Free Software Film Slams Absurdity Of Software Patents

A new film criticising the growth of software patents is being made freely available for copying and dissemination to demonstrate the importance of open standards.

The documentary, “Patent Absurdity”, has been released online and is being partly funded by open software campaign group the Free Software Foundation. The film is being made available under the Creative Commons BY-ND (Attribution-No Derivative Works) license, which encourages sharing and redistribution. The film was also made entirely with free software, in the Ogg Theora format, the makers claims.

Software patents “block standards”

“Software patents block compatibility and standards, make programmers remove useful features, and are the cause of unknown amounts of frustration in the daily life of many individuals,” said Ciaran O’Riordan, the director of the End Software Patents campaign, and a technical adviser to the filmmakers.

According to its makers, the film is based around an ongoing software patent case in the US Supreme Court known as “in re Bilski“. “The *Bilski* case before the Supreme Court is really the story of the judicial activism of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, who during the 80s and 90s became dominated by patent lawyers who wanted an expansive reading of patent law,” said O’Riordan. “They opened the floodgates to the patenting of software ideas and business methods, previously held by the Supreme Court to be unpatentable subject matter.”

Dr. Robert Shafer, associate professor of medicine at Stanford University, who created a free, publicly available HIV Drug Resistance Database, praised the film for challenging the interest groups which currently profit from the patent system.

“There is a hardcore group of special interests who profit from the system the way it is now – the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit, patent examiners who essentially receive credit for their work only when they issue or uphold patents, and the patent bar which benefits from cross-licensing and patent litigation regardless of how ridiculous a patent is,” he said.

Software patent opponents will also be encouraged by the news that New Zealand is considering outlawing the practice. The NZ Commerce Committee is reportedly considering excluding software from an upcoming patents bill.

However software patent campaigners in the country have reacted angrily to the news. “Excluding computer software from the Patents Bill is a mistake and will stifle innovation,” said Matt Sumpter, a partner with New Zealand law firm Chapman Tripp. “I’m astonished that the Commerce Committee is recommending this change and hope that the Government will reconsider because the arguments against it are very strong.”

Last year Swedish anti-software patent campaigners won a seat in the EU parliament after winning more than 7 percent of the vote in the country’s European election, in the wake of prison sentences given to the Swedes who operated the Pirate Bay site. The UK Pirate Party is also hoping to use the upcoming UK election to drive awareness of the issue.