Story: Sun has betrayed us all

Posted by: Hartmut Pilch (Tuesday 12 October 2004, 3:04 PM)

"Sun Corporate Communications" called the ZDNet article irresponsible on
several accounts:

Sun can only characterize as irresponsible ZDUK's leader about our patent
settlement with Kodak. Even as you acknowledge that you “don't know the
details,” you nonetheless draw a host of unfounded conclusions with no facts
to support them. In so doing, you paint an incredibly inaccurate portrait of
Sun and its stance on both intellectual property and creativity in software.

Unfortunately the portrait is very accurate at least as far as Sun's "stance
on intellectual property" is concerned, as "Sun Corporate Communication" shows
by its own words a few lines later:

At the same time, Sun believes firmly in the need to provide strong
intellectual property protections, such as software patents, in order to
assure that both individuals and companies will be rewarded for creativity and
invention. Without that reward, no one would invest money, time nor the sweat
of their brow to create the technology that today enriches all of our
lives. IP protection is the armour that protects the vital organs of today's
global economy.

These statements make no sense at all. Copyright and other mechanisms already
assure a sufficient reward for creativity, and patents contribute very little
to economic growth in most technical fields, as anybody will know who cares to
read up on the economic literature (see. e.g. Hayek, Machlup, Bessen, ....).

Are there problems with today's patent systems and other intellectual property
rules? Of course. No human system is ever perfect. We all need to work
together, individuals, companies and governments, to deal with everything from
“junk” patents to the blatant piracy of copyrighted work around the world.

All software patents that I have seen are "junk patents". The patent system
tends to turn honorable non-trivial work into disgracefully broad patent
claims, and the only practical solution to this that I know of is to change
the caselaw that imposed these patents on the software industry (against its
will, as the hearings of 1994 showed, where Sun was one of very few companies
who, yes, betrayed the industry).

But you don't junk the entire system, as you suggest, because a small part
of it isn't working. That is the height of irresponsibility for every
economy in the world.

No, we do not need to abolish the entire patent system. We are just talking
of pushing it out of the software field. If a system doesn't work, you don't
release it. Fix the bugs first, then release the code. That's the sense of
responsibility that I'd expect of a company like Sun. It's the basic ethics
of this field. Unfortunately, Sun betrayed this basic ethic because they have
a large hardware business and, based on that, a strong tradition of patenting.
They entered a devil's pact back then, and they don't seem to be able to free
themselves from this pact. Perhapss the Kodak "Danegeld" ws their tuition fee. Perhaps they need a few more Kodaks before they
can learn.

--
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation http://swpat.ffii.org/
350,000 votes 3000 firms against software patents http://noepatents.org/