Software & Patents: "Linus Is Wrong," Says UK Lawyer @ LINUX

Software & Patents: "Linus Is Wrong," Says UK Lawyer

John Collins, a partner at UK firm Marks and Clerk, which describes itself as 'the UK's leading firm of patent and trade mark attorneys,' has issued a statement in response to the public letter signed by Linus Torvalds in November 2004 which called on the EU Council to refrain from adopting its Software Patent Agreement of May 2004. 'Linus...has recently made a statement claiming that the Directive would broaden the area in which patents would be granted. This is simply a false assumption,' Collins says in the statement.

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#6	Follow the money commented on the 4 Dec 2004 Of course he wants sotware patents. He's an IP Lawyer, he wants the opportunity for lawsuits to increase.
#5	anonimous commented on the 4 Dec 2004 Software is not music ! People who preachs for patented software are dreaming of a model (to make big money) that is not aplicable to software world. Music is a very static thing, eg: Beethoven's 5 symphony. Great, but static. Software is a dinamic thing. Photoshop's code of today is not the same whem 10 years ago. You can not patent things like these! What do they think ? Today they patent software, tomorrow they will go to patent the alphabet ?
#4	Collins is wrong commented on the 4 Dec 2004 Tovalds is right. Collins is wrong. Software innovators live under a Damocles sword of software patents applied by players alien to their market. They never requested patents for software from the European Commission because no one needs them.
#3	Alex H. Horn commented on the 4 Dec 2004 There is little to add to Mr. Collin's assessment. However, it should be pointed out that the term "open source developers" might be a bit fuzzy or even inexact within this context - there are also open source developers employed by companies exercising an active patent policy. Moreover, the patentability of computer-implemented inventions is also challenged by representatives of companies not creating open source software but perhaps wanting to have a free ride with regard to valuable inventions of third parties.
#2	Guy Inchbald commented on the 4 Dec 2004 The thrust of John Collins' criticism is that, in considering the proposed EU software patent directive, Linus does not take on board that "copyright can only protect software code and not software". This means you cannot copyright the functionality of a piece of software, only the exact code sequence (text character or binary strings). So if I write a piece of code to do exactly what someone else's copyrighted code does, provided my source and compiled code sequences do not significantly duplicate the copyrighted ones, I am street legal. Well, that's all very fine and (correct me if I'm wrong) I don't think Linus is upset about normalising EU-wide copyright laws. This will if anything strengthen the GPL (The copyright license agreement under which he releases Linux). I'm quite impressed that the corporate camp have managed to find a lawyer who can't tell the difference between a copyright and a patent!
#1	D Hamill commented on the 4 Dec 2004 Torvald's comment is legally spot on. You cannot copyright software (ie functionality) but you can copyright code (ie sequences of numbers). The fact that this is confusing to the industry it is meant to protect suggests that the whole thing needs reviewing. (And don't get me started on whether or not software is goods or services!)

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