[pjscott]

It's not a perfect solution, and (like most things in the patent system) it's an obvious ugly hack, but it would be a lot better than the status quo. Do you have a realistic alternative that's better?

(I just realized: you may be in the dubious position of being less pragmatic about something than Richard Stallman. It's not often someone can say that!)

[prostoalex]

This "ugly hack" is a hole you can drive a truck through, and one can be pretty sure the patent lawyers will find an aircraft carrier, load it up with trucks, and drive through it collectively.

It's silly to assume no change in behavior, any legal counsel from that point on will advise in favor of patenting the hardware implementation, and instead of patented software running on commodity hardware we'll end up with patented "appliances" and "reference hardware implementations" with broad claims extending to other types of hardware implementations.

[zanny]

I agree with this, mainly on a simple premise:

If you start an arguement at two extremes, and give ground where your opponents do not, you weaken your position and put the compromise between them more in their favor. And when you keep giving ground, you keep showing a willingness to concede defeat, and your opponents will just ignore you. If you stand your ground, you are a stalwart wall of opposition that needs to be confronted, rather than ignored, eventually.

In many cases (gay rights, civil liberties, patent law, equality / freedom) that stalwart position may require multiple generations. You don't get instant results when dealing with the entrenched status quo that is horribly wrong. But when you give ground you render your entire argument and stance illegitimate because your opponents can dismiss you as you keep conceding ground and giving up on your positions.

Patents, as a whole, are archaic and bad. The turnaround time for any new discovery is now a matter of days, or months, rather than the years it would take in centuries past to distribute and market goods and services. In the digital world, everything is already information, it is all number patterns in electrical terms, and we had a track record of not letting people monopolize knowledge and information in the realm of mathematics before, and the digital era should never have been any different in my opinion. Of course, it is my opinion and all. But I remain dilligent in my stance for it.

I have lost a lot of respect for Stallman because it seems in recent years his dialogue has propagated a lot of "buts" in his arguments. He concedes ground on what he believes in and that illegitimizes him more than anyone calling him cookey would in my book.

[TimGebhardt]

The classic name for the "Keep moving the extremes so people's opinion converge on the gradually moving middle" is called the Overton window and politicians try to employ it all the time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

[d2vid]

I think you have this backwards. I can't be sued unless I implement the patented idea in hardware.

In that state of the world, if they patent the hardware solution, I don't care. I can still implement in software and I have a legal workaround to avoid infringing. I'm driving the truck through the hole.

[guelo]

I don't see the hole being that big. For example Apple's slide-to-unlock patent, no one would be allowed to move that functionality into a dedicated chip but that would never happen anyways.

[prostoalex]

If Stallman's modification of "implementations using special-purpose hardware" was in place and Apple was filing that application today, I could see how they would reduce the slide-to-unlock to "slide-to-unlock on a multitouch surface".

[reitzensteinm]

There might be holes in Stallman's plan, but this isn't one of them.

Apple might be able to patent multi touch if they hypothetically invented it, since that's a hardware thing.

But once that touch data makes it to the CPU, what is done with it afterwards would be unpatentable.

Even if Apple themselves somehow did slide to unlock in hardware, competitors could still implement a software version.

[guelo]

I don't think that's right. The regular meaning of special-purpose computer is an appliance like a TV or an iPod, it can't do anything that it wasn't designed to do. The opposite is a general-purpose computer which is pretty much anything that can be programmed such as a PC or a smartphone. Of course it would depend on the legal definitions to know what the exact loopholes would be.