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Salient quotations from law texts, economic analyses, political documents as well as statements by programmers, politicians and other parties interested in the debate about software patents.
News & Chronology
2005-04-23 phm starts Economic Majority testimony page, cites this wiki as an extension
- 2005-04-12 arebenti adds IBM criticism of impact of patents on standards
- 2004-06-04 Geza adds Ebay and Google quotes
- 2004-06-03 Geza adds questions on Friedman/Alcatel quotates
More Quotes
2000-09-19-23 10th European Patent JudgesÂ’ Symposium Luxembourg Paul VAN DEN BERG
It is already a long time ago that patent examiners in patent offices of Europe at the mere discovery in a patent application of something, which might have to do with a computer program, immediately decided to refuse the application concerned without much ado. In the meantime the situation has changed very much.
http://www.european-patent-office.org/epo/pubs/oj001/06_01/06_spe1.pdf
IBM/Seebach on conflict between patent system and standardisation
In some cases, a standard comes with some kind of licensing restrictions, or involves something that someone has a patent on. For instance, Unisys had a patent governing a bit of the algorithm used for GIF images. In general, patents are a huge weakness for a standard. The MP3 standard is used very widely by people who simply don't know -- or don't care -- that someone theoretically has a patent on part of it, and only some code using the patented algorithm actually has a license from the patent holder. Developers and users can be bitten by this many years after they make the design decision to use a patented algorithm, due to the nature of patents (see Resources). De jure standards often require contributors to clearly disclose any known patents; de facto standards generally have no way to do this.
2005-04-12 EN IBM/Seebach: Naturally occurring standards, patents are a huge weakness for a standard.
Google lawyer: current patent system easy to abuse
Google executive Kulpreet Rana, who looks after intellectual property issues at the internet search firm, backs the need for reform because he believes the present system makes it difficult to make good business decisions.
/The ambiguity and lack of quality that we currently have really mainly favours those who want to use patents as a tool for harassment. The system, because of the way it works right now, is fairly easy to abuse./
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3722509.stm
eBay lawyer: patents divert time to lawyers
- Ebay's litigation and intellectual property professional, deputy general Jay Monahan* has seen the number patent problems for his company grow steadily, including one for infringing a Virginia man's patent of selling auctioned items at a fixed price. Ebay has come to think of the patent trolls as "an unfortunate cost of doing business", he says.
/It's driven ebay's costs up and it diverts time and resources from building the world's greatest ecommerce platform. There are dollars spent on lawyers. There's also an impact on diverting in-house legal staff, engineers, people at all levels to produce documents and sit for depositions. Our approach to this point has been to vigorously defend ourselves against these claims and not to pay ransom money if you will./
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3722509.stm
Comments on existing Quotes
Concerning two of the quotations, Geza wonders whether they are appropriate:
Bradford Friedmann (Cadence)
geza question
http://swpat.ffii.org/archiv/zitate/index.en.html#cadence02 seems to argue in favor of SwPats: he acknowledges "animosity" but then regrets that the industry has "relied on other patents more market-oriented drivers of innovation" and states that he believs this is a "missed opportunity for accelerating ... growth".
Why do we quote this?
phm answer
because the "regretting" talk seems to be merely a gesture of submissiveness toward an audience which is expected to be very pro-patent. Translated to less submissive language, it reads "Although I can see that some people want more than market-oriented drivers and their idealism is understandable, reality has proven those drivers unworkable and it's now time to turn to reality". This quote is in more useful than the Google/Ebay quotes which can be understood as narrowly criticising the patent office's inability to assess prior art or non-obviousness in the case of business-method patents.
The Alcatel quotation
geza question
http://swpat.ffii.org/archiv/zitate/index.en.html#swpatalcatel appears to be just an excerpt from the usual gloomy list-all-catastrophes-that-might-befall-us-and-then-some disclaimer at the end of a quarterly/annual report. It talks in very general terms about problems Alcatel might have with patents (or other "intellectual property") claims of any sort (not just SwPat). ("Our business ... will be harmed if we are unable to acquire licenses ... on reasonable terms.")
IMHO this adds nothing to the SwPat discussion; moreover, one can find similar paragraphs in the 10-Q's,10-K's of nearly every company.
phm answer
Still the standard SEC language shows that patents are a source of danger, even for Alcatel. If they weren't it wouldn't be written there.