Ciaran O'Riordan (LP09)

End Software Patents

Irish Free Software Association

Real victory with Bilski.

Tom Tom is in the Netherlands, but the litigation is happening in the US.

Disconnect with communication within the movement, not knowing about what was happening in India.

Ben Klemens did a study of how software patents are impacting American companies and found that the litigation is costing them 11.2 billion dollars. Car manufacturers, food companies... Every company is in the software business because every company is using software -- makes them a target.

Why aren't these companies doing the work to fight software patents?

Free software community, small companies, and non-software companies are the groups that will fight software patents. In Europe, small companies helped out a lot, with the assistance of the unions. But that's not true in the US because those companies are partners to larger corporations and don't want to offend them. That seems true in Europe as well, but for some reason the smaller companies aren't as afraid as they are in Europe.

ESP will rely on small businesses making small donations and large non-software companies making big donations. But right now we're relying on the free software community to bootstrap the campaign.

We're focusing on changing the legislation or getting new results in the courts. There has been discussion about other ways of reducing the problem but they have not been that effective and they won't solve the problem. Patent pools, for example.

Our free software licenses can help but only when patent holders distribute GPL software -- and they might be afraid to do that if it gets to be too powerful of a tool.

Don't take a position on pharmaceutical patents -- not our area. We're sure that software patents are a bad idea.

Some of the patent sites that had useful documents on them before have disappeared, so we are putting this information together on a web site and making it accessible. Collecting info about the EU campaigns, Bilski, etc. Putting a wiki online, English first and other languages later. Also doing a news site.

Make a platform so that other people can get active.

Hope to work with http://progfree.org/.

Software is not technical! We have to specify that when working in Europe to explain why it's not patentable.

Other Resources

SFLC's statement on Bilski.

Software Freedom Law Show (podcast) discussed Bilski as well.