On Mon, 19 Dec 2005, Juan Garofalo wrote:

> Peter Peres said:
>
>> This prevents you from stealing code from others, and others from stealing your
>> code. And that's the point.
>
> Excuse me. You either 'believe' in 'intelectual property' and patents, 
> or you don't. Tertium non datur.

I believe that I hate absolute choices ;-) The world is complicated and 
it can be subdivided into parts, and parties, by arbitrary criteria in 
many ways. If one would not believe in the 'intellectual property' of 
patents, as a GPLd code author, then why put it under the GPL which is a 
valid license in the spirit of software patents and/or attribution and 
licensing. As to tertium, it gets hard to count the number of options 
and real life problems caused by our 'incomplete' model of the world in 
any language, but especially in Latin. Maybe that's why judgements in 
intellectual property cases appear so odd to 'normal' people like me 
(ianal).

Just as an example, consider the Msoft:Lindows lawsuit. Msoft 
trademarked a dictionary word, Windows, in conjunction with operating 
systems (you can't do that, right ? But they did it anyway - although at 
the time windowing graphical computing systems were common already). 
Lindows is not a dictionary word and yet Msoft was able to sue them 
several times over the 'similarity' of Lindows to a dictionary word. 
Imho in this case there is a clear double standards issue. How can one 
sue someone else for using a non-dictionary word, for its being similar 
to a dictionary word, never mind the context ?! Apparently in the 
twisted ways of IP law, you can get away with this ?! Barf !!

>> You have to understand that people who have made their code available 
>> under the GPL did not relinquish any rights on it.
>
>The same contradiction. Either ideas can be owned or....

What has this got to do with ideas ? Ideas should not be owned, 
embodiments should (and are). There should also be a limit to the 
breadth of the 'wide scope' of the lawyertalk in the claims of a patent.

After all, a mammoth bone needle patent from 10,000 years ago could very 
well be used by some successors of a really old people to sue modern 
loom makers for infringement if there would be no limits.

> If you don't believe in patents and/or IP, then you must completly 
> drop the license system enforced at the point of a gun. It doesn't 
> matter if the 'license' to be enforced is GPL LGPL CNN FBI or 
> whatever.

> Otherwise, all this is talk about 'free' software(meaning it's linked 
> to freedom) is pure hypocrisy and is, IMO, intended to confuse people.

The GPL has little to do with ideas, it is a license on an embodiment of 
an idea, or embodiment of an algorythm, when used on code. When used on 
something else, then again it reflects the belief of the author that a 
license is necessary (usually in the form of an Artistic License or 
Creative Commons license, an not GPL), therefore he surmises that 
licenses do work and are necessary, therefore he does believe that 
intellectual property exists and must be regulated (up to what point, 
remains to be seen).

Meanwhile the GPL and free software are a way to maintain open source 
code as is desired by its authors, in despite of the encroaching on this 
and other areas by the ip 'industry'.

As to whether it's good or bad, I say it's bad. The most recent example 
I could give would be the RIM (Blackberry makers) lawsuit. RIM is a 
Canadian maker of the popular Blackberry handheld wireless email 
terminals, i.e. an electronic device manufacturer, fairly close to what 
many on this list are doing (or hope to be doing). The challenger is 
NTP. NTP won against RIM, practically destroying its business in the USA 
and now other 'intellectual property' companies in Europe are also suing 
RIM. To understand the enormity of the issue one must read what NTP 
really is:

http://www.newsday.com/business/printedition/ny-bzoff184555212dec18,0,4971614.story?coll=ny-business-print

(Scroll down to the paragraph that begins with "The fight casts light on a little-known" ...
if impatient - notice that the page is Ajaxed, you cannot highlight and 
copy text from it until you do not turn off their Style (Firefox:View->Page Style->No Style))

If IP law means that such a firm can come out of the woods and claim 6% 
of revenues once one starts making money, and successfully sue one for 
$450 million, then I think IP in the form of patents on ideas is bad in 
its present form and that it makes engineering and IT innovation work as 
dangerous as walking in a minefield. Note that NTP holds a patent on an 
idea that imho even has copious previous art (see military telex coupled 
to short wave radio for copious precedents and previous art dating from 
pre-WW2 - the exact nature of NTPs ideas are covered elsewhere on the 
web).

As to how deep the mud is, here is a a little sample (patent lawyer's 
blog):

http://271patent.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_271patent_archive.html

which has a lot of darkness but also some light (look under "PatentCafe 
Intoduces Infringement Litigation Suite to Uncover Prior Art"), more 
darkness (under "US standard of patent approval 'down sharply'"), darker 
("One click, two click, three click, four"), darkness ("Brits Dumping on 
the US Patent System"), grayness ("Good Things Come To Those Who Wait") 
and on and on.

ianal (and damn glad I ain't)
Peter

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