Richard Stallman, creator of the Free Software movement, has written a tremendous essay for the Guardian on the risks of software patents. Richard undertakes a gedankenexperiment about "literary patents" and the impact they would have had on Victor Hugo as he sat down to pen Les Miserables.
Now consider this hypothetical literary patent:
Claim 1: a communication process that represents, in the mind of a reader, the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and subsequently changes his name…
These patents would all cover the story of one character in a novel. They overlap, but they do not precisely duplicate each other, so they could all be valid simultaneously – all the patent holders could have sued Victor Hugo. Any one of them could have prohibited publication of Les Misérables.
You might think these ideas are so simple that no patent office would have issued them. We programmers are often amazed by the simplicity of the ideas that real software patents cover – for instance, the European Patent Office has issued a patent on the progress bar, and one on accepting payment via credit cards. These would be laughable if they were not so dangerous.
(Thanks, Phil and Eloisa!)
