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| Authored by: pem on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 10:47 AM EDT |
"Sun believes in innovation and invests billions of Euro each year in
software development. We believe in protecting these investments."
Could mean that Sun believes that patent protection is a good thing.
"[While] Article 6 allows for the development of products through reverse
engineering, it does not allow for the manufacture, sale and use of such
products without a license from the right holder. This effectively leaves
existing dominant rights holders with a de facto veto over new and competing
products."
Indicates that the EU's proposed scheme went too far. It apparently (in Sun's
opinion, anyway) allowed you to patent a small feature, wrap a big black box
that did lots of other things around the patented feature, and keep anybody else
from reverse-engineering your entire black box to develop compatible
technology.
So (in my reading) it's not about patents being bad. It's more about how
patents should be constrained to "merely" protect the patented
functionality, and how it should be the equivalent of copyright fair use for
someone else to figure out (via reverse engineering) how other software
communicates with the software that incorporates the patents so that they can
(a) write software that communicates with the protected program, or (b) attempt
to work around the patent when writing a replacement program that will talk to
all the same other programs as the original.
To PJ's update point, not only is this "as relevant" to APIs as it is
about patents, I'd say it is MOSTLY about APIs. Sun believed that even hidden
APIs should be discoverable and usable by third parties.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: PJ on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 02:22 PM EDT |
You were here at Groklaw, weren't you, when
the software patents argument was going on
in the EU? If so, you should be able to
remember without outside aid that Sun was
opposed to the Directive. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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