Software Should Not Be Copyrighted - - Lawsuit

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Computer software should not be protected by copyright laws designed for music, literature and other creative works, according to a lawsuit filed in a U.S. court in San Francisco.

Intellectual-property consultant Greg Aharonian hopes to convince the court that software makers can protect their products adequately through patents, which provide more comprehensive protection, but are difficult to obtain and expire in a shorter period of time.

The case seeks to clarify which laws the $100 billion U.S. software industry uses to protect its products. Currently, software makers like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O) use both copyright and patent laws to protect their creations, as well as ``clickwrap'' agreements that stipulate terms of use.

An official with a software-industry trade group said not every software product is protected by patents.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-copyright.html

Big business will be sure about that.

There are two issues:

1) Stealing software outright (e.g.: illegal copying of disks and sharing of programs), and that's what copyrights are good to protect.

2) Stealing innards - how something was done. This is protected by trade secrets (hopefully) and occasionally patents. With a trade secret, you keep your lips zipped and don't tell nobody. With a patent you publicize it, and everyone knows how it's done, but more importantly they know you invented it and you own the rights to it.

The problem is that people have tried to patent every little precious thing in computer software, even down to patenting the concept of browsing and clicking on a hyperlink. The patent office just grants a lot of these because they aren't in a position to chase all the prior art, and then companies collect all these nuisance patents and now they even trade patents and sell them to the highest bidder.

I've created enough stuff that I could probably have patented some of it, but I refuse to contribute to the problem. The whole software industry thrives on building on previous work. If everyone patented everything, we'd end up with a handful of companies owning all the patents (because they'd buy them out and would have the resources to aggressively pursue them) and it'd get so either big companies would have to buy some kind of license protection or they'd limited to what they could build, and any small innovative software that got popular could find itself sued out of existence and bought up by the larger company as payment, because it'd be nearly impossible to write anything without walking over someone's patent.

In the software industry, products are covered by four types of legal protection - copyright, as mentioned above, - patents, for truly innovative and shareable things, - trade secrets, which is the twelve herbs and spices no one knows about, - and trademarks, which is the look and feel stuff. Let's keep stuff where it belongs. People are trying to patent "glowing cursors" and crap. For chrissakes!

Stealing a concept IMHO is not possible, for the same reason that you couldn't patent/copyright a chicken pot pie.

Al Gore should just claim theft, since he created the internet and everyone is using his technology. :-)

Wouldn't that mean no competing entity could design similar software at lower cost during the life of the patent? Wouldn't that ultimately be the opposite of what free- and shareware adherants advocate? Or have I misunderstood something? Help me out here.

I'm talking here about a corporate or business entity coming up with a "killer app" and then patenting it. Frankly, I wouldn't put it past a corp to design some killer app that is designed to protect people from a problem they themselves created. And if they kept their culpability for the exposure under wraps, they could clean up selling the only legally viable version of the "killer app" that would protect against it.