[Ecommerce] Red Hat Intensifies Campaign for Pate nt ‘Reform

[Manon Ress]

http://www.localtechwire.com/article.cfm?u=11482
Friday | June 03, 2005

Open Up: Red Hat Intensifies Campaign for Intellectual Property, Patent
‘Reform’
Special To LTW
RALEIGH – Mark Webbink, deputy general counsel at Red Hat, joined Chief
Executive Officer Matthew Szulik in calling for changes in patent and
intellectual property protection policy during a speech at the Red Hat
Summit in New Orleans.

Webbink called for “reform to remove barriers to innovation”.

Szulik has made similar calls in recent speeches. In a keynote speech at
the Summit, Szulink said “No longer should patents and copyrights be
held hostage”.

Javed Tapia, director of Red Hat India, told the Indian web site Sify
that patents create a “minefield”.

"For genuine innovators and entrepreneurs, patents have become broken
glass on the highways of progress,” he said. “With patent restrictions,
entrepreneurs and innovators have to be extremely careful to ensure that
they are not walking into a legal minefield."

IBM, Nokia and Red Hat are among companies that have announced access to
protected software related to Open Source development.

Red Hat labeled three initiatives it has launched as an “intellectual
property strategy aimed an ensuring an open right to innovate”.

Red Hat’s initiatives include establishment of a Fedora Foundation for
support of Red Hat’s Fedora open source development project.

Webbink also reiterated calls for “reform” in US patent applications
requiring :a higher standard of scrutiny that ensures better patent
quality” while expanding rights of third parties to challenge patents.
Red Hat is also arguing for change in the European Union.
However, Red Hat’s call ran into resistance at the EU last month.

“If you allow anyone to get this information for free you have no way of
having any kind of license," Francisco Mingorance, director of public
policy for the Business Software Alliance trade association that
includes Microsoft and Apple, told the EU Parliament, according to
Reuters. The inventors "are deprived of their original investment,”
Reuters quoted Mingorance as saying.

The third part of Red Hat's strategy is to create what it called a
“Software Patent Commons” that would encourage “wide sharing” of copyrights.

"Patents are not equal to innovation," Webbink said at the Summit. "More
often, innovation occurs despite patents. What we observe today in the
software industry is the use of patents to maintain market share, even
where that market share has been obtained by anticompetitive means. We
need to move away from a system of software patents compromised by
trivial, incremental enhancements that block innovation, to a system
that is aimed at rewarding substantial innovation."

For details, see: www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html

Posted: 06/03/2005 01:17 PM



--
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

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