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April 25, 2006
DMCA double or quits and Software Patents
Did you see the US are planning to increase the breadth of the DMCA - including more offenses, higher fines and doubling the jail terms for offenders. It is now illegal just to download software that MAY be used to break copyright.
Farewell fair use.
This is all pushed by the same company that has just decided to sue a family for illegal file sharing - a family that does not even own a computer!
I would love to think that the EU and our own glorious government will not follow in their footsteps but unfortunately our MEP's are staunch supporters of big business. I remember seeing some footage of the recent software patent debates in the EU Parliment with Mary Harney obfuscating, bullying and generally ramming through software patents.
Software patents are a BAD bad idea. If someone sits down and thinks up some new way of doing something with software - clicking on a link to pop-up an IM window for instance - they can get a patent for it. The important thing is they never have to develop this functionality or even give some technical basis for how it might work. The idea is patented and patents are given for ideas that have prior art.
What this means that if some hard-working chap builds a company and implements an idea that is demonstratably similar to the patent then they can be sued and forced to pay costs, fines and licence fees. Poor hard working chap goes out of business. Everybody who works for him loses their job. Entropy increases.
Most of the software patents are held by big companies - either filed by them or bought out by them. These companies have the money to pay patent lawyers to search existing applications (ie. from the dawn of the internet), or newly developed applications or whatever with the goal of prosecuting all offenders.
Entropy will increase sometime soon near you.
Posted by dottie at April 25, 2006 8:16 AM