WHAT DO ANTI-SOFTWARE PATENT ADVOCATES WANT?
No software patents at all, of course.
To the die hard advocates it isn’t about the quality of the patents being issued or the term of exclusivity that is being given. It is about very existence of patent rights for software – period.
In an article at NewsForge (the online newspaper for Linux and open source) about IBM’s new initiative with the US Patent Office to create repositories of prior art for the USPTO to use in examining software patents, one prominent anti-software patent advocate sums it up:
Software developer and patent opponent Florian Mueller says, “Those patent pools and prior art initiatives aren’t harmful per se, but the intention behind them is to give people comfort when there are serious reasons to be worried and to push for a legislative ban of software patents.”
Mueller, the founder of NoSoftwarePatents.com and a key figure in the fight against software patents in Europe, says the efforts might reduce the number of US patents that are granted, given prior art. However, he added that those are the kinds of patents that can be invalidated anyway by later proving that prior art existed at the time of the patent application.
“The patents that really give reason for concern, such as the Eolas patent or Microsoft’s File Allocation Table (FAT) patents, survive any prior-art check, so they can’t be prevented by that initiative,” Mueller says. “So far, the users or vendors of no major open source program have been successfully sued over a patent in a way that made headline news, but the day it happens, the problem will be understood by many, and people will then look at those patent pools and prior-art libraries and realize that those don’t solve the patent problem to any meaningful extent.”