LPT730 Lab01

Software Patents

I do not believe that software patents are a good idea in general, at least not in the form in which they currently exist in most countries.

A large part of the dificulty comes from the fact that software patents are dificult for usual patent office employees to evaluate effectively, and as such a disturbingly high number of approved patents have been granted that, most likely, should not have been. When evaluating a patent application for a software practice, patent reviewers do not have time to learn an entire new discipline, and patent reviewers are typically not software developers and are unlikely to fully understand the material contained within the patent application. As such, many 'bad' software patents exist. Usually, the element making these patents 'bad' is that many times patents have been granted for broadly defined techniques or strategies, rather than merely for a particular specific implementation -- and, as per normal practices in the granting of patents, patents are intended to apply only to particular implementations or methods of accomplishing a goal.

While I don't necessarily see anything wrong with patenting a particular, specific implementation for achieving a particular goal in software, the cost of the patent office retaining evaluators knowledgeable enough to effectively evaluate these patens is one that most governments are unlikely to be willing to pay. Needless to say, if the patent office was handling the granting of software patents in an effective manner, these patents would become far less valuable to companies, as the chances of recieving a broad patent that one could use to litigate their way to riches would be far less likely.

Bill C-61

While the odds of Bill C-61 becoming law in Canada currently appear to be low, I would still be in favour of such a law, if not for the reasons one might think.

Bill C-61 would, if passed, imply many onerous new restrictions on how an end user may make use of copyrighted content they own, mostly in the area of making the circumvention of technical measures intended to prevent the copying of data an illegal act.

Many in the open source community are up in arms over the restrictions on users' freedom that this bill would imply, being as usual all for the freedom to do what they wish with information in their posesssion. I would suggesst, however, that they look at things in a different light: what Bill C-61 really does is make using, posessing, or acquiring copyrighted content distributed under a proprietary liscence far less attractive than it was previously. The more careful the user has to be with handling the information, the more they have to worry about accidentally doing something illegal with it and not realizing it until it is too late, the less they will want to have anything to do with this dangerous, legally risky proprietary media.