Ciaran O'Riordan (LP09)
The following are materials from Ciaran O'Riordan's presentation at Libre Planet 2009.
Contents
Slides
Slides: http://ciaran.compsoc.com/esp-boston-2009.html
Summary
Irish Free Software Organisation.[1]
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.
Transcript
It's nice to actually feel welcome, because, for many years I was like the boogey man at conferences. People would come and present their software and they'd show what new features they'd coded in the last year, and then I'd come along and say software patents. I'd have to tell everyone to be scared.
So I do feel welcome, and when I started out working on software patents I was working in Ireland, and in Ireland, a group of us formed an organisation just to work specifically on software patents, it was called the Irish Free Software Organisation. Some people like out t-shirts, we have a gnu playing a harp.
(00:58)
So, my background: I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a legal expert, I'm a computer programmer, by trade. Or at least I was until I started getting into software patents. What this means is that I'm not a general spokesperson on software patents. Sometimes people ask me for my opinion on the Tom Tom case, or will Bilski go to the Supreme Court, and usually I don't know these things. I'm a programmer. What I do know is what I saw in the European Parliament because I was working on this between 2003 and 2005, and just from the general lobbying that we did during that and a bit after as well.
This is the first positive talk I've given about software patents. Things are going well recently. The most decisive battles in the last few years have been in the EU, the Bilski case, and India.
In the EU, very briefly, what happened is that there was a proposal to have software patents, and we fought back and forth for what was actually eight years in total, and in the end the entire proposal was scrapped. So it was all that work for nothing, but at least we showed that we could match the effort of the pro-software-patent campaigners and we gained a lot of political support and we showed that we can actually perform in this arena and that we can actually be involved in the legislative procedures.
It was also impressive in one other way because in Europe, we didn't really have structures working on software patents. Not big structures at least. It wasn't organised. We used to read Slashdot and we'd read about crazy patents in the USA and we thought that was hilarious. And then it landed on our coast, and... it was amazing, very quickly there was a movement and we managed to actually be effective. So that was impressive.
(02:57)
The second major decision was the Bilski case. I didn't actually follow the Bilski case, because, another thing in Europe is that we though it's pointless in the USA, that'll be the last country to get rid of software patents. So we were really happy. When I read the result of the Bilski case, it's very useful. And the USPTO board of appeals is now actually overturning certain patents, mostly IBM patents, based on the Bilski decision. It really does have a concrete outcome. So when we declare victory, it's not just a political victory - because everyone has to declare victory in politics - it's actually a real victory.
And it doesn't just affect the USA, because a lot of software businesses are global. The TomTom case is a good example because TomTom is a company in The Netherlands, but the litigation is happening in the US because that's the court that Microsoft has filed the documents at, and Microsoft has contacted the International Trade Commission to ask for a block on TomTom's products. So even for European companies, what happens in the USA is important.
And a second reason is that countries around the world, when they're talking about their patent policy, are usually asked to harmonise with the rest of the world, and "the rest of the world" usually means the USA. So the Bilsk case is important for people all around the world.
The third big decision was in India, and most people don't even know that there was a big decision in India. I think it was 2005, there was a proposal to change the legislation to have software patents, and there was a mad battle for maybe about three weeks, and the media discussed it for about a week and a half, and then the Parliament decided, yeh, that is a bad idea, let's not have software patents.
In Europe, we were left scratching our heads wondering what just happened there. It took us eight years to do that. So we feel kinda inefficient now. But the lack of awareness of what happened in India means that there's a gap. There's something not happening right in the communication.
Ok, so I'm working for End Software Patents now, and that's a campaign, a slightly separate project from FSF but the funding has come from FSF. However, software patents, it has to be made clear that it's not a free software issue. We don't want people to think that adopting free software means you now have a software patent problem. Software patents, they're a threat to all different types of uses of software.
Now, there are some problems that free software developers have. For example, we can't get a licence per copy or per user for a patent. In that way, software patents cause a particular problem for free software. But in other ways, we have certain advantages. For example, our development is distributed, a lot of our developers are volunteers, so there aren't big pots of gold that litigators can look at.
And another thing is that, because free software can be edited by anyone, if there's a problem with one part of an application, you don't have to take the whole application off the market or tell people: don't use the application. We can just take out that one infringing part and the rest of the application can continue to be used by as many people as possible.
(06:22)
(WORK IN PROGRESS. CHECK BACK IN AN HOUR.)
