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BLOG@IP::JURPatent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.
Monday, October 18, 2004Richard M. Stallman - Fundamentalist of the Anti-Patent Movement: "Patents = Malaria Mosquitos". Groklaw quotes Mr. Richard M. Stallman on patents:"[...] The supposition that software idea patents are inevitable is a form of defeatism that is already visibly mistaken. The movement against software idea patents in Europe, led by FFII (fii.org) and supported by organizations as diverse as Deutsche Bank Research and the Confederation of Associations of Small and Medium-size Enterprises, has already persuaded the European Parliament once. The outcome will be so close that it is absurd to think you can predict the winner.Mr. Stallman is a somewhat tragic character. He, the creator of the GNU GPL, has given the world a very successfull new copyright-based view of the modes of creating and distributing software. Maybe that twenty years ago, when Mr. Stallman wrote down the GNU GPL, potential effects of patents on computer-implemented inventions might have been a very remote possibility. Anyway, the GNU GPL as written down by Mr. Stallman is centred solely around copyright, and it does not take into account the role of the patent system in modern developed market economies. This is the big point of failure of Mr. Stallman with regard to his Free Software utopia.
Only rather late Mr. Stallman seems to have recognised that patents on computer-implemented inventions might interfere with his copyright-based utopia of Free Software. He decided to devote a lot of his energy to the political fight against patentability of computer-implemented inventions. But Mr. Stallman's anti-patent utopia not only implies that there should be no patents on computer-implemented inventions. If he really wants to be sure that no patent claim ever can cover a system consisting of a piece of software running on a computer even those inventions must be declared non-patentable which are not clearly computer-implemented but merely potentially computer-implementable. This means reducing the patent system to chemistry, pharmacy, and some areas of oil-contaiminated mechanical engineering. Hence, capitulating before some intrinsically difficult particulars of any serious attempt to bring the patent system and Free Software together, Mr. Stallman therefore decided to put all his eggs in one basket: Obtaining a political majority for crippling and wrecking the patent system down to some point where no patent claim can ever be directed against anyone tinkering with software on a computer. That is the patent law aspect of Mr. Stallman's utopia of Free Software. Doing so is not only a high bid but also quite cynical: Although he surely is aware thereof, Mr. Stallman refuses to pay attention to the potential difficulties of many branches of modern industries like the automotive industry or the telecommunications industries which would show up if his anti-patent policy would be cast into law. It looks as if in his view such detrimental effects on entire industries are only some form of acceptable collateral damages. The above-quoted message of Mr. Stallman is a monument of a destructive political plot aiming to form a blockade against any meaningful reforms to improve the patent system. Tactically mis-quoting voices criticising the patent system he intends to impress the general public whose members mostly are untrained in patent law. Even trade mark registrations covering the title of a piece of software can potentially interfere with Free Software. However, it looks as if this aspect also has escaped Mr. Stallman's timely attention. Perhaps he should also advocate to ban any trade mark registrations for software and other computer-related goods and services. At this point, the foolishness of such kinds of doctrines would become clear to everybody, and Mr. Stallman surely is better off to stop short of pushing for reforms cippling also the system of trade mark law. The world of globalised capitalistic markets will never be centered around any particular utopia of Mr. Stallman irrespective of how many supporters he is able to mobilise. It is proven that Free Software in the sense of a copyright-based GNU GPL can successfully thrive within the limits of the laws of our globalised market economy but it surely would be rather naive to assume that the laws governing the globalised market economy could be confined to any utopia of a Free Software in an absolute sense beyond pure copyright. And, the constitution of the globalised market economy, the WTO agreements in general and TRIPS in particular, is based not only on copyright but also on the patent system.
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