine that will do the same thing, but N
times, for us that's a <code>for</code>-loop, but for the Patent Office
that's an invention.  If there are machines that can do A, and there
are machines that can do B, and somebody designs a machine that can do
A or B, for us that's an <code>if-then-else</code> statement, but for the
Patent Office that's an invention.  So they have very low standards,
and they follow those standards; and the result is patents that look
absurd and trivial to us.  Whether they're legally valid I can't say.
But every programmer who sees them laughs.</p>

<p>In any case, I was unable to suggest anything he could do to help
himself, and he had to shut down his business.  But most patent
holders will offer you a license.  It's likely to be rather
expensive.</p>

<p>But there are some software developers that find it particularly
easy to get licenses, most of the time.  Those are the
megacorporations.  In any field the megacorporations generally own
about half the patents, and they cross-license each other, and they
can make anybody else cross-license if he's really producing anything.
The result is that they end up painlessly with licenses for almost all
the patents.</p>

<p>IBM wrote an article in its house magazine, <cite>Think</cite>
magazine&mdash;I think it's issue 5, 1990&mdash;about the benefit IBM
got from its almost 9,000 US patents at the time (now it's up to
45,000 or more).  They said that one of the benefits was that they
collected money, but the main benefit, which they said was perhaps an
order of magnitude greater, was &ldquo;getting access to the patents
of others,&rdquo; namely cross-licensing.</p>

<p>What this means is since IBM, with so many patents, can make almost
everybody give them a cross-license, IBM avoids almost all the grief
that the patent system would have inflicted on anybody else.  So
that's why IBM wants software patents.  That's why the
megacorporations in general want software patents, because they know
that by cross-licensing, they will have a sort of exclusive club on
top of a mountain peak.  And all the rest of us will be down here, and
there's no way we can get up there.  You know, if you're a genius, you
might start up a small company and get some patents, but you'll never
get into IBM's league, no matter what you do.</p>

<p>Now a lot of companies tell their employees, &ldquo;Get us patents
so we can defend ourselves&rdquo; and they mean, &ldquo;use them to
try to get cross-licensing,&rdquo; but it just doesn't work well.
It's not an effective strategy if you've got a small number of
patents.</p>

<p>Suppose you've got three patents.  One points there, one points
there, and one points there, and somebody over there points a patent
at you.  Well, your three patents don't help you at all, because none
of them points at him.  On the other hand, sooner or later, somebody
in the company is going to notice that this patent is actually
pointing at some people, and [the company] could threaten them and
squeeze money out of them&mdash;never mind that those people didn't
attack this company.</p>

<p>So if your employer says to you, &ldquo;We need some patents to
defend ourselves, so help us get patents,&rdquo; I recommend this
response:</p>

<blockquote><p>Boss, I trust you and I'm sure you would only use those
patents to defend the company if it's attacked.  But I don't know
who's going to be the CEO of this company in five years.  For all I
know, it might get acquired by Microsoft.  So I really can't trust the
company's word to only use these patents for defense unless I get it
in writing.  Please put it in writing that any patents I provide for
the company will only be used for self-defense and collective
security, and not for repression, and then I'll be able to get patents
for the company with a clean conscience.</p></blockquote>

<p>It would be most interesting to raise this not just in private with
your boss, but also on the company's discussion list.</p>

<p>The other thing that could happen is that the company could fail
and its assets could be auctioned off, including the patents; and the
patents will be bought by someone who means to use them to do
something nasty.</p>

<p>This cross-licensing practice is very important to understand,
because this is what punctures the argument of the software patent
advocates who say that software patents are needed to protect the
starving genius.  They give you a scenario which is a series of
unlikelihoods.</p>

<p>So let's look at it.  According to this scenario, there's a
brilliant designer of whatever, who's been working for years by
himself in his attic coming up with a better way to do whatever it is.
And now that it's ready, he wants to start a business and mass-produce
this thing; and because his idea is so good his company will
inevitably succeed&mdash; except for one thing: the big companies will
compete with him and take all his market the away.  And because of
this, his business will almost certainly fail, and then he will
starve.</p>

<p>Well, let's look at all the unlikely assumptions here.</p>

<p>First of all, that he comes up with this idea working by himself.
That's not very likely.  In a high-tech field, most progress is made
by people working in a field, doing things and talking with people in
the field.  But I wouldn't say it's impossible, not that one thing by
itself.</p>

<p>But anyway the next supposition is that he's going to start a
business and that it's going to succeed.  Well, just because he's a
brilliant engineer doesn't mean that he's any good at running a
business.  Most new businesses fail; more than 95 percent of them, I think,
fail within a few years.  So that's probably what's going to happen to
him, no matter what.</p>

<p>Ok, let's assume that in addition to being a brilliant engineer who
came up with something great by himself, he's also talented at running
businesses.  If he has a knack for running businesses, then maybe his
business won't fail.  After all, not all new businesses fail, there
are a certain few that succeed.  Well, if he understands business,
then instead of trying to go head to head with large companies, he
might try to do things that small companies are better at and have a
better chance of succeeding.  He might succeed.  But let's suppose it
fails anyway.  If he's so brilliant and has a knack for running
businesses, I'm sure he won't starve, because somebody will want to
give him a job.</p>

<p>So a series of unlikelihoods&mdash;it's not a very plausible
scenario.  But let's look at it anyway.</p>

<p>Because where they go from there is to say the patent system will
&ldquo;protect&rdquo; our starving genius, because he can get a patent
on this technique.  And then when IBM wants to compete with him, he
says, &ldquo;IBM, you can't compete with me, because I've got this
patent,&rdquo; and IBM says, &ldquo;Oh, no, not again!&rdquo;</p>

<p>Well, here's what really happens.</p>

<p>IBM says, &ldquo;Oh, how nice, you have a patent.  Well, we have
this patent, and this patent, and this patent, and this patent, and
this patent, all of which cover other ideas implemented in your
product, and if you think you can fight us on all those, we'll pull
out some more.  So let's sign a cross-license agreement, and that way
nobody will get hurt.&rdquo; Now since we've assumed that our genius
understands business, he's going to realize that he has no choice.
He's going to sign the cross-license agreement, as just about
everybody does when IBM demands it.  And then this means that IBM will
get &ldquo;access&rdquo; to his patent, meaning IBM would be free to
compete with him just as if there were no patents, which means that
the supposed benefit that they claim he would get by having this
patent is not real.  He won't get this benefit.</p>

<p>The patent might &ldquo;protect&rdquo; him from competition from
you or me, but not from IBM&mdash;not from the very megacorporations
which the scenario says are the threat to him.  You know in advance
that there's got to be a flaw in this reasoning when people who are
lobbyists for megacorporations recommend a policy supposedly because
it's going to protect their small competitors from them.  If it really
were going to do that, they wouldn't be in favor of it.  But this
explains why [software patents] won't do it.</p>

<p>Even IBM can't always do this, because there are companies that we
refer to as patent trolls or patent parasites, and their only business
is using patents to squeeze money out of people who really make
something.</p>

<p>Patent lawyers tell us that it's really wonderful to have patents
in your field, but they don't have patents in their field.  There are
no patents on how to send or write a threatening letter, no patents on
how to file a lawsuit, and no patents on how to persuade a judge or
jury, so even IBM can't make the patent trolls cross-license.  But IBM
figures, &ldquo;Our competition will have to pay them too; this is
just part of the cost of doing business, and we can live with
it.&rdquo; IBM and the other megacorporations figure that the general
dominion over all activity that they get from their patents is good
for them, and paying off the trolls they can live with.  So that's why
they want software patents.</p>

<p>There are also certain software developers who find it particularly
difficult to get a patent license, and those are the developers of
free software.  The reason is that the usual patent license has
conditions we can't possibly fulfill, because usual patent licenses
demand a payment per copy.  But when software gives users the freedom
to distribute and make more copies, we have no way to count the copies
that exist.</p>

<p>If someone offered me a patent license for a payment of
one-millionth of a dollar per copy, the total amount of money I'd have
to pay maybe is in my pocket now.  Maybe it's 50 dollars, but I don't
know if it's 50 dollars, or 49, or what, because there's no way I can
count the copies that people have made.</p>

<p>A patent holder doesn't have to demand a payment per copy; a patent
holder could offer you a license for a single lump sum, but those lump
sums tend to be big, like US$100,000.</p>

<p>And the reason that we've been able to develop so much
freedom-respecting software is [that] we can develop software without
money, but we can't pay a lot of money without money.  If we're forced
to pay for the privilege of writing software for the public, we won't
be able to do it very much.</p>

<p>That's the possibility of getting a license for the patent.  The
other possibility is to invalidate the patent.  If the country
considers software patents to be basically valid, and allowed, the
only question is whether that particular patent meets the criteria.
It's only useful to go to court if you've got an argument to make that
might prevail.</p>

<p>What would that argument be?  You have to find evidence that, years
ago, before the patent was applied for, people knew about the same
idea.  And you'd have to find things today that demonstrate that they
knew about it publicly at that time.  So the dice were cast years ago,
and if they came up favorably for you, and if you can prove that fact
today, then you have an argument to use to try to invalidate the
patent.  And it might work.</p>

<p>It might cost you a lot of money to go through this case, and as a
result, a probably invalid patent is a very frightening weapon to be
threatened with if you don't have a lot of money.  There are people
who can't afford to defend their rights&mdash;lots of them.  The ones
who can afford it are the exception.</p>

<p>These are the three things that you might be able to do about each
patent that prohibits something in your program.  The thing is,
whether each one is possible depends on different details of the
circumstances, so some of the time, none of them is possible; and when
that happens, your project is dead.</p>

<p>But lawyers in most countries tell us, &ldquo;Don't try to find the
patents in advance&rdquo;, and the reason is that the penalty for
infringement is bigger if you knew about the patent.  So what they
tell you is &ldquo;Keep your eyes shut.  Don't try to find out about
the patents, just go blindly taking your design decisions, and
hope.&rdquo;</p>

<p>And of course, with each single design decision, you probably don't
step on a patent.  Probably nothing happens to you.  But there are so
many steps you have to take to get across the minefield, it's very
unlikely you will get through safely.  And of course, the patent
holders don't all show up at the same time, so you don't know how many
there are going to be.</p>

<p>The patent holder of the natural order recalculation patent was
demanding 5 percent of the gross sales of every spreadsheet.  You could
imagine paying for a few such licenses, but what happens when patent
holder number 20 comes along, and wants you to pay out the last
remaining 5 percent?  And then what happens when patent holder number 21
comes along?</p>

<p>People in business say that this scenario is amusing but absurd,
because your business would fail long before you got there.  They told
me that two or three such licenses would make your business fail.  So
you'd never get to 20.  They show up one by one, so you never know how
many more there are going to be.</p>

<p>Software patents are a mess.  They're a mess for software
developers, but in addition they're a restriction on every computer
user because software patents restrict what you can do on your
computer.</p>

<p>This is very different from patents, for instance, on automobile
engines.  These only restrict companies that make cars; they don't
restrict you and me.  But software patents do restrict you and me, and
everybody who uses computers.  So we can't think of them in purely
economic terms; we can't judge this issue purely in economic terms.
There's something more important at stake.</p>

<p>But even in economic terms, the system is self-defeating, because
its purpose is supposed to be to promote progress.  Supposedly by
creating this artificial incentive for people to publish ideas, it's
going to help the field progress.  But all it does is the exact
opposite, because the big job in software is not coming up with ideas,
it's implementing thousands of ideas together in one program.  And
software patents obstruct that, so they're economically
self-defeating.</p>

<p>And there's even economic research showing that this is
so&mdash;showing how in a field with a lot of incremental innovation,
a patent system can actually reduce investment in R &amp; D.  And of
course, it also obstructs development in other ways.  So even if we
ignore the injustice of software patents, even if we were to look at
it in the narrow economic terms that are usually proposed, it's still
harmful.</p>

<p>People sometimes respond by saying that &ldquo;People in other
fields have been living with patents for decades, and they've gotten
used to it, so why should you be an exception?&rdquo;</p>

<p>Now, that question has an absurd assumption.  It's like saying,
&ldquo;Other people get cancer, why shouldn't you?&rdquo; I think
every time someone doesn't get cancer, that's good, regardless of what
happened to the others.  That question is absurd because of its
presupposition that somehow we all have a duty to suffer the harm done
by patents.</p>

<p>But there is a sensible question buried inside it, and that
sensible question is &ldquo;What differences are there between various
fields that might affect what is good or bad patent policy in those
fields?&rdquo;</p>

<p>There is an important basic difference between fields in regard to
how many patents are likely to prohibit or cover parts of any one
product.</p>

<p>Now we have a naive idea in our minds which I'm trying to get rid
of, because it's not true.  And it's that on any one product there is
one patent, and that patent covers the overall design of that product.
So if you design a new product, it can't be patented already, and you
will have an opportunity to get &ldquo;the patent&rdquo; on that
product.</p>

<p>That's not how things work.  In the 1800s, maybe they did, but not
now.  In fact, fields fall on a spectrum of how many patents [there
are] per product.  The beginning of the spectrum is one, but no field
is like that today; fields are at various places on this spectrum.</p>

<p>The field that's closest to that is pharmaceuticals.  A few decades
ago, there really was one patent per pharmaceutical, at least at any
time, because the patent covered the entire chemical formula of that
one particular substance.  Back then, if you developed a new drug, you
could be sure it wasn't already patented by somebody else and you
could get the one patent on that drug.</p>

<p>But that's not how it works now.  Now there are broader patents, so
now you could develop a new drug, and you're not allowed to make it
because somebody has a broader patent which covers it already.</p>

<p>And there might even be a few such patents covering your new drug
simultaneously, but there won't be hundreds.  The reason is, our
ability to do biochemical engineering is so limited that nobody knows
how to combine so many ideas to make something that's useful in
medicine.  If you can combine a couple of them you're doing pretty
well at our level of knowledge.  But other fields involve combining
more ideas to make one thing.</p>

<p>At the other end of the spectrum is software, where we can combine
more ideas into one usable design than anybody else, because our field
is basically easier than all other fields.  I'm presuming that the
intelligence of people in our field is the same as that of people in
physical engineering.  It's not that we're fundamentally better than
they are; it's that our field is fundamentally easier, because we're
working with mathematics.</p>

<p>A program is made out of mathematical components, which have a
definition, whereas physical objects don't have a definition.  The
matter does what it does, so through the perversity of matter, your
design may not work the way it &ldquo;should&rdquo; have worked.  And that's just
tough.  You can't say that the matter has a bug in it, and the
physical universe should get fixed.  [Whereas] we [programmers] can
make a castle that rests on a mathematically thin line, and it stays
up because nothing weighs anything.</p>

<p>There're so many complications you have to cope with in physical
engineering that we don't have to worry about.</p>

<p>For instance, when I put an <code>if</code>-statement inside of
a <code>while</code>-loop,
</p>

<ul>
<li>I don't have to worry that if this <code>while</code>-loop repeats
  at the wrong rate, the <code>if</code>-statement might start to
  vibrate and it might resonate and crack;</li>

<li>I don't have to worry that if it resonates much faster&mdash;you
  know, millions of times per second&mdash;that it might generate
  radio frequency signals that might induce wrong values in other
  parts of the program;</li>

<li>I don't have to worry that corrosive fluids from the environment
  might seep in between the <code>if</code>-statement and
  the <code>while</code>-statement and start eating away at them until
  the signals don't pass anymore;</li>

<li>I don't have to worry about how the heat generated by my
  <code>if</code>-statement is going to get out through
  the <code>while</code>-statement so that it doesn't make
  the <code>if</code>-statement burn out; and</li>

<li>I don't have to worry about how I would take out the broken
  <code>if</code>-statement if it does crack, burn, or corrode, and
  replace it with another <code>if</code>-statement to make the
  program run again.</li>
</ul>

<p>For that matter, I don't have to worry about how I'm going to
insert the <code>if</code>-statement inside
the <code>while</code>-statement every time I produce a copy of the
program.  I don't have to design a factory to make copies of my
program, because there are various general commands that will make
copies of anything.</p>

<p>If I want to make copies on CD, I just have to write a master; and
there's one program I can [use to] make a master out of anything,
write any data I want.  I can make a master CD and write it and send
it off to a factory, and they'll duplicate whatever I send them.  I
don't have to design a different factory for each thing I want to
duplicate.</p>

<p>Very often with physical engineering you have to do that; you have
to design products for manufacturability.  Designing the factory may
even be a bigger job than designing the product, and then you may have
to spend millions of dollars to build the factory.  So with all of
this trouble, you're not going to be able to put together so many
different ideas in one product and have it work.</p>

<p>A physical design with a million nonrepeating different design
elements is a gigantic project.  A program with a million different
design elements, that's nothing.  It's a few hundred thousand lines of
code, and a few people will write that in a few years, so it's not a
big deal.  So the result is that the patent system weighs
proportionately heavier on us than it does on people in any other
field who are being held back by the perversity of matter.</p>

<p>A lawyer did a study of one particular large program, namely the
kernel Linux, which is used together with the GNU operating system
that I launched.  This was five years ago now; he found 283 different
US patents, each of which appeared to prohibit some computation done
somewhere in the code of Linux.  At the time I saw an article saying
that Linux was 0.25 percent of the whole system.  So by multiplying 300 by
400 we can estimate the number of patents that would prohibit
something in the whole system as being around 100,000.  This is a very
rough estimate only, and no more accurate information is available,
since trying to figure it out would be a gigantic task.</p>

<p>Now this lawyer did not publish the list of patents, because that
would have endangered the developers of Linux the kernel, putting them
in a position where the penalties if they were sued would be greater.
He didn't want to hurt them; he wanted to demonstrate how bad this
problem is, of patent gridlock.</p>

<p>Programmers can understand this immediately, but politicians
usually don't know much about programming; they usually imagine that
patents are basically much like copyrights, only somehow stronger.
They imagine that since software developers are not endangered by the
copyrights on their work, that they won't be endangered by the patents
on their work either.  They imagine that, since when you write a
program you have the copyright, [therefore likewise] if you write a
program you have the patents also.  This is false&mdash;so how do we
give them a clue what patents would really do?  What they really do in
countries like the US?</p>

<p>I find it's useful to make an analogy between software and
symphonies.  Here's why it's a good analogy.</p>

<p>A program or symphony combines many ideas.  A symphony combines
many musical ideas.  But you can't just pick a bunch of ideas and say
&ldquo;Here's my combination of ideas, do you like it?&rdquo; Because
in order to make them work you have to implement them all.  You can't
just pick musical ideas and list them and say, &ldquo;Hey, how do you
like this combination?&rdquo; You can't hear that [list].  You have to
write notes which implement all these ideas together.</p>

<p>The hard task, the thing most of us wouldn't be any good at, is
writing all these notes to make the whole thing sound good.  Sure,
lots of us could pick musical ideas out of a list, but we wouldn't
know how to write a good-sounding symphony to implement those ideas.
Only some of us have that talent.  That's the thing that limits you.
I could probably invent a few musical ideas, but I wouldn't know how
to use them to any effect.</p>

<p>So imagine that it's the 1700s, and the governments of Europe
decide that they want to promote the progress of symphonic music by
establishing a system of musical idea patents, so that any musical
idea described in words could be patented.</p>

<p>For instance, using a particular sequence of notes as a motif could
be patented, or a chord progression could be patented, or a rhythmic
pattern could be patented, or using certain instruments by themselves
could be patented, or a format of repetitions in a movement could be
patented.  Any sort of musical idea that could be described in words
would have been patentable.</p>

<p>Now imagine that it's 1800 and you're Beethoven, and you want to
write a symphony.  You're going to find it's much harder to write a
symphony you don't get sued for than to write one that sounds good,
because you have to thread your way around all the patents that exist.
If you complained about this, the patent holders would say, &ldquo;Oh,
Beethoven, you're just jealous because we had these ideas first.  Why
don't you go and think of some ideas of your own?&rdquo;</p>

<p>Now Beethoven had ideas of his own.  The reason he's considered a
great composer is because of all of the new ideas that he had, and he
actually used.  And he knew how to use them in such a way that they
would work, which was to combine them with lots of well-known ideas.
He could put a few new ideas into a composition together with a lot of
old and uncontroversial ideas.  And the result was a piece that was
controversial, but not so much so that people couldn't get used to
it.</p>

<p>To us, Beethoven's music doesn't sound controversial; I'm told it
was, when it was new.  But because he combined his new ideas with a
lot of known ideas, he was able to give people a chance to stretch a
certain amount.  And they could, which is why to us those ideas sound
just fine.  But nobody, not even a Beethoven, is such a genius that he
could reinvent music from zero, not using any of the well-known ideas,
and make something that people would want to listen to.  And nobody is
such a genius he could reinvent computing from zero, not using any of
the well-known ideas, and make something that people want to use.</p>

<p>When the technological context changes so frequently, you end up
with a situation where what was done 20 years ago is totally
inadequate.  Twenty years ago there was no World Wide Web.  So, sure,
people did a lot of things with computers back then, but what they
want to do today are things that work with the World Wide Web.  And
you can't do that using only the ideas that were known 20 years ago.
And I presume that the technological context will continue to change,
creating fresh opportunities for somebody to get patents that give the
shaft to the whole field.</p>

<p>Big companies can even do this themselves.  For instance, a few
years ago Microsoft decided to make a phony open standard for
documents and to get it approved as a standard by corrupting the
International Standards Organization, which they did.  But they
designed it using something that Microsoft had patented.  Microsoft is
big enough that it can start with a patent, design a format or
protocol to use that patented idea (whether it's helpful or not), in
such a way that there's no way to be compatible unless you use that
same idea too.  And then Microsoft can make that a de facto standard
with or without help from corrupted standards bodies.  Just by its
weight it can push people into using that format, and that basically
means that they get a stranglehold over the whole world.  So we need
to show the politicians what's really going on here.  We need to show
them why this is bad.</p>

<p>Now I've heard it said that the reason New Zealand is considering
software patents is that one large company wants to be given some
monopolies.  To restrict everyone in the country so that one company
will make more money is the absolute opposite of statesmanship.</p>

<p>So, at this point, I'd like to ask for questions.</p></dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>What is the alternative?</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>No software patents.  I know that that works fine.  I was in the
field when there were no software patents.  And that meant people
developed software, and they distributed that software in various
ways, and they didn't have to worry about getting sued by patent
holders for doing it, so they were safe.  Software patents don't solve
a real problem, so we don't need to ask what other solution is
there.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>How do the developers get rewarded?</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd><p>Many ways.  Software patents have nothing to do with that.
Remember if you're a software developer, software patents don't help
you get whatever you want to get.</p>

<p>Different software developers want different things.  I developed
some important software in the 1980s, and the reward I wanted was to
see people using computers in freedom.  And I got that reward,
although not totally, not everybody has freedom.  But software patents
would only have stopped me.</p>

<p>Other people developed programs because they wanted money.
Software patents threaten them, too, and still threaten them, because
you're not going to make any money if patent holders demand that you
give it all to them, or if they make you shut down.</p></dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>How do you prevent plagiarism and still&hellip;</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd><p>Plagiarism has nothing to do with this issue.  It has
absolutely nothing to do with this issue.</p>

<p>Plagiarism means copying the text of a work and claiming to have
written it yourself.  But patents are not concerned with the text of
any particular work.  They simply have nothing to do with this.</p>

<p>If you write a work and this work embodies some ideas, which it
always does, there's no reason to think that the patents covering
those ideas would belong to you.  They're more likely to belong to
lots of others, and half of them to the megacorporations, and they can
then all sue you.  So you don't even have to worry [about plagiarism];
long before you get to the point where somebody else might copy it,
you're going to be getting the shaft.</p>

<p>You are confusing patents with copyrights, I'm afraid.  They have
nothing in common.  I've explained to you what the patent system does
to software, but I think you don't believe me because you've heard
what copyrights do and you're confusing the two, so these impressions
you've got about what copyrights do, you're just assuming that patents
do them also&mdash;and they don't.  If you write some code, the
copyright on that code would belong to you; but if your code
implements ideas, if some of these ideas are patented, those patents
belong to others who could then sue you.</p>

<p>You don't have to be afraid, with copyright, that when you write
code yourself, that somebody else already has a copyright on it and
can sue you, because copyright only restricts copying.  In fact, even
if you write something which is identical to what somebody else wrote,
if you can prove you didn't copy it, that's a defense under copyright
law, because copyright law is only concerned with copying.  But
copyright law is only concerned with the details of authorship of a
work [i.e., not the ideas it embodies], so it has nothing in common
with patent law in terms of what it deals with, and the effects are
totally different.</p>

<p>Now I'm not in favor personally of all the things that people do
with copyright law, I've criticized it.  But it's a totally different,
unrelated issue.  If you think that patent law helps somebody who is
developing software, it means that you have got a completely wrong
picture of what patent law actually does.</p></dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>Don't get me wrong.  I'm on your side.</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>OK, but still you've got a wrong picture.  I'm not blaming you for
it, because you've just been misinformed.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>If I'm writing software for commercial purposes, do I get good
protection by treating it as a black box and keeping it secret?</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>I don't want to discuss that question because I'm not in favor of
it, I think it's unethical to do that, but that's an unrelated
issue.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>I understand that.</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>I don't want to change the subject and then praise something that
I think is bad.  But because it's a change of subject I'd rather not
get into that.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>Our Foundation for Research, Science, and Technology, I think
they're probably the equivalent of your National Science Foundation,
provides grants for research and development and one of the things
that they propose pretty actively is that ideas that they have funded
should be secured if possible by patents.</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>That shouldn't be the case in software, because software ideas
shouldn't be patentable ever by anyone.  But what you are seeing
there, more generally, is an example of the general corruption of our
society by putting commercial aims above all others.  Now I'm not a
communist and I don't want to abolish business, but when it becomes
business above all, every aspect of life oriented towards business,
that is dangerous.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>So Richard, if you talk to the Foundation, perhaps you might
propose that there are better ways for a small country like New
Zealand to make money on software.</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>Software patents don't help anybody make money out of software.
They mean that you're in danger of getting sued when you try.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>Which makes it difficult for New Zealand as a country to build an
economic base using software as part of that.</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>Sorry, when you say &ldquo;which&rdquo; I don't know what you are
referring to.  Software patents will make it difficult for anyone.  If
New Zealand allows software patents, that will make it difficult in
New Zealand for anybody to develop programs and distribute them,
because you'll be in danger of getting sued.  Software patents have
nothing to do with developing a program and then putting it to some
use.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>So New Zealand, in terms of its economic development, it would be
better protected by having no software patents.</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd><p>Yes.  You see, each country has its own patent system, and they
work independently, except that countries have signed up to a treaty
that says, &ldquo;If you have got a patent in that country, you can
basically bring your application over here, and we'll judge it based
on the year you applied for it over there.&rdquo;  But other than that, each
country has its own criteria for what can be patented and has its own
set of patents.</p>

<p>So the result is if the US allows software patents and New Zealand
does not, that means that everybody in the world, including New
Zealanders, can get US software patents and sue us poor Americans at
home.  But if New Zealand doesn't allow software patents that means
that neither you nor we can get New Zealand software patents to sue
you New Zealanders at home.  You can be sure that almost all the
software patents will belong to foreigners who will use them to
basically kick any New Zealand software developers whenever they get
the chance.</p></dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>Since the Hughes Aircraft case, I think it was in the 1990s</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>I don't know about that case.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>But basically New Zealand's had software patents.  It's not like
we're going into a field where we don't already have them, we do.</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd><p>I don't know, but I'm told that there's a decision being made
now at the legislative level of whether to allow them.  But Patent
Offices often respond to lobbying from megacorporations through
WIPO.</p>

<p>WIPO, as you can tell from its name, which is the World
Intellectual Property Organization, is up to no good, because any use
of that term is spreading confusion.  WIPO gets a lot of its funds
from megacorporations, and uses those funds to bring officials from
Patent Offices to idyllic resort destinations for training.  What they
train them to do is twist the law to allow patents in areas where
they're not supposed to be allowed.</p>

<p>In many countries there are laws and court decisions which say that
software as such can't be patented, algorithms can't be patented, or
&ldquo;mathematical&rdquo; algorithms can't be patented (no one's
quite sure what it means for an algorithm to be mathematical or not),
and various other criteria which if interpreted naturally would rule
out software patents, but the patent offices twist the law to allow
them anyway.</p>

<p>For instance, a lot of things which practically speaking are
software patents have the form where they describe a system involving
a central processing unit, a memory, input/output facilities,
instruction-fetching facilities, and means to perform this particular
computation.  In effect they've written explicitly into the patent all
the parts of an ordinary computer, and then they say, &ldquo;Well,
this is a physical system which we would like to patent&rdquo;, but
really it's just patenting certain software on a computer.  There are
many subterfuges that they've used.</p>

<p>Patent Offices will generally try to twist the law into allowing
more patents.  In the US software patents were created by a court
decision in 1982, in the Appeals Court that deals with all patent
cases, which misunderstood a Supreme Court decision from the previous
year, and misapplied it.  Now it looks like that Appeals Court has
finally changed its mind, and it's come to the conclusion that it was
mistaken all along; and it looks like this decision will get rid of
all software patents, unless the Supreme Court reverses it.  The
Supreme Court is now considering it, and within less than a year we
should find out whether we've won or lost.</p></dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>Should that case be unsuccessful, is there any movement in the
States to take a legislated solution?</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>Yes, and I been promoting this for about 19 years now.  It's a
battle that we fight over and over in various different
countries.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>Where in your universe do you put the in I4i case?</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>I have no idea what that is.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>It's where Microsoft has basically almost had to shut down on
selling Word, because they were found to have infringed a Canadian
patent.</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>Oh, that one.  That's just an example of how dangerous software
patents are to all software developers.  I don't like what Microsoft
does, but that's an issue that's irrelevant for this purpose.  It's
not good that somebody can sue a software developer and say &ldquo;I
won't let you distribute such software&rdquo;.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>Obviously we live in an imperfect world, and in some cases we run
into the issue of software patents.  Do you think that we should allow
privileges for researchers to get around patents in the same way that
copyright law allows research on copyright material?</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>No, it's a mistake to look for partial solutions, because we have
a much better chance of establishing a full solution.  Everybody
involved in software development and distribution and use, except the
ones in the megacorporations, when they see how dangerous software
patents are, they will get behind total rejection of software patents.
Whereas an exception for some special case will only win support from
the people in that special case.  These partial solutions are
essentially distractions.  People start by saying, &ldquo;Oh, I'm sure
we can't really solve the problem, so I give up on that.  Let me
propose a partial solution.&rdquo; But these partial solutions don't
make it safe to develop software.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>You wouldn't, however, oppose a partial solution that's not
necessarily just directed at software patents, so you wouldn't oppose
experimental use, which may be a good solution for the pharmaceutical
patent.</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>I wouldn't oppose that.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>But what you're saying is that you don't think it's applicable to
software, just to clarify.</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>Something that saves only a few of us, or only certain activities,
or gets rid of half the software patents, that's analogous to saying,
&ldquo;Well, maybe we could clear part of the minefield, or maybe we
could destroy half the mines in the minefield.&rdquo; [That's an
improvement] but that doesn't make it safe.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>So you've been speaking the same thing all around the world.  How
much uptake has there been?  Have governments changed, or not adopted
software patents?</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>Some have.  In India a few years ago, there was an attempt to
change patent law to explicitly allow software patents and it was
dropped.  A few years ago the US proposed a trade treaty, a free
exploitation treaty, with Latin America.  And it was blocked by the
president of Brazil, who said no to software patents and another nasty
thing relating to computers, and that killed the whole treaty.  That's
apparently the whole thing that the US wanted to impose on the rest of
the continent.  But these things don't stay dead; there are companies
that have full-time staff looking for some way they can subvert some
country or other.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>Is there any real hard data around what happens in economic terms
in the innovation communities in countries that have essentially no
software patents?</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd><p>There isn't any.  It's almost impossible to measure these
things.  Actually, I shouldn't say there isn't any.  There is a
little.  It's very hard to measure the effect of the patent system,
because you're comparing the real world with a counterfactual world,
and there's no way to be sure what would happen.</p>

<p>What I can say is before there were software patents, there was
lots of software development; not as much as there is now, because of
course there were nowhere near as many computer users.</p>

<p>How many computer users were there in 1982, even in the US?  It was
a small fraction of the public.  But there were software developers.
They weren't saying, &ldquo;We desperately want patents&rdquo;.  They
weren't getting sued for patent infringement after they developed
their programs.  But there is a bit of [economic] research that I saw
that apparently software patents resulted not in an increase in
research, but [in] a shift of funds from research into
patenting.</p></dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>Do you expect that there would be any interest in trade
secrets?</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>No.  Before there were software patents, a lot of software
developers kept the details of their programs secret.  But they
usually wouldn't keep any of the general ideas secret, because that
they realized that the big job in developing good software was not
picking your general ideas, it was implementing a lot of ideas
together.  So they would publish, [or] they would let their employees
publish, in scholarly journals any interesting new ideas that they'd
had.  So now, they'll patent those new ideas.  It has very little to
do with developing a useful program, and just letting people know some
ideas doesn't give them a program.  Besides, most of the ideas, the
thousands of ideas you've combined in your program, are known
anyway.</dd>

<dt>Q.</dt>
<dd>To back that up, I was listening to an interview, one of the
founders of PayPal was interviewed, and he said that he really felt
strongly that his success was 5 percent idea and 95 percent execution, and that
supports your point really well.</dd>

<dt>A.</dt>
<dd>I agree.</dd>

<dt>SF:</dt>
<dd>Excellent.  Richard has here stickers which I believe are
free</dd>

<dt>RMS:</dt>
<dd>Gratis.   And these [other items] are for sale.</dd>

<dt>SF:</dt>
<dd>So you're welcome to come down.  It's been a great debate&mdash;thank
you Richard.</dd>

</dl>

<hr />
<blockquote id="fsfs"><p>This speech is published
in <a href="http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society/"><cite>Free
Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard
M. Stallman</cite></a>.</p></blockquote>

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