Software Patents: The Patent Trap

[Seth Johnson <seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org>]

(Forwarded from DMCA Discussion list,
dmca_discuss@lists.microshaft.org)

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 15:51:51 -0800
From: "Jon O ." <jono@microshaft.org>


http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/02/19/1651244

Thursday February 21, 04:24 AM EST    [ Patents and
Trademarks ] 
- by Tina Gasperson -

Songs are created from individual notes combined with chord
progressions. There are really only 12 notes to choose from,
whether one is composing a melody or placing the melody over
a pleasing chord arrangement. When someone writes a song,
his copyright on that song covers the original combination
and arrangement of some or all of those 12 notes and the
progression of harmonies created by the chord selection. No
one is allowed to copy the author's melody without his
permission, but the notes and the chords that make up the
song are freely available for use by anyone. In fact, most,
if not all songs have note progressions that have been used
in other songs before, kind of like algorithms. 

What if all of a sudden the U.S. Patent Office decided that
musicians could patent chords or certain note phrasings? Say
a composer decided that this note progression was unique: C,
F#, E, D, C and the patent office, being unfamiliar with
music, agreed with him? Now the composer can force anyone
who writes a song that uses his "invention" to pay him any
fee he deems appropriate, or stop singing it. It sounds
ridiculous. But if this happened, we would soon see an end
to the seemingly endless flow of new songs. What starving
artist could afford the royalty payments? 

On a larger scale, this is what is happening with software
patents. The difference is that with software, there are
many, many more "notes" to choose from in the creation of an
application or process, which makes the process of that
creation more complicated and difficult to understand from
the patent office's perspective. It also makes a
programmer's life dangerous because she never knows when she
might be violating a software patent. What if at the very
same time she wrote her program, another company filed
patent applications on the very same processes and
algorithms she used? It has happened, in the case of the LZW
compression used in the creation of GIF images. 

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/02/19/1651244
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