Compliance Toolkit

Story: Linus Torvalds speaks out against EU patent law

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Software problems have a lot of problems:

Software patents cover really basic principles that any number of developers can and will independently invent. They're embarassing really. A program will involve hundreds and thousands of ideas, so will it need that many patents to cover it, or will it potentially infringe that many patents. Some ideas I see patented are so basic, its like a hardware person patenting the concept of using a nut and bolt to hold something together.

Software Patents cover ideas so abstract that they are used to cover whole problem domains. In the physical world there exist many patents on specific implementations of corkscrew, but it is not possible to patent the concept of opening wine. With software patents, it is. Copyright in the software world does the same job as patents in the hardware world.

In the past there has been no protection for file and communication standards. This has allowed competition and we have all benefited from that. Samba competes with Windows Server, Open Office with Word.

Software Patents give legal enforcement to vendor lockin, and even worse, they allow vendors to sprout to the world about how Open their standards are, while knowing that all the benefits of competition and freedom to choose that come from open standards are lost because it becomes illegal for anyone else to implement the standard without permission.

I suppose it would be like Ford patenting a specific screw thread in order to prevent independent oil filter manufacturers selling oil filters for their cars.

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