Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/06/26/john-oliver-gets-it-wrong.html
I’ve been otherwise impressed with John Oliver and his ability
on Last Week Tonight to find key issues that don’t have
enough attention and give reasonably good information about them in an
entertaining way — I
even lauded
Oliver’s discussion of non-profit organizational corruption last
year. I suppose that’s why I’m particularly sad (as I caught up
last weekend on an old episode) to find that
John Oliver
basically fell for the large patent holders’ pro-software-patent rhetoric on
so-called “software patents”.
In short, Oliver mimics the trade association and for-profit software
industry rhetoric of software patent reform rather than abolition
. I hope the worlds’
— because trolls are the only problem
largest software patent holders send Oliver’s writing staff a nice gift
basket, as such might be the only thing that would signal to them that they
fell into this PR trap. Although, it’s admittedly slightly unfair to blame
Oliver and his writers; the situation is subtle.
Indeed, someone not particularly versed in the situation can easily fall
for this manipulation. It’s just so easy to criticize non-practicing
entities. Plus, the idea that the sole inventor might get funded
on Shark Tank has a certain appeal, and fits a USAmerican
sensibility of personal capitalistic success. Thus, the first-order
conclusion is often, as Oliver’s piece concludes, maybe if we got rid of
.
trolls, things wouldn’t be so bad
And then there’s also the focus on the patent quality issue; it’s easy to
convince the public that higher quality patents will make it ok to restrict
software sharing and improvement with patents. It’s great rhetoric for a
pro-patent entities to generate outrage among the technology-using public
by pointing to, say, an example of a patent that reads on every Android
application and telling a few jokes about patent quality. In fact, at
nearly every FLOSS conference I’ve gone to in the last year, OIN has
sponsored a speaker to talk about that very issue. The jokes at such talks
aren’t as good as John Oliver’s, but they still get laughs and
technologists upset about patent quality and trolls — but through
carefully cultural engineering, not about software
patents themselves.
In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a for-profit industry and its trade
associations do so well at public outrage distraction since the “tort
reform” battles of the 1980s and 1990s, which were produced in part
by George H. W. Bush’s
beloved M.C. Rove
himself. I really encourage those who want to understand of how the
anti-troll messaging manipulation works to study how and why
the tort
reform issue played out the way it did. (As I mentioned on
the Free as in
Freedom audcast, Episode
0x13, the
documentary film Hot Coffee is a good resource for
that.)
I’ve literally been laughed at publicly by OIN representatives when I
point out that IBM, Microsoft, and other practicing entities do
software patent shake-downs, too — just like the trolls. They’re
part of a well-trained and well-funded (by trade associations and
companies) PR machine out there in our community to convince us that trolls
and so-called “poor patent quality” are the only problems.
Yet, nary a year has gone in my adult life where I don’t see a some
incident where a so-called legitimate, non-obvious software patent causes
serious trouble for a Free Software project.
From RSA, to the codec
patents,
to Microsoft
FAT patent shakedowns, to
IBM’s
shakedown of the Hercules open source project,
to exfat
— and that’s just a few choice examples from the public tip of the
practicing entity shakedown iceberg. IMO, the practicing entities are just
trolls with more expensive suits and proprietary software licenses for
sale. We should politically oppose the companies and trade associations
that bolster them — and call for an end to software patents.
