COMPCOMM: Background on Software Patents

[Lachlan Cranswick <l.m.d.cranswick@dl.ac.uk>]

(from Vincent and myself)

Re: Background on Software Patents

It is hard to find "objective" articles but this 33 page 
document seems to be the best of the lot:

Software Useright: Solving Inconsistencies of Software Patents: 
 an overview by Jean-Paul Smets
   http://www.smets.com/it/policy/useright/useright.pdf

Conclusion from the above article:
"Software patents are generally useless, worthless and unfair.  Patents
on programmes as such are even dangerous because they allow to grant
monopolies on business methods and social practices and make business
life very risky for software publishers."

If members of the Commission would like to read the abovelink.
Then the draft compcomm opinion can be resent to the mailing list
Monday and reviewed with respect to this background information.

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Also: 

Top 1000 out of 77677 potential software patents:

  http://swpat.de/ffii/swpat.pre.en.top1000.html

An overall linking page on Software Patents:

  http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/patents.html

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The thing that is most relevant and why I think the computing commission
needs to have an opinion on this is because 1) the large majority of
software patents are "trivial" in nature and 2) these can easily
involve "prior art" (something already published should not as a rule
be patented, but patent offices are not practically able to detect
this)

E.g., based on what is happening in the non-crystallographic
field, there would be nothing to stop a non-expert Joe Blogs (man
on the street) for filing patent applications on 
things like:  integration of spots from 
image plates or CCD frames; an algorithm for finding twin
matrices from single crystal diffraction data; 
algorithm for finding missing symmetry in 
crystal structures; algorithm for application
of method X to the refinement of crystal structures, algorithm
for the solving of crystal structures by algorithm X, etc, etc

If academics were then writing a program on the above and were cited
for infringing a software patent - would they have the financial
and legal resources to challenge it?  This is the issue already
facing the non-crystallographic software world.

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Lachlan M. D. Cranswick

Collaborative Computational Project No 14 (CCP14)
    for Single Crystal and Powder Diffraction
  Birkbeck University of London and Daresbury Synchrotron Laboratory 
Postal Address: CCP14 - School of Crystallography,
                Birkbeck College,
                Malet Street, Bloomsbury,
                WC1E 7HX, London,  UK
Tel: (+44) 020 7631 6850   Fax: (+44) 020 7631 6803
E-mail: l.m.d.cranswick@dl.ac.uk   Room: B091
WWW: http://www.ccp14.ac.uk/