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- Go to No To Software Patents
It's all an extension of trying to define what is "intellectual property" and what is not. Patents, trademarks and copyrights are supposed to be issued under stringent rules.One such rule is that ideas (and concepts) are not patentable, copyrightable or available for trademarks. Issuing a patent, for example, gives the patent holder exclusive rights to develop and sell (under license) anything pertaining to that patent. If someone uses the thing under patent, then they have to pay for the privilege - that is,they have to buy it from the patent holder or someone who has bought the right to sell it (whatever it is).
"Copyleft" people, who include users of GNU agreements, feel threatened by the proprietary approach in products like Windows, and MSOffice, and so on. Although MS does use third-party developers, and allows third-party people to produce software that runs on the Windows platform, it could just as easily stop allowing such people to operate, because MS holds both patents and copyright to the operating system. Under "copyleft", the user agreement states that the usage is free, as long as the producer's material is left untouched, but it lets people add to the whole.
In Europe, which has a very small percentage of MS development, this could be disastrous, because MS is so prevalent in the software industry - it really could, as the article (and the other pages it leads to) claims, allow proprietary software to be the only legal software to be on computers.
And, for those in the States, a full beachhead in Europe could allow MS to demand its rights there as well.
What it boils down to, though, is whether proprietary software could protect what people actually own (the data created and stored through the properietary software) if there was a full hack attack on the software.Let's face it, MS has NOT been too successul in producing software that is well-protected.
posted by
L.E.Gant
on June 9, 2005 at 4:50 PM
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