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www/server/staging software-patents.html
|
From: |
Dora Scilipoti |
|
Subject: |
www/server/staging software-patents.html |
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Date: |
Mon, 5 Dec 2022 18:10:22 -0500 (EST) |
CVSROOT: /web/www
Module name: www
Changes by: Dora Scilipoti <dora> 22/12/05 18:10:22
Modified files:
server/staging : software-patents.html
Log message:
Some changes... (www-discuss Dec 3, 2022).
CVSWeb URLs:
http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/www/server/staging/software-patents.html?cvsroot=www&r1=1.1&r2=1.2
Patches:
Index: software-patents.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /web/www/www/server/staging/software-patents.html,v
retrieving revision 1.1
retrieving revision 1.2
diff -u -b -r1.1 -r1.2
--- software-patents.html 3 Dec 2022 15:41:22 -0000 1.1
+++ software-patents.html 5 Dec 2022 23:10:21 -0000 1.2
@@ -53,7 +53,7 @@
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
+that you would use in developing software. That is what makes them a
dangerous obstacle to all software development.
</p>
<!-- 00:58 -->
@@ -88,7 +88,7 @@
treat it is as a kind of property, which is one among many
alternatives. This term “intellectual property”
pre-judges the most basic question in whatever area you are dealing
-with. This is not conducive to clear and open minded thinking.
+with. That's not conducive to clear and open minded thinking.
</p>
<!-- 01:35 -->
<p>
@@ -99,8 +99,8 @@
patents, which are completely different from copyrights (every detail is
different), and 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.
+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 cover different areas of life and activities, and
the public policy issues they raise are completely unrelated. So, if
@@ -122,7 +122,7 @@
<p>
Copyrights cover the details of expression of a work; copyrights
don't cover any ideas. It's {an error} to consider copyrights as
-covering any idea. But patents only cover ideas and the use of ideas.
+covering any idea. But patents <em>only</em> cover ideas and the use of ideas.
</p>
</li>
<li>
@@ -166,7 +166,7 @@
</ul>
<!-- 5:18 -->
<p>
-I hope you will forget about copyrights for the rest of this talk,
+I hope you will basically just forget about copyrights for the rest of this
talk,
because this talk is about patents and you should never lump together
copyrights and patents. Your understanding of these legal
issues would be about like what would happen in your understanding of
@@ -236,7 +236,7 @@
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, and
-there is no way you can keep track of what they are all about. So you
+there is no way you could keep track of what they are all about. So 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 keywords and so on. Well, that will work to a certain extent. You
@@ -251,7 +251,7 @@
cells, it always recalculates everything after the things it depends
on, so that after one recalculation everything is up to date. The
first spreadsheets 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
+cell depend on a cell that was 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 on cells above
them, you see.
@@ -267,16 +267,17 @@
didn't mention that word. You couldn't have found it to “natural
order” or “topological sort,” because 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.
+“method of compiling formulas into object code.” I thinK
+when I first saw it, I thought it was the wrong patent.
</p>
<!-- 11:36 -->
<p>
But let's suppose that you got a list of patents. So you want to see now
-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.
-In fact, things that patent offices say often don't mean what they seem to
mean.
+what you are not allowed to do. You try studying these patents; well,
+you discover they are very hard to understand as they are written in
+tortuous legal language, whose meaning is very hard to understand. In
+fact, things that patent offices say often don't mean what they seem to
+mean.
</p>
<!-- 12:02 -->
<p>
@@ -285,7 +286,7 @@
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
+to learn anything, because it is too hard to understand them. They quoted
one engineer saying “I can't recognize my own inventions in
patenteese.” <i>[laughs]</i>
</p>
@@ -296,7 +297,7 @@
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 “Inventions.” It didn't look
+with with his “inventions.” It didn't look
similar. But his lawyer told him that you could read the patents as
covering part of Hypercard, so he decided to then attack Apple.
<span class="gnun-split"></span>When I gave a
@@ -341,7 +342,7 @@
</p>
<dl>
-<dt id="patent-avoiding">1) Avoiding the patent</dt>
+<dt id="patent-avoiding">1. Avoiding the patent</dt>
<dd>
<p>
That means don't use the idea that the patent covers. This can be
@@ -373,7 +374,7 @@
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
+program that people think is not very good, and they are likely to reject
it.
</p>
<!-- 16:49 -->
@@ -384,7 +385,7 @@
access? Traversing hyperlinks is absolutely essential to a major use
of computers these days. And 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
+feature, it is really just a combination of two, just arbitrarily
juxtaposed. It is rather like a patent on having a sofa and
television in the same room. <i>[laughs]</i>
</p>
@@ -424,12 +425,12 @@
</p>
<!-- 19:24 -->
<p>
-In some cases, you can find a better algorithm. This may or may not
+In some cases, you can find a better algorithm. That 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 <cite>New York Times</cite>. It
+he decided to contribute it to us. We were going to release it, and just
+by chance I happened to see a copy of the <cite>New York Times</cite> that
happened to have the weekly patent column in it. I didn't see a copy
of the <cite>Times</cite> more than once every few months. So I looked at
it, and it said that somebody had got a patent for “inventing a new
@@ -498,7 +499,7 @@
</p>
<!-- 23:41 -->
<p>
-So, avoiding the patents may be easy; {it} may be impossible; it may be easy
+So, avoiding the patents may be easy {or it} may be impossible; it may be easy
but it makes your program useless. It varies depending on the
situation.
</p>
@@ -517,8 +518,8 @@
<span class="gnun-split"></span>They went back to insisting that patents had
to be
freely implementable by anyone, and that standards had to be free
for anyone to implement. That is an interesting victory. I think
-it's the first time any standards body has made that decision. It
-is normal for standards bodies to be willing to put something in a
+it's the first time any standards body has made that decision. It's
+normal for standards bodies to be willing to put something in a
standard which in fact 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.
@@ -1382,7 +1383,7 @@
<p class="unprintable">Updated:
<!-- timestamp start -->
-$Date: 2022/12/03 15:41:22 $
+$Date: 2022/12/05 23:10:21 $
<!-- timestamp end -->
</p>
</div>