[Patents] Patent system run for consumers or producers?

[PILCH Hartmut phm@a2e.de]

> There is no proof of Hartmut's assertion that the public and
> consumers are suffering because of (bad) software patents.

I myself am experiencing this suffering.  For example when trying to get
patent descriptions from the EPO web server, I get single-page PDF files
that are really only GIF files with a PDF appearance to make them look
more serious.  In order to be able to seriously browse such files, I have
to at least concatenate them into one multi-page PDF files.  When doing
that with the imagemagick toolset

        $ convert -page A4 -adjoin EPxxxx-??.pdf  EPxxxx.pdf

I will get an unreadable EPxxxx.pdf file as a result.  Why?  Because
Imagmagick uses Ghostscript, and the Ghostscript authors refrained from
using LZW decompression because they don't have the license to use it in
free software.  Free software developpers have in fact been attacked by
Unisys.

Similarly, if a company uses a Linux system, it cannot be sure that it
won't be attacked by Apple, which owns patents on some aspects of the TTF
format which is implemented by the FreeType engine.

Some software companies I know are already forced to sign guarantee
agreements that their software doesn't infringe on patents, and they are
trying to prepare for uncalculable risks.  Mostly this means reserving
money and/or strictly following a guideline of delivering only closed
sources to customers aswell as to the public.

> Second, patents economically for the most part in the software world
> reallocate money, not increase or decrease it (which is of interest
> to the public on whose behalf patents are awarded).  

Patents make it necessary to organise the software business according to
the model of traditional industry as a battle between large corporate
armies.  Small companies, which so far were very productive, have to
decide which of the big armies they want to join.  Ultimately, for
interoperability reasons, software patents provide an incentive to
organise the software business and the whole world of software under the
roof of one large private monopoly.

As you know, mergers usually do not only reallocate money but also destroy
values.  Some departments will become superfluous, others will just not
work well in the framework of a big bureaucracy.

> If I sue you and win and get money out of you, the public
> macroeconomically could care less because the taxes still get paid,
> and the money is still there to be consumed.  In any event, there is
> no suffering on the part of the public and the consumer.

Software patents mean a shift of ressources away from small companies to
patent experts and patent departments, around which large companies are
grouped.

Such shifts are usually not null-sum games.  I'd expect software
developpers to be a more socially productive lot than patent experts.
So the shift means an overall loss in productivity.

> So any of you using the word "suffer" should stop doing so.  It is
> a silly way to undermine your arguments.

Since the "consumers" in the software field are users of all kinds,
including those sponsors of the Eurolinux Petition who, according to Mr.
Bresse, have a greater interest in freely using other people's software
than in writing software themselves, I can't see how anyone could
seriously attempt to negate the suffering that software users are
undergoing.

Even in 1976 the German Federal High Court (BGH) stated that software
needed to be kept free from patents because it belonged to the realm of
immaterial activity, which is outside the scope of the patent system.  The
BGH stated even back then that limiting the public's freedom in this area
would inflict unjustified pain.  The patent system, according to the BGH,
had been designed and proven only for the inventions in the material
world.

In the US people have rightly claimed that software patents run counter to
the First Amendment.

It is probably hard to negate in general that patents inflict some
suffering on the public.  There is, even in the world of material
invention patents, a trade-off between the gift of disclosure and the
20-year limitation on use.  Thus it is even harder to negate that patents
inflict suffering in the immaterial sphere, where basic civil freedoms are
touched and where the effect is that less less knowhow than before is
disclosed in return for less freedom than before.

Maybe you won't be so silly as to negate this fact, but the word
"suffering" just sounds silly to you.  I actually used it because it is a
basic concept in Karl Popper's philosphy of social engineering, from which
also some of the concepts for delimiting the material world from the
subjective and informational worlds are derived.  I find it quite useful
as a basic concept to always get back to when talking about why certain
institutions should be reformed in certain ways.

-phm