(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.
Without any authority, except my unalienable Right to pursue Happiness, I wrote this simple family tree generator. In so doing, I have infringed patents 6,842,878, 6,570,567, and 6,285,367, along with inumerable others.
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Born: July 30, 1975 <- << edit  Kirsten Hillary Finucane née: Smith Born: November 3, 1977 <- << edit  |
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Software patents are so broadly written, and the USPTO is so alacritous in their willingness to grant patents despite prior art or obviousness, that every piece of software ever written violates somebody's patent. Patent holders without scruple use their rights as patent owners to demand royalties they did not earn.
The effect is to stifle commerce and creativity in software programming--contrary to the intent of patents, which is to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.
A useful analogy would be for Stephen King to patent "A method to convey horror by displaying horrible text to a horrified reader", and then going on to detail the various gambits of bad dialog and gore that make King books successful. Suddenly, no author but King may write a horror novel. If pressed, a court may decide in favor of an author whose method is sufficiently unique from that described by King's patent, but a fearful author might be better off switching to romance.
My analogy sounds silly, but the reality is far worse in the case of many software patents. Somebody out there owns the right to describe a graphical tree with a GUI showing boxes connected by lines. To a programmer who wishes to make any software that shows org charts, to-do lists, state diagrams, etc., the potential restrictions by the patent holder are tantamount to denying Clive Barker the use of verbs.
Similarly, a software copyright holder need only compare his source with that of a violator to see if his work was stolen. This job is made much easier if software distributors made available the source.
Even without seeing the source, copyright holders can and do pursue violators based on clues derived from properties of the binary code and its execution. So if I find you are violating my copyright in your use, distribution, disemination, homoginization, or otherwising existention of my software, you'd better watch out!
# You may do with this software what you will. Please send me your
# suggestions for improvement, which I am sure are numerous and
# fervently believed.
"The Zombie Stare" tells of an ambitious high school senior,
consumed by anticipation of college admission, who prays one
night to remain unconscious until receiving his MIT admissions
letter. He consciously awakes 30 years later when he finally
receives the letter, lost in the mail for so many years, and
discovers that, to all external observers, he has lived an
apparently normal life. He desperately seeks to regain 30
years' worth of memories lost as an unconscious philosophical
zombie.
Pretty heady stuff. Sounds like a story written for a 7th grade composition class. Not to give away the final plot twist, but I'm sure it concludes with,
The ambitious high school senior groggily looked around his
familiar bedroom, and sighed with relief, rubbing the zombie
stare out of his eyes.
"It was all only a dream," he sighed with relief. Again.
THE END
I created an entry in a fiction wiki that anyone can modify. The story is called The Zombie Stare, and ends with the passage above. I don't know how often people update stuff on this particular wiki (looks like not many), but hopefully someday will find a lovely long story with the ridiculous patented plot.