IBM Pledges 500 U.S. Patents To Open Source

[GadgetMaster]

ARMONK, N.Y., January 11, 2005 - IBM today pledged open access to key innovations  covered by 500 IBM software patents to individuals and groups working on open source software. IBM believes this is the largest pledge ever of patents of any kind and represents a major shift in the way IBM manages and deploys its intellectual property (IP) portfolio.

The pledge is applicable to any individual, community, or company working on or using software that meets the Open Source Initiative (OSI) definition of open source software now or in the future.

To  find out which patents are covered :

Read Press Release Here

[hagar]

Having nuclear weapons and promise not to use them at me, doesn't change anything, nuclear weapons are still bad. The same goes for software patents.

http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com
http://www.ffii.org

[weirdami]

Patents are always a good idea. Come up with your own ideas and stop leeching from productive folks.

[hagar]

The patentsystem (or rather said, the way the patentsystem is raped today makes it) is not a good way to prevent proctect the inventor's invention.

It might be so that many of the software patents of today will has been granted even if the shouldn't have been. But the costs of fighting an invalid patent is huge, and probably no small firm can survive a legal battle with one the giants.

Some good examples can be find here:
http://www.eff.org/patent/  (american patents)
http://webshop.ffii.org/    (example of european patents in a webshop)

The most important thing that one should remeber about patents is that the intention of patents is that the if the society gains more of giving one person a monopoly on his/hers idea, a patent should be granted, otherwise it shouldn't be granted. Since you normally don't want a monopoly in a free market, patents are an exception for a situation where both the inventor(s) and the society gains on having a time limited monopoly.


And I can't see how the public and the society gains anything by having patents on "one click shopping", "streming video" or 683 patents on the ethernet plug.

[KThunder]

The current problem with software patents is that software ideas cannot be covered under copy-right laws. So say some small company or individual comes up with a fantastic idea for a program or part of a program and copyrights it. Some big company can look at the program and do basically the same thing in their program and put the individual out of business. It doesnt really matter by the way if its a big or small company or two big companies, the fact of the matter is that both the code and the idea behind the code is valable. Some entity put the time and effort into developing both the idea and the program.
In other words software patents cover the intellectual effort put into software ideas (which are valuable) that copyright laws dont. If you came up with a valuable idea for a program wrote code etc. and then microsoft came along, saw what you had, and made their own, bundling it free with windows and you made no money because of it, that would be wrong.
>The most important thing that one should remeber about patents is that the intention of patents is that the if the society gains more of giving one person a monopoly on his/hers idea, a patent should be granted, otherwise it shouldn't be granted.>
you wrote that and it is wrong. the most important thing to remember is that patents are not about society but about the individual and their rights to their ideas. it is not about a monopoly by the way, since most people dont develop inventions and bring them to market by themselves. usually they take their ideas to differant companies or investors. without patents any company or individual who sees your idea could profit from it locking you out completely. there have been numerous times that this has happened. only on a very few instances has an idea been so important to society that a patent hasnt been issued and in those time the developer has either been someone who was refusing to liscence their idea to anyone or market it themselves, or they were compensated.
it also doesnt matter if anyone else thinks an idea is important if the idea is considerd valuable to you and sufficently different from anything else a patent should be issued.
sorry about the book but im sick of people who apparently think that all software should be open source and free for the downloading or dissassembling. the person who develops and idea and or software should be protected and allowed to profit from their work.

[KThunder]

by the way this thread is about IBM basicly giving up most of their rights to these patents for the good of society, if most other companies had developed these ideas noone would ever be able to use them since most companies keep their Intellectual Property very well protected.