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 <h2>Software patents &mdash; Obstacles to software development</h2>
 
 <address class="byline">by Richard Stallman</address>
 
 <div class="infobox">
 <p>This is the transcription of a talk presented by Richard M. Stallman on 
 March 25, 2002, at the University of Cambridge 
 <a href="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/">Computer Laboratory</a>,
 organized by the <a href="https://www.fipr.org/">Foundation for Information 
 Policy Research</a>.</p>
 <p>Transcript (<a
 href="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/stallman-patents.html">original 
 version</a>) and <a
 href="//audio-video.gnu.org/audio/#patent-cambridge-2002-03-25">audio
 recording</a> by Nicholas Hill. HTML editing and links by Markus Kuhn.</p>
 </div>
 <hr class="thin" />
 
 <p>
 You might have been familiar with my work on
 <a href="/philosophy/free-sw.html">free software</a>.
 This speech is not about that. This speech is about a way of
 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150329103351/http://www.progfree.org/Patents/against-software-patents.html">
 misusing laws</a> to make software development a dangerous activity.
 This is about what happens when patent law gets applied to the field
 of software.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 It is not about patenting software.  That is a very bad way, a
 misleading way to describe it, because it is not a matter of patenting
 individual programs.  If it were, it would make no difference, it
 would be basically harmless.  Instead, it is about patenting ideas.
 Every patent covers some
 idea.  <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150329143651/http://progfree.org/Patents/patents.html">
 Software patents</a> are patents that cover software ideas, ideas
 which you would use in developing software.  That is what makes them a
 dangerous obstacle to all software development.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 You may have heard people using a misleading term
 &ldquo;<a href="https://www.wipo.org/about-ip/en/">Intellectual
 Property</a>.&rdquo;  This term, as you can see, is biased.  It makes
 an assumption that whatever it is you are talking about, the way to
 treat it is as a kind of property, which is one among many
 alternatives.  This term &ldquo;Intellectual Property&rdquo;
 pre-judges the most basic question in whatever area you are dealing
 with. This is not conducive to clear and open minded thinking.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 There is an additional problem which has nothing to do with promoting
 any one opinion.  It gets in the way of understanding even the facts.
 The term &ldquo;intellectual property&rdquo; is a catch-all.  It lumps
 together completely disparate areas of law such as copyrights and
 patents, which are completely different.  Every detail is different.
 It also lumps together trademarks which are even more different, and
 various other things more or less commonly encountered.  None of them
 has anything in common with any of the others.  Their origins
 historically are completely separate.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>The laws were designed
 independently.  They covered different areas of life and activities.
 The public policy issues they raise are completely unrelated.  So, if
 you try to think about them by lumping them together, you are
 guaranteed to come to foolish conclusions.  There is literally no
 sensible intelligent opinion you can have about &ldquo;Intellectual
 Property.&rdquo;  If you want to think clearly, don't lump them
 together.  Think about copyrights and then think about patents.  Learn
 about copyright law and separately learn about patent law.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 To give you some of the biggest differences between copyrights and
 patents: Copyrights cover the details of expression of a work.
 Copyrights don't cover any ideas.  Patents only cover ideas and the
 use of ideas.  Copyrights happen automatically.  Patents are issued by
 a patent office in response to an application.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Patents cost a lot of money.  They cost even more paying the lawyers
 to write the application than they cost to actually apply.  It takes
 typically some years for the application to get considered, even
 though patent offices do an extremely sloppy job of considering.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Copyrights last tremendously long.  In some cases they can last as
 long as 150 years, where patents last 20 years, which is long enough
 that you can outlive them but still quite long by a timescale of a
 field such as software.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Think back about 20 years ago when a PC was a new thing.  Imagine
 being constrained to develop software using only the ideas that were
 known in 1982.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Copyrights cover copying.  If you write a novel that turns out to be
 word-for-word the same with <cite>Gone with the Wind</cite> and you
 can prove you never saw <cite>Gone with the Wind</cite>, that would be
 a defense to any accusation of copyright infringement.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 A patent is an absolute monopoly on using an idea.  Even if you could
 prove you had the idea on your own, it would be entirely irrelevant if
 the idea is patented by somebody else.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 I hope you will forget about copyrights for the rest of this talk
 because this talk is about patents and you should never lump together
 copyrights and patents. It is about your understanding of these legal
 issues.  It is like what would happen in your understanding of
 practical chemistry if you confused water and ethanol.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 When you hear people describe the patent system, they usually describe
 it from the point of view of somebody who is hoping to get a patent-
 what it would be like for you to get a patent.  What it would be like
 for you to be walking down the street with a patent in your pocket so
 that every so often you can pull it out and point it out at somebody
 and say &ldquo;Give Me Your Money!&rdquo;  There is a reason for this
 bias, which is that most of the people who will tell you about this
 patent system have a stake in it, so they want you like it.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 There is another reason&mdash;the patent system is a lot like a
 lottery because only a tiny fraction of patents actually bring any
 benefit to those who hold the patents.  In fact,
 <cite><a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2011/08/20/patent-medicine">
 The Economist</a></cite> once compared it to a time consuming lottery.
 If you have seen ads for lotteries, they always invite you to think
 about winning.  They don't invite you to think about losing, even
 though losing is far more likely. It is the same with ads for the
 patent system.  They always invite you to think about being the one
 who wins.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 To balance this bias, I am going to describe the patent system from
 the point of view of its victims.  That is from the point of view of
 somebody who wants to develop software but is forced to contend with a
 system of software patents that might result in getting sued.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 So, what is the first thing you are going to do after you have had an
 idea of what kind of program you are going to write?  The first thing
 you might want to try to do to deal with the patent system is find out
 what patents may cover the program you want to write.  This is
 impossible. The reason is that some of the patent applications that
 are pending are secret.  After a certain amount of time they may get
 published, like 18 months.  But that is plenty of time for you to
 write a program and even release it not knowing that there is going to
 be a patent and you are going to get sued.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>This is not just academic.
 In 1984, the compress program was written, a program for data
 compression.  At the time, there was no patent on the LZW compression
 algorithm which it used.  Then in 1985, the US issued a <a
 href="https://patents.justia.com/patent/4558302">patent</a> on this
 algorithm and over the next few years, those who distributed the
 compress program started getting threats.  There was no way that the
 author of compress could have realized that he was likely to get sued.
 All he did was use an idea that he found in a journal just like
 programmers have always done.  He hadn't realized that you could no
 longer safely use ideas that you found in a journal.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Let's forget about that problem&hellip; The issued patents are
 published by the patent office so you can find the whole long list of
 them and see exactly what they say.  Of course, you couldn't actually
 read that whole list as there are too many of them.  In the US, there
 are hundreds of thousands of software patents.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 There is no way you can keep track of what they are all about.  You
 would have to try to search for relevant ones.  Some people say that
 should be easy in these modern days of computers.  You could search
 for key words and so-on.  That one works to a certain extent.  You
 will find some patents in the area.  You won't necessarily find them
 all however.  For instance, there was a software patent which may have
 expired by now on natural order recalculation in spread sheets.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>This
 means basically that when you make certain cells depend upon other
 cells, it always recalculates everything after the things it depends
 on, so that after one re-calculation, everything is up to date.  The
 first spread sheets did their recalculation top-down, so if you made a
 cell depend on a cell lower down, and you had a few such steps, you
 had to recalculate several times to get the new values to propagate
 upwards.  You were supposed to have things depend upon cells above
 them.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>Then someone realized why don't I do the recalculation so that
 everything gets recalculated after the things it depends upon?  This
 algorithm is known as topological sorting.  The first reference to it
 I could find was in 1963.  The patent covered several dozen different
 ways you could implement topological sorting but you wouldn't have
 found this patent by searching for spreadsheet.  You couldn't have
 found it by searching for natural order or topological sort.  It
 didn't have any of those terms in it.  In fact, it was described as a
 method of compiling formulas into object code.  When I first saw it, I
 thought it was the wrong patent.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Let's suppose that you got a list of patents.  So you want to see know
 what you are not allowed to do.  When you try studying these patents,
 you will discover they are very hard to understand as they are written
 in tortuous legal language, whose meaning is very hard to understand.
 The things patent offices say often don't mean what they seem to mean.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 There was an Australian government study of the patent system in the
 1980's.  It concluded that aside from international pressure, there
 was no reason to have a patent system.  It did no good for the public
 and recommended abolishing it if not for international pressure.  One
 of the things they cited was that engineers don't try reading patents
 to learn anything, as it is too hard to understand them.  They quoted
 one engineer saying &ldquo;I can't recognize my own inventions in
 patenteese.&rdquo;
 </p>
 
 <p>
 This is not just theoretical.  Around 1990, a programmer named
 <a href="https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n3/hypercard.html">Paul
 Heckel</a> sued Apple claiming that Hypercard infringed a couple of
 his <a href="https://patents.justia.com/patent/4486857">patents</a>.
 When he first saw Hypercard, he didn't think it had anything to do
 with his patent, with his &ldquo;Inventions.&rdquo;  It didn't look
 similar.  When his lawyer told him that you could read the patents as
 covering part of Hypercard, he decided to attack Apple.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>When I had a
 speech about this at Stanford, he was in the audience, he said &ldquo;That's
 <a href="https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/int-prop/heckel-debunking.html">
 not true</a>, I just didn't understand the extent of my
 protection!&rdquo; I said yes, that's what I said!  So, in fact, you
 will have to spend a lot of time talking with lawyers to figure out
 what these patents prohibit you from doing.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>Ultimately they are going
 to say something like this: &ldquo;If you do something in here, you
 are sure to lose, If you do something here, there is a substantial
 chance of losing, and if you really want to be safe, stay out of this
 area.  And, by the way, there is a sizable element of chance in the
 outcome of any law suit.&rdquo;
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Now, that you have a predictable terrain for doing business(!) what
 are you going to do?  Well, there are three approaches that you might
 try. Any of which is applicable in some cases.
 </p>
 
 <p>They are</p>
 
 <ol>
 <li>Avoiding the patent</li>
 <li>Licensing the patent</li>
 <li>Overturning the patent in court.</li>
 </ol>
 
 <p>
 Let me describe these three approaches and what makes them workable or
 unworkable.
 </p>
 
 <h3>1) Avoiding the patent</h3>
 
 <p>
 That means don't use the idea that the patent covers.  This can be
 easy or hard, depending on what that idea is.  In some cases, a
 feature is patented.  Then you avoid the patent by not implementing
 that feature.  Then it just matters how important is that feature.  In
 some cases, you can live without it.  A while ago, the users of the
 word processor XyWrite got a downgrade in the mail.  The downgrade
 removed a feature which allowed you to pre-define abbreviations.  That
 when you typed an abbreviation followed by a punctuation character, it
 would immediately replace itself with by some expansion.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>So that way
 you could define the abbreviation for some long phrase, type the
 abbreviation then the long phrase will be in your document.  They
 wrote to me about this because they knew
 the <a href="/software/emacs/">Emacs</a> editor has a similar feature.
 In fact, it had it since the 70's.  This was interesting because it
 showed me that I had at least one patentable idea in my life.  I knew
 it was patentable because somebody else patented it afterward!
 Actually, they had tried these various approaches.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>First they tried
 negotiating with the patent holder, who turned out not to negotiate in
 good faith.  Then they looked at whether they could have a chance of
 overturning the patent.  What they decided to do was take out the
 feature.  You can live without this feature.  If the word processor
 lacks only this feature, maybe people will still use it.  But as
 various features start getting hit, eventually you end up with a
 program people think is not very good and they are likely to reject
 it.  That is a rather narrow patent on a very specific feature.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 What do you do with the
 <a href="https://patents.justia.com/patent/4873662">British
 Telecom patent</a> on traversing hyper links together with dial-up
 access?  Traversing hyper links is absolutely essential to a major use
 of computers these days.  Dial-up access is also essential.  How do
 you do without this feature, which, by the way, isn't even one
 feature, it is really a combination of two just arbitrarily
 juxtaposed.  It is rather like having a patent on a sofa and
 television in the same room.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Sometimes the idea that's patented will be so broad and basic that it
 basically rules out an entire field.  For instance, the idea of Public
 Key Encryption which was patented in the US.  The patent expired in
 1997.  Until then, it largely blocked the use of Public Key Encryption
 in the US.  A number of programs that people started to develop got
 crushed.  They were never really available because the patent holders
 threatened them.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>Then, one program got away.  The
 program <a
 href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170315023711/http://www.pgpi.org/">
 PGP</a>, which initially was
 released as free software.  Apparently, the patent holders by the time
 they got around to attacking, realized they might get too much bad
 publicity.  So they imposed restrictions making it for non-commercial
 use only, which meant it couldn't catch on too much.  So they greatly
 limited the use of Public Key Encryption for a decade or more.  There
 was no way around that patent.  There was nothing else you could do
 like that.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Sometimes a specific algorithm gets patented.  For instance, there is
 a patent on an optimized version of the Fast Fourier Transform.  It
 runs about twice as fast.  You can avoid that by using the ordinary
 FFT in your program.  That part of your program will take twice as
 long.  Maybe that doesn't really matter, maybe that is a small part of
 the program's running time.  Maybe if it is twice as slow, you won't
 really notice.  Or maybe that means your program won't run at all
 because it will take twice real time to do its job.  The effects vary.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 In some cases, you can find a better algorithm.  This may or may not
 do you any good.  Because we couldn't use compress, in the GNU project
 we started looking for some other algorithm for data compression.
 Somebody wrote to us saying he had one. He had written a program and
 he decided to contribute it to us.  We were going to release it.  Just
 by chance, I happened to see a copy of the New York Times.  It
 happened to have the weekly patent column in it.  I didn't see a copy
 of the Times more than once every few months.  So I looked at it and
 it said that somebody had got a patent for &ldquo;Inventing a new
 method of compressing data.&rdquo;
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>I figured I better take a look at
 this patent.  I got a copy and it turned out to cover the program that
 we were just a week away from releasing.  That program died before it
 was born.  Later on we did find another algorithm which was
 un-patented.  That became the program <a href="/software/gzip/">
 gzip</a>, which is now effectively the de-facto standard for data
 compression.  As an algorithm to use in a program for data
 compression, it was fine.  Anyone who wanted to do data compression
 could use gzip instead of compress.  But the same patented LZW
 compression algorithm was also used in image formats such as
 the <a href="/philosophy/gif.html">GIF</a> format.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>But there because
 the job people wanted to do was not to simply compress data but to
 make an image that people could display with their software, it turned
 out extremely hard to switch over to a different algorithm.  We have
 not been able to do it in 10 years!  Yes, people use the gzip
 algorithm to define <a href="https://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/">another
 image format</a>, once people started getting threatened with law
 suits for using GIF files.  When we started saying to people stop
 using GIF files, switch over to this, people said &ldquo;We can't
 switch.  The browsers don't support the new format yet.&rdquo;  The
 browser developers said &ldquo;We're not in a hurry about this.  After
 all, nobody is using this file format.&rdquo;
 </p>
 
 <p>
 In effect, society had so much inertia in the use of the GIF format,
 we have not been able to get people to switch.  Essentially, the
 community's use of the GIF format is still pushing sites into using
 GIF format with the result that they are vulnerable to these threats.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 In fact, the situation is even more bizarre.  There are in fact two
 patents covering the LZW compression algorithm.  The patent office
 couldn't even tell that they were issuing two patents on the same
 thing.  They couldn't keep track.  There is a reason for this.  It
 takes a while of study of these two patents to see that they really
 cover the same thing.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 If they were patents on some chemical process, it would be much
 easier.  You could see what substances were being used, what the
 inputs were, what the outputs were, which physical actions are being
 taken.  No matter how they are described, you'd see what they were and
 then you would see that they are similar.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 If something is purely mathematical, there are many ways of describing
 it, which are a lot more different.  They are not superficially
 similar.  You have to really understand them to see they are talking
 about the same thing.  The patent office doesn't have time.  The US
 Patent Office as of a few years ago, was spending on average 17 hours
 per patent.  This is not long enough to think carefully about them,
 so, of course they make mistakes like that.  In fact, I told you about
 the program that died before it was born.  That algorithm also had two
 patents issued for it in the US.  Apparently, it is not that unusual.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Avoiding the patents may be easy, may be impossible.  It may be easy
 but it makes your program useless.  It varies depending on the
 situation.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Here is another point I should mention: Sometimes a company or
 consortium can make a format or protocol the de-facto standard.  Then,
 if that format or protocol is patented, that is a real disaster for
 you.  There are even official standards that are restricted by
 patents.  There was a big political uproar last September when the
 <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/patent-practice/">World Wide Web
 Consortium</a> was proposing to start adopting standards that were
 covered by patents.  The community objected so they reversed
 themselves.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>They went back to insisting that any patents had to be
 freely implementable by anyone and that the standards had to be free
 for anyone to implement.  That is an interesting victory.  I think
 that was the first time any standards body has made that decision.  It
 is normal for standards bodies to be willing to put something in a
 standard which is restricted by patents and people are not allowed to
 go ahead and implement it freely.  We need to go to other standards
 bodies and call on them to change their rules.
 </p>
 
 <h3>2) Licensing the patent</h3>
 
 <p>
 The second possibility instead of avoiding the patent is to get a
 license for the patent.  This is not necessarily an option.  The
 patent holder does not have to offer you a license, it is not
 required.  10 Years ago, the league for programming freedom got a
 letter asking for help from somebody whose family business was making
 gambling machinery for casinos and they used computers back then.  He
 received a threat from another company that said we have the patents.
 You are not allowed to make these things.  Shut down.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 I looked at that patent.  It covered having a number of computers on a
 network for playing games such that each computer supported more than
 one game and allowed you to play more than one game at a time.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 You will find patent office really think that there is something
 brilliant about doing more than one of anything.  They don't realize
 that in computer science, that's the most obvious way to generalize
 anything.  You did it once and now you can do it any number of times,
 you can make a subroutine.  They think that if you do anything more
 than once, that somehow means you are brilliant and that nobody can
 possibly argue with you and that you have the right to boss them
 around.  Anyway, he was not offered a license.  He had to shut down.
 He couldn't even afford really to go to court.  I would say that
 particular patent was an obvious idea.  It is possible that a judge
 might have agreed, but we will never know because he could not afford
 to go to court.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 However, a lot of patent holders do offer licenses.  They often charge
 a lot of money for that though.  The company licensing the natural
 order recalculation patent was demanding 5% of the gross sales of
 every spreadsheet in the US.  I am told that was the cheap pre-lawsuit
 price.  If you actually made them sue you and they won, they'd demand
 more.  You might be able to afford that 5% for licensing this one
 patent, but what if you need to license 20 different patents to make
 the program?  Then all the money you take in goes on patents.  What if
 you need to license 21 patents?
 </p>
 
 <p>
 People in business told me that practically speaking, 2 or 3 of them
 would make any business unfeasible.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 There is a situation where licensing patents is a very good solution.
 That is if you are a multinational mega-corporation.  Because these
 companies own a lot of patents, and they cross-license with each
 other.  That way, they escape most of the harm that the patent system
 does and they only get the good.  IBM published an
 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150329104135/http://progfree.org/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/ibm.think.article">
 article</a> in Think magazine.  I believe it was issue No. 5 of 1990
 on IBM's patent portfolio, which said that IBM got two kinds of
 benefit from its 9000 US patents.  I believe the number is larger
 today.  These were first, collecting royalties and second, getting
 access to the patents of others.  They said that the latter benefit is
 an order of magnitude greater.  So the benefit that IBM got from being
 allowed to use the ideas that were patented by others was 10 times the
 direct benefit IBM could get from licensing patents.  What does this
 really mean?
 </p>
 
 <p>
 What is the benefit that IBM gets from this access to the patents of
 others?  It is basically the benefit of being excused from the trouble
 that the patent system can cause you.  The patent system is like a
 lottery.  What happens with any given patent could be nothing, could
 be a windfall for some patent holder or a disaster for everyone else.
 But IBM being so big, for them, it averages out.  They get to measure
 the average harm and good of the patent system.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>For them, the trouble
 of the patent system would have been 10 times the good.  I say would
 have been because IBM through cross-licensing avoids experiencing that
 trouble.  That trouble is only potential.  It doesn't really happen to
 them.  But when they measure the benefits of avoiding that trouble,
 they estimate it as 10 times the value of the money they collect from
 their patents.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 This phenomenon of cross-licensing refutes a common myth, the myth of
 the starving genius.  The myth that patents &ldquo;protect&rdquo; the
 &ldquo;small inventor.&rdquo;  Those terms are propaganda terms.  You
 shouldn't use them.  The scenario is like this: Suppose there is a
 brilliant designer of whatever of whatever.  Suppose he has spent
 years starving in the attic designing a new wonderful kind of whatever
 and now wants to manufacture it and isn't it a shame the big companies
 are going to go into competition with him, take away all the business
 and he'll &ldquo;starve.&rdquo;
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>I will have to point out that people
 in high tech fields are not generally working on their own and that
 ideas don't come in a vacuum, they are based on ideas of others and
 these people have pretty good chances of getting a job if they need to
 these days.  So this scenario, the idea that a brilliant idea came
 from this brilliant person working alone is unrealistic and the idea
 that he is in danger of starving is unrealistic.  But it is
 conceivable that somebody could have an idea and this idea along with
 100 or 200 other ideas can be the basis of making some kind of product
 and that big companies might want to compete with him.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>So let's see
 what happens if he tries to use a patent to stop them.  He says
 &ldquo;Oh No, IBM.  You cannot compete with me.  I've got this patent.
 IBM says let's see.  Let's look at your product.  Hmmm.  I've got this
 patent and this one and this one and this one and this one and this
 one, which parts of your product infringe.  If you think you can fight
 against all of them in court, I will just go back and find some more.
 So, why don't you cross license with me?&rdquo; And then this
 brilliant small inventor says &ldquo;Well, OK, I'll cross
 license.&rdquo;  So he can go back and make these wonderful whatever
 it is, but so can IBM.  IBM gets access to his patent and gets the
 right to compete with him, which means that this patent didn't
 &ldquo;protect&rdquo; him at all.  The patent system doesn't really do
 that.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 The mega-corporations avoid, for the most part, the harm of the patent
 system.  They see mainly the good side. That is why they want to have
 software patents.  They are the ones who will benefit from it.  But if
 you are a small inventor or work for a small company, the small
 company is not going to be able to do this.  They try.  The problem is
 that they cannot get enough patents to do this.  Any given patent is
 pointing in a certain direction.  So if a small company has patents
 pointing there, there and there and somebody over there points a
 patent at them and says give me your money, they are helpless.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>IBM
 can do it because with these 9000 patents, they are pointing
 everywhere, no matter where you are, there is probably an IBM patent
 pointing at you.  So IBM can almost always make you cross license.
 Small companies can only occasionally make someone cross-license.
 They will say they want patents for defensive purposes but they won't
 get enough to be able to defend themselves.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 There are cases where even IBM cannot make someone cross-license.
 That is when there is a company whose sole business is taking a patent
 and squeezing money out of people.  The company that had the natural
 order recalculation patent was exactly such a company.  Their sole
 business was to threaten to sue people and collect money from people
 who were really developing something.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 There are no patents on legal procedures.  I guess the lawyers
 understand what a pain it would be to have to deal with the patent
 system themselves.  The result is that there is no way to get a patent
 to make that company cross license with you. So they go around
 squeezing everyone.  But I guess companies like IBM figure that is
 part of the price of doing business so they can live with it.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 So that is the possibility of licensing a patent which may or may not
 be possible and you may or may not be able to afford it.
 </p>
 
 <h3>3) Overturning a patent in court</h3>
 
 <p>
 Supposedly, in order to be patented, something has to be new, useful
 and unobvious.  That is the language used in the US.  I think other
 countries have different language which is pretty much equivalent to
 it.  Of course, when the patent office gets into the game, they start
 interpreting new and unobvious.  New turns out to mean we don't have
 it in our files and unobvious tends to mean unobvious to someone with
 an IQ of 50.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Somebody who studies most of the software patents issued in the US, or
 at least he used to, I don't know if he can still keep up with them,
 said that 90% of them wouldn't pass the crystal city test, which meant
 if the people in the patent office went outside to the news stand and
 got some computer magazines, they would see that these ideas are
 already known.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 The patent office does things that are so obviously foolish, you
 wouldn't even have to know the state of the art to see they are
 foolish.  This is not limited to software.  I once saw the famous
 Harvard mouse patent which was obtained after Harvard genetically
 engineered a strain of mouse with a cancer causing gene.  The cancer
 causing gene was already known and was inserted using known techniques
 into an already existing strain of mouse.  The patent they got covered
 inserting any cancer causing gene into any kind of mammal using any
 method whatsoever.  You don't have to know anything about genetic
 engineering to realize that is ridiculous.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 I am told that this over claiming is normal practice and that the US
 Patent Office sometimes invited patent applicants to make their claims
 broader.  Basically make the claims broader until you think they are
 running into something else that's unambiguous prior art.  See how
 much land grab in mental space you can get away with.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 When programmers look at a lot of software patents, they say this
 is ridiculously <a
 href="https://web.archive.org/web/20040604051644/http://people.qualcomm.com/karn/patents/patent-comments.html">
 obvious</a>! Patent bureaucrats have all sorts of excuses to
 justify ignoring what programmers think.  They say &ldquo;Oh! But you
 have to consider it in terms of the way things were 10 or 20 years
 ago.&rdquo;  Then they discovered that if they talk something to death
 then you can eventually lose your bearings.  Anything can look
 unobvious if you tear it apart enough, analyze it enough.  You simply
 lose all standard of obviousness or at least lose the ability to
 justify any standard of obvious or unobvious.  Then, of course, they
 describe the patent holders as brilliant inventors, all of them.
 Therefore we can't question their entitlement to power over what we
 can do.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 If you go to court, the judges are likely to be a little more
 stringent about the idea of what is obvious or not.  But the problem
 is that it costs millions of dollars to do that.  I heard of one
 patent case, the defendant I remember was Qualcomm, and I believe the
 ruling was ultimately 13 million dollars of which most went to pay the
 lawyers on both sides.  There were a few million dollars left over for
 the plaintiff, because they lost.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 To a large extent, the question of the validity of a patent will
 depend on historical accidents.  Lots of historical accidents such as
 precisely what was published when and which of those things somebody
 manages to find.  Which of them didn't get lost, precise dates and
 so-on.  Many historical accidents determine whether a patent is valid.
 
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>In fact, it is a weird thing that the
 <a href="https://patents.justia.com/patent/4873662">
 British Telecom following hyper links together with telephone access
 patent</a>, I think, was applied for in 1975.  I think it was in 1974
 that I developed the info package for the first time.  The info
 package allows you to traverse hyper links and people did use
 telephones to dial up and access the system.  So in fact, I produced a
 piece of prior art for that patent.  So that is the second patentable
 idea I have had in my life, but I don't think I have any proof of
 that.  I didn't think this was interesting enough to publish it.
 After all, the idea of following hyper links I got from the demo of
 Engelbart's editor.  He is the one who had an idea which was
 interesting to publish.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>What I'd done I called &ldquo;poor man's hypertext&rdquo; as I
 had to implement it in the context of TECO.  It was not as powerful as
 his hypertext but it was at least useful for browsing documentation,
 which it all it was meant for, and as for there being dial-up access
 to the system, well, there was, but it didn't occur to me that the one
 had anything particular to do with the other.  I wasn't going to
 publish a paper saying &ldquo;Oh!  I implemented this poor man's
 hypertext, and guess what! There are dial-up lines on the computer
 too!&rdquo; I suspect there is no way to tell precisely on what dates
 I implemented this.  And was it published in any sense?  Well, we
 invited guests to come in across the ARPAnet, and log in on our
 machine, so they could have browsed documentation using info and seen
 the thing.  If they had asked us, they would have found we have
 dial-up access.  But as you can see, historical accident determines
 whether you have prior art.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Now of course, there is a publication made by Engelbart about
 hypertext, which they are going to show.  I don't think it says
 anything about having dial-ups on the computer however, so whether it
 will suffice is not clear.  So, this is an option, the possibility of
 going to court to overturn the patent.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Because of the expense, it is often out of the question even if you
 can find solid prior art that ought to be sufficient to overturn the
 patent.  As a result, an invalid patent, a patent that nominally
 shouldn't have existed (but in fact lots and lots of them do) is a
 dangerous weapon.  If somebody attacks you with an invalid patent,
 that can really cause a lot of trouble for you.  You might be able to
 bluff them away by showing them the prior art.  It depends upon
 whether they can get scared off that way or they might think
 &ldquo;well, you are just bluffing, we figure you can't really go to
 court, you can't afford it so we'll sue you anyway.&rdquo;
 </p>
 
 <p>
 All of these three possibilities are things that sometimes you can
 manage to use, but often you can't.  So you have to face patent after
 patent after patent.  Each time you may be able to find one of these
 three possibilities you can use, then there is another patent then
 another and another.  It gets like crossing a minefield.  Each step
 you take, each design decision, probably won't step on a patent, so
 you can take a few steps and probably there won't be an explosion.
 But the chance you will get all the way through the minefield and get
 to develop the program you want to develop without ever stepping on a
 patent gets less and less as the program gets bigger.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Now, people used to say to me, &ldquo;Well, there are patents in other
 fields, why should software be exempt?.&rdquo;  Note the bizarre
 assumption in there that somehow we are all supposed to suffer through
 the patent system.  It is like saying &ldquo;Some people get cancer.
 Why should you be exempt?&rdquo; As I see it, each person who doesn't
 get cancer is good.  But there is, behind that, a less biased
 question, which is a good question which is: Is software different
 from other fields?  Should patent policy be different in different
 fields?  If so, why?
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Let me address that question: patents relate to different fields
 differently because in various fields patents relate to products
 differently.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 On one extreme we have pharmaceuticals where a given chemical formula
 would be patented, so that patent covers one and only one product.
 Some other product wouldn't be covered by the existing patent.  If
 there is to be a patent for this new product, the patent holder would
 be whoever developed the new product.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 That fits in with the naive idea of the patent system that we have,
 that if you are designing a new product, you are going to get
 &ldquo;The Patent.&rdquo;  The idea that there is one patent per
 product and that it covers the idea of that product.  In some fields
 it is closer to being true.  In other fields it is further from being
 true.  This is because software packages are usually very big.  They
 use many different ideas in a new combination.  If the program is new
 and not just copied, then it is probably using a different combination
 of ideas combined, of course, with newly written code, because you
 can't just magically say the names of these ideas and have them work.
 You have to implement them all.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>You have to implement them all in
 that combination.  The result is that even when you write a program,
 you are using lots of different ideas, any one of them might be
 patented by somebody.  A pair of them may be patented as a combination
 by somebody.  There might be several different ways of describing one
 idea which might be patented by various different people.  So there
 are possibly thousands of things, thousands of points of vulnerability
 in your program, which might be patented by somebody else already.
 This is why software patents tend to obstruct the progress of
 software&mdash;the work of software development.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 If it were one patent-one product, then these patents wouldn't obstruct the
 development of products because if you developed a new product, it
 wouldn't be patented by somebody else already.  But when one product
 corresponds to many different ideas combined, it becomes very likely
 your new product is going to be patented by somebody else already.  In
 fact, there is economic research now showing just how imposing a
 patent system on a field where there is incremental innovation, can
 retard progress.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>You see, the advocates of software patents say
 &ldquo;well yes, there may be problems but more important than any
 problems, the patents must promote innovation and that is so important
 it doesn't matter what problems you cause.&rdquo;  Of course, they
 don't say that out loud because it is ridiculous but implicitly they
 want you to believe that as long as it promotes progress, that
 outweighs any possible cost.  But actually, there is no reason to
 believe it does promote progress.  We now have a model showing
 precisely how patents can retard progress.  The case where that model
 can fit describes the software field pretty well; Incremental
 innovation.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Why is software on that extreme of the spectrum?  The reason is that
 in software we are developing idealized mathematical objects.  You can
 build a complicated castle and have it rest on a thin line and it will
 stay up because it doesn't weigh anything.  In other fields, people
 have to cope with the perversity of matter&mdash;of physical objects.
 Matter does what it is going to do.  You can try to model it and if
 the actual behavior doesn't fit the model then tough on you, because
 the challenge is to make physical objects that really work.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 If I wanted to put an <code>if</code> statement in a
 <code>while</code> statement, I don't have to worry about whether the
 <code>if</code> statement will oscillate at a certain frequency and
 rub against the <code>while</code> statement and eventually they will
 fracture.  I don't have to worry whether it will oscillate at a
 certain higher frequency and induce a signal in the value of some
 other variable.  I don't have to worry about how much current that
 <code>if</code> statement will draw and whether it can dissipate the
 heat there inside that <code>while</code> statement.  Whether there will be a
 voltage drop across the <code>while</code> statement that will make the
 <code>if</code> statement not function.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>I don't have to worry that
 if i run this program in a salt water environment that the salt water
 may get in between the <code>if</code> statement and the
 <code>while</code> statement and cause corrosion.  I don't have to
 worry when I refer to the value of a variable whether I am exceeding
 the fan-out limit by referring to it 20 times.  I don't have to worry,
 when I refer to the variable, how much capacitance it has and whether
 there has been sufficient time to charge up the value.  I don't have
 to worry when I write the program, about how I am going to physically
 assemble each copy and whether I can manage to get access to put that
 <code>if</code> statement inside the <code>while</code> statement.
 I don't have to worry about how I am going to gain access in case that
 <code>if</code> statement breaks, to remove it and replace it with a
 new one.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 So many problems that we don't have to worry about in
 software.  That makes it fundamentally easier.  It is fundamentally
 easier to write a program than to design a physical object that's
 going to work.  This may seem strange because you have probably heard
 people talking about how hard software is to design and how this is a
 big problem and how we are going to solve it.  They are not really
 talking about the same question as I am.  I am comparing physical and
 software systems of the same complexity, the same number of parts.  I
 am saying the software system is much easier to design than the
 physical system.  But the intelligence of people in these various
 fields is the same, so what do we do when we are confronted with an
 easy field?  We just push it further!  We push our abilities to the
 limit.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>If systems of the same size are easy, let's make systems which
 are ten times as big, then it will be hard!  That's what we do!  We
 make software systems which are far bigger in terms of number of parts
 than physical systems.  A physical system whose design has a million
 different pieces in it is a mega project.  A computer program whose
 design has a million pieces in it, is maybe 300,000 lines, a few
 people will write that in a couple of years.  That is not a
 particularly giant program.  GNU Emacs now has several million pieces
 in its design I think.  It has a million lines of code.  This is a
 project done with essentially no funding whatsoever.  Mostly done by
 people in their spare time.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 There is another big saving.  If you have designed a physical product,
 the next thing you have to do is design the factory to make it.  To
 build this factory may cost millions or tens of millions whereas to
 make copies of the program, you just have to type <kbd>copy</kbd>.
 The same copy command will copy any program.  You want copies on CD
 then fine.  You burn a master CD and send it off to a CD plant.  They
 will use the same equipment which will copy any contents on a CD.  You
 don't have to build a factory to make this product.  There is
 tremendous simplification and tremendous reduction in costs of
 designing things.
 
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>The result is, say for an automobile company, who
 will spend 50 million dollars to build a factory, to build a new model
 of auto, they can hire some lawyers to cope with patent license
 negotiations.  They can even cope with a law suit if they wanted to.
 To design a program of the same complexity may cost 50 thousand or 100
 thousand dollars.  By comparison, the cost of dealing with the patent
 system is crushing.  Or actually designing a program with the same
 complexity as the mechanical design of an auto is probably a month's
 work.  How many parts does an auto have&hellip; that is if it is an
 auto which doesn't have computers in it.[<a href="#f1">1</a>] There
 are not that many parts.  That is not to say designing a good one is
 easy but just that there are not that many different things in it.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 The result is software really is different from other fields because
 we are working with mathematical stuff designing something is far, far
 easier and the result is that we regularly make systems which are
 much, much larger and do so with just a few people.  The result is
 that the patent system then instead of being close to one product, one
 patent, we are in a system where one product involves many, many ideas
 which could be patented already.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 The best way to explain it by analogy is with symphonies.  A symphony
 is also long and has many notes in it, and probably uses many musical
 ideas.  Imagine if the governments of Europe in the 1700's had decided
 they wanted to promote the progress of symphonic music by establishing
 a European Musical Patent Office that would give patents for any kind
 of musical ideas which you could state in words.  Then imagine it is
 around 1800 and you are Beethoven and you want to write a symphony.
 You will find that getting your symphony so that it doesn't infringe
 any patents is going to be harder than writing a good symphony.
 
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>When
 you complain about this, the patent holders would say &ldquo;Ah
 Beethoven, you are just bitching because you have no ideas of your
 own.  All you want to do is rip off our inventions.&rdquo;  Beethoven,
 as it happens, had a lot of new musical ideas but he had to use a lot
 of existing musical ideas in order to make recognizable music.  In
 order to make music that listeners could possibly like, that they
 could recognize as music.  Nobody is so brilliant that he can
 re-invent music and make something that people would want to listen
 to.  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Boulez">Pierre
 Boulez</a> said he would try to do that, but who listens to Pierre
 Boulez?
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Nobody is so brilliant he can re-invent all of computer
 science, completely new.  If he did, he would make something that the
 users would find so strange that they wouldn't want to use it.  If you
 look at a word processor today, you would find, I think, hundreds of
 different features.  If you develop a nice new innovative word
 processor, that means there are some new ideas in it, but there must
 be hundreds of old ideas in it.  If you are not allowed to use them,
 you cannot make an innovative word processor.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Because the work of software development is so big, the result is that
 we don't need any artificial scheme to incentivize new ideas.  You
 just have people writing software and they will have some new ideas.
 If you want to write a program and you want to make it good, so some
 ideas will come to you and some you will see a way to use.  What used
 to happen, because I was in the software field before there were
 software patents, was most of the developers would publish any new
 ideas that they thought were noteworthy, that they thought that they
 might get any credit or respect for.
 
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>The ideas that were too small or
 not impressive enough, they would not publish because that would be
 silly.  Now the patent system is supposed to encourage disclosure of
 ideas.  In fact, in the old days, nobody kept the ideas secret.  They
 kept the code secret, it's true.  The code, after all, represented the
 bulk of the work.  They would keep the code secret and publish the
 ideas so that way the employees would get some credit and feel good.
 After software patents, they still kept the code secret and they
 patented the ideas, so in fact, disclosure has not been encouraged in
 any meaningful sense.  The same things are kept secret now as what were kept secret before,
 but the ideas which used to be published so that we could use them are
 now likely to be patented and off-limits for 20 years.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 What can a
 country do to change this?  How should we change the policy to solve
 this problem?  There are two places you can attack it.  One is the place where
 patents are being applied for and issued, in the patent office.  The
 other is when patents are being applied&mdash;that is, the question of
 what does a patent cover.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Changing the criteria for issuing patents or simply keeping a good
 criteria for issuing patents, can work in a country which has not
 authorized software patents before, for instance, for the most part,
 in Europe.  Simply to clearly re-enforce the European Patent Office's
 rules which say that software is not patentable.  This is a good
 solution for Europe.  Europe is now considering a directive on
 software patents.  The directive I suppose may be broader than that
 but one of its important implications is for software patents.  Simply
 by modifying this to say software ideas cannot be patented will keep
 the problem out of Europe for the most part, except for some countries
 that may have admitted the problem on their own.  Unfortunately one of
 them being the UK.  Unfortunately for you.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 That approach won't work in the US.  The reason is that the US already
 has large numbers of software patents and any change in the criteria
 for issuing patents won't get rid of the existing
 ones.[<a href="#f2">2</a>] In fact, these patents are not officially
 labeled as software patents.  I say software patents but what do I
 really mean?  Patents which might potentially apply to software.
 Patents which might potentially get you sued for writing software.
 
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>The patent office doesn't divide patents into software patents and
 other patents.  So, in fact, any patent might conceivably get you sued
 for writing software if it could apply to some software.  So in the US
 the solution would have to be done through changing the applicability,
 the scope of patents saying that a pure software implementation
 running on general purpose computer hardware which does not in itself
 infringe the patent, is not covered by any patent and you cannot get
 sued for it.  That is the other kind of solution.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 The first kind of solution, the solution that operates on what types
 of patents can be valid is a good solution for Europe to use.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 When the US started having software patents, there was no political
 debate.  In fact, nobody noticed.  The software field, for the most
 part, didn't even notice.  There was a supreme court decision in 1981
 which considered a patent on a process for curing rubber.  The ruling
 was that the fact that the apparatus included a computer and a program
 as part of the process to cure the rubber did not make it
 un-patentable.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>The appeals court the next year which considers all
 patent cases, reversed the qualifiers.  They said the fact that there
 is a computer and a program in this makes it patentable.  The fact
 that there is a computer and program in anything makes it patentable.
 This is why the US started having business procedure patents.  This is
 because the business procedures were carried out on a computer and
 that made them patentable.  So this ruling was made and I think the
 natural order recalculation patent was one of the first or might have
 been even the first.  Throughout the 80's we didn't know about this.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 It was around 1990 that programmers in the US started to become aware
 that they were faced with a danger from software patents.  So i saw
 how the field worked before and how the field worked after.  I saw no
 particular speed up in progress after 1990.  There was no political
 debate in the US, but in Europe there has been a big political debate.
 Several years ago there was a push to amend the
 Munich treaty that established the <a href="https://www.epo.org/">
 European Patent Office</a>.  It has a
 <a href="https://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/html/epc/1973/e/ar52.html">
 clause saying that software is not patentable</a>.  The push was to
 amend that to start allowing software patents.  But the community took
 notice of this.  It was actually free software developers and free
 software users who took the lead.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 We are not the only ones threatened by software patents.  All software
 developers are threatened by software patents and even software users
 are threatened by software patents.  For instance, Paul Heckel, when
 Apple wasn't very scared of his threats, he threatened to start suing
 Apple's customers.  Apple found that very scary.  They figured they
 couldn't afford to have their customers being sued like that, even if
 they would ultimately win.  So the users can get sued too, either as a
 way of attacking a developer or just as a way to squeeze money out of
 them on their own or to cause mayhem.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 All software developers and users are vulnerable.  But it was the free
 software community in Europe that took the lead in organizing
 opposition.  In fact, twice now the countries that govern the European
 Patent Office voted not to amend that treaty.  Then the EU took a hand
 and the directorates of the EU were divided on the issue.
 </p>
 
 <p> The one whose job is to promote software is against software
 patents it seems.  They were not in charge with this issue.  It is the
 open market directorate who is in charge and is lead by somebody who
 is in favor of software patents.  They basically disregarded public
 opinion which has been expressed to them.  They have proposed a
 directive to allow software patents.[<a href="#f3">3</a>] The French
 government has already said they are against it.  People who are
 working in various other governments in Europe to oppose software
 patents and it is vital to start doing so here.  </p>
 
 <p>
 According to Hartmut
 Pilch, who is one of the leaders in the European struggle against
 software patents, the main impetus comes from the <a
 href="https://www.gov.uk/topic/intellectual-property/patents">UK
 &ldquo;Intellectual Property&rdquo; Office</a>.  This office
 is simply biased in favor of software patents.  It had a
 public consultation and most of the responses were opposed to software
 patents.  They then wrote a report saying that people seem to be
 content with them, completely disregarding the answers.  You see, the
 free software community said please send the answers to them and
 please send your answers to us too and we'll publish them.  So they
 published these answers which were generally opposed.  You'd have
 never guessed that from the report that the UK Patent Office
 published.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 They (the UK Patent and Trademark Office) use a term that they call
 technical effect.  This is a term which can stretch tremendously.  You
 are supposed to think it means a program idea would only be patentable
 if it relates closely to specific physical activities.  If that is the
 interpretation, it would mostly solve the problem.  If the only
 software ideas that can be patented were those that really did relate
 to a particular technical, specific physical result that you might
 have patented if you didn't use a program, that would be OK.  The
 problem is that you can stretch that term.  You can describe the
 result you get by running any program as a physical result.  How does
 this physical result different from every other?  Well it is as a
 result of this computation.  The result is that the UK Patent Office
 is proposing something that looks like it leads to mostly solving the
 problem and really gives carte blanche for patenting almost anything.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 The people in the same ministry are also involved in the copyright
 issue which really has nothing to do with software patents except that
 it is being handled by the same people.  It is a question of
 interpreting the recent EU copyright directive, a horrible law like
 the <a href="https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca">Digital Millennium Copyright
 Act in the US</a>.  But there is some latitude for countries to decide
 how to implement it.  The UK is proposing the most draconian possible
 way of implementing this directive. You could greatly reduce the harm
 that it does by implementing it properly.  The UK wants to maximize
 the tyrannical effect of this directive.  It seems there is a certain
 group, the <a href="https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20070603164510/http://www.dti.gov.uk/">Department of Trade and
 Industry [archived]</a>, who need to be reined in.  It is necessary to put a
 check on their activities. Stop their creating new forms of power.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Software patents tie up every software developer and every computer
 user in a new in a new form of bureaucrat.  If the businesses that use
 computers realized how much trouble this can cause for them, they
 would be up in arms and I am sure they can stop it.  Business doesn't
 like being tied up in bureaucracy.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 Sometimes, of course, it serves an important purpose.  There are some
 areas where we wish the UK government did a more careful job in tying
 certain businesses up in bureaucracy, like when it involves moving
 animals around.[<a href="#f4">4</a>] But in some cases, when it
 doesn't serve any purpose except to create artificial monopolies so
 that somebody can interfere with software development, squeeze money
 out of developers and users, then we should reject it.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 We need to make management aware of what software patents will do to
 them.  Get their support
 in <a href="https://ffii.org/">fighting against
 software patents in Europe</a>.
 </p>
 
 <p>
 The battle is not over.  It still can be won.
 </p>
 <div class="column-limit"></div>
 
 <h3 class="footnote">Footnotes</h3>
 <ol>
   <li id="f1">There are approximately 300-400 unique parts in an
   automatic transmission, and a transmission is generally the most
   complicated component of an auto.  To design a transmission may take
   six months to a year, and even then it may take longer to actually
   get it built and functioning.  However, a program with 500 to 600
   functional parts would have 200 to 300 lines of actual code, and
   would probably take a good programmer a day to a week to write, test
   and debug.</li>
   
   <li id="f2">I say &ldquo;software patents&rdquo; but what do I
   really mean?  The U.S. patent office doesn't officially divide
   patents into software patents and other patents.  So, in fact, any
   patent might conceivably get you sued for writing software if it
   could apply to some software.  Software patents are patents that
   might potentially apply to software, patents that might potentially
   get you sued for writing software.</li>
 
   <li id="f3">On 6 July 2005, the European Parliament rejected the
   software patent directive by 648 out of 680 votes.  However, we must
   not forget the issue of software patents, as those who were pressing
   for patenting are trying to revive the recently thrown-out
   directive.  We also have to ensure that the European Patent Office
   (EPO) and the national offices in different EU countries stop
   conceding patents for software included in other kinds of
   inventions.</li>
 
   <li id="f4">To make it harder for foot-and-mouth disease to
   spread.</li>
 </ol>
 
 <hr class="no-display" />
 <div class="edu-note c"><p id="fsfs">This essay is published in
 <a href="https://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society/"><cite>Free
 Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard
 M. Stallman</cite></a>.</p></div>
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