FurtherRefutations

Reaction to a CampaignForCreativity article

From http://campaignforcreativity.org/camp4creativity/:

The objective of our campaign is to ensure that the legal protections we enjoy, such as copyright, trademarks, patents and design rights are not diluted. These protections are a right, they are not a privilege. We must not allow them to be trampled on. We must fight back."

• This is the big-business world attempting to look rebellious. The "a right, ... not a privilege" thing is factually wrong.

---

From http://campaignforcreativity.org/camp4creativity/issues_so.htm:

Is the Campaign opposed to open source software?

No, not at all. In fact we are supportive. The directive will have no effect on the development of open source software.

• Except to massively increase the risks of doing so and the costs if patent searches, cross-licensing and litigation become necessary

Patents have to be applied for.

• Not sure if this is intented to mean "There is an imperative to apply for patents" or "Patents are not granted automatically".

If open source developers want to create and publish their own work they will continue to be free to do so.

• How magnanimous! Except now they will face greater artificially-created costs and risks, for the benefit of a few megacorporations and parasitic patent farms.

Once an invention has been made public it cannot be patented by another, so it would be impossible for a company to 'steal' open source material.

• I think this is intended to mean that it is "impossible" for a company to patent an idea that has been published as open source software. Except I can think of at least one case where this has happened: Network Associates' broad anti-spam patent which was applied for in December 2002 and comes way after SpamAssassin and also after Paul Graham's article on Bayesian Spam filtering from August 2002 ( http://paulgraham.com/spam.html).

  Update: This may not be as broad as was originally thought. But see this ASRG thread for discussion on TitanKey's per-user blacklisting patent.

On the other hand, without patents commercial companies, or indeed anyone who creates software or any other invention, would find it impossible to make a return on their work.

• "Impossible" is a pretty strong word. There are plenty of commercial software companies making a return on their work without patents. MySQL AB is probably a good example, but there must be many small companies who make a profit on the software they develop without patents.

So whilst we support giving inventors a choice, those who oppose patents would create a world in which only non-commercial software would exist."

• I'd like more software to be Free Software, but this is orthoganal to the patents issue, and indeed to the commercial/non-commercial issue.