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+1. Software Patents and Literary Patents {#software-patents-and-literary-patents .chapter}
+========================================
+
+@firstcopyingnotice{{ Copyright © 2005, 2007, 2008 Richard Stallman\
+ {This essay was originally published on <http://guardian.co.uk>, on
+23 June 2005. It was then titled “Patent Absurdity” and focused on the
+proposed European software patent directive. This version is part of
+@fsfsthreecite} When politicians consider the question of software
+patents, they are usually voting blind; not being programmers, they
+don’t understand what software patents really do. They often think
+patents are similar to copyright law (“except for some details”)—which
+is not the case. For instance, when I publicly asked Patrick Devedjian,
+then Minister for Industry in France, how France would vote on the issue
+of software patents, Devedjian responded with an impassioned defense of
+copyright law, praising Victor Hugo for his role in the adoption of
+copyright. (The misleading term “intellectual property” promotes this
+confusion—one of the reasons it should never be used.)
+
+Those who imagine effects like those of copyright law cannot grasp the
+disastrous effects of software patents. We can use Victor Hugo as an
+example to illustrate the difference.
+
+A novel and a modern complex program have certain points in common: each
+one is large, and implements many ideas in combination. So let’s follow
+the analogy, and suppose that patent law had been applied to novels in
+the 1800s; suppose that states such as France had permitted the
+patenting of literary ideas. How would this have affected Victor Hugo’s
+writing? How would the effects of literary patents compare with the
+effects of literary copyright?
+
+Consider Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. Since he wrote it, the
+copyright belonged only to him. He did not have to fear that some
+stranger could sue him for copyright infringement and win. That was
+impossible, because copyright covers only the details of a work of
+authorship, not the ideas embodied in them, and it only restricts
+copying. Hugo had not copied Les Misérables, so he was not in danger
+from copyright.
+
+Patents work differently. Patents cover ideas; each patent is a monopoly
+on practicing some idea, which is described in the patent itself. Here’s
+one example of a 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 becomes bitter towards society and humankind.
+-   Claim 2: a communication process according to claim 1, wherein said
+    character subsequently finds moral redemption through the kindness
+    of another.
+-   Claim 3: a communication process according to claims 1 and 2,
+    wherein said character changes his name during the story.
+
+If such a patent had existed in 1862 when Les Misérables was published,
+the novel would have conflicted with all three claims, since all these
+things happened to Jean Valjean in the novel. Victor Hugo could have
+been sued, and if sued, he would have lost. The novel could have been
+prohibited—in effect, censored—by the patent holder.
+
+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.
+
+Les Misérables would have been prohibited by that patent too, because
+this description too fits the life story of Jean Valjean. And here’s
+another hypothetical patent:
+
+-   Claim 1: a communication process that represents in the mind of a
+    reader the concept of a character who finds moral redemption and
+    then changes his name.
+
+Jean Valjean would have been forbidden by this patent too.
+
+All three patents would cover, and prohibit, the life story of this one
+character. They overlap, but they do not precisely duplicate each other,
+so they could all be valid simultaneously; all three patent holders
+could have sued Victor Hugo. Any one of them could have prohibited
+publication of Les Misérables.
+
+This patent also could have been violated:
+
+-   Claim 1: a communication process that presents a character whose
+    given name matches the last syllable of his family name.
+
+through the name “Jean Valjean,” but at least this patent would have
+been easy to avoid.
+
+You might think that 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
+a patent on accepting payment via credit cards. These patents would be
+laughable if they were not so dangerous.
+
+Other aspects of Les Misérables could also have run afoul of patents.
+For instance, there could have been a patent on a fictionalized
+portrayal of the Battle of Waterloo, or a patent on using Parisian slang
+in fiction. Two more lawsuits. In fact, there is no limit to the number
+of different patents that might have been applicable for suing the
+author of a work such as Les Misérables. All the patent holders would
+say they deserved a reward for the literary progress that their patented
+ideas represent, but these obstacles would not promote progress in
+literature, they would only obstruct it.
+
+However, a very broad patent could have made all these issues
+irrelevant. Imagine a patent with broad claims like these:
+
+-   A communication process structured with narration that continues
+    through many pages.
+-   A narration structure sometimes resembling a fugue or improvisation.
+-   Intrigue articulated around the confrontation of specific
+    characters, each in turn setting traps for the others.
+-   Narration that presents many layers of society.
+-   Narration that shows the wheels of hidden conspiracy.
+
+Who would the patent holders have been? They could have been other
+novelists, perhaps Dumas or Balzac, who had written such novels—but not
+necessarily. It isn’t required to write a program to patent a software
+idea, so if our hypothetical literary patents follow the real patent
+system, these patent holders would not have had to write novels, or
+stories, or anything—except patent applications. Patent parasite
+companies, businesses that produce nothing except threats and lawsuits,
+are booming nowadays.
+
+Given these broad patents, Victor Hugo would not have reached the point
+of asking what patents might get him sued for using the character of
+Jean Valjean, because he could not even have considered writing a novel
+of this kind.
+
+This analogy can help nonprogrammers see what software patents do.
+Software patents cover features, such as defining abbreviations in a
+word processor, or natural order recalculation in a spreadsheet. Patents
+cover algorithms that programs need to use. Patents cover aspects of
+file formats, such as Microsoft’s OOXML format. MPEG 2 video format is
+covered by 39 different US patents.
+
+Just as one novel could run afoul of many different literary patents at
+once, one program can be prohibited by many different patents at once.
+It is so much work to identify all the patents that appear to apply to a
+large program that only one such study has been done. A 2004 study of
+Linux, the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system, found 283 different
+US software patents that seemed to cover it. That is to say, each of
+these 283 different patents forbids some computational process found
+somewhere in the thousands of pages of source code of Linux. At the
+time, Linux was around 1 percent of the whole GNU/Linux system. How many
+patents might there be that a distributor of the whole system could be
+sued under?
+
+The way to prevent software patents from bollixing software development
+is simple: don’t authorize them. This ought to be easy, since most
+patent laws have provisions against software patents. They typically say
+that “software per se” cannot be patented. But patent offices around the
+world are trying to twist the words and issuing patents on the ideas
+implemented in programs. Unless this is blocked, the result will be to
+put all software developers in danger.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+This document was generated by *tonghuix* on *March 25, 2016* using
+[*texi2html 1.82*](http://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/).\