End Software Patents (ESP) is an international campaign of the Free Software Foundation for a legislative ban on software patents in all jurisdictions. We believe that software patents constitute a threat to developer freedom. To learn more, check the ESP FAQ and blog.
This community is dedicated to the discussion of software patents. Here you can post anything that is related to software patents. Opposing views are welcome, but only to the extent that they encourage healthy debate. ESP advocates for the total (not partial) elimination of software patents.
Martin Goetz, Who Received the First Software Patent, Dies at 93
“I knew at some point in time the patent office would recognize” computer software, he said. It happened in 1968, helping to ignite the software market.
See also ESP Wiki's entry on Martin Goetz.
Huawei reveals royalty rates for 4G, 5G, Wi-fi 6, IoT patents
On Thursday, one of the world’s largest patent holders, Huawei, announced royalty rates for its handsets, Wi-Fi, and IoT patent license programs.
Open Source Needs Our Help: Stand up for Open Source Software Patent Defense!
Tutanota fully supports the Open Invention Network in fighting proposed patent rules.
Harmonization of European patent systems - ESP Wiki
On 1 June 2023, the Unified Patent Court and the unitary patent were entered into force. Simply put, this means that we will soon have software patents in Europe that are effective automatically in the entire European Union.
Hardly anyone talks about this, but it is bound to become a problem. I am currently editing relevant entries on ESP Wiki. This specific entry is about the history and dangers of harmonizing the European patent systems (spoiler alert: the EU had been trying to create such a system ever since its creation).
You can help support our open source ecosystem, reduce wasteful litigation by non-practicing entities (NPEs), and stop the assertion of bad patents.
Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
Wow.I flagged on Wednesday that Chief Judge Connolly planned to hold an evidentiary hearing today regarding compliance with his litigation …
Asymmetric numeral systems - ESP Wiki
This is a new ESP Wiki entry explaining the situation around software patents on a new data compression algorithm.
The original author, Jarek Duda, released his work into the public domain. Despite his intentions, Big Tech companies are attempting to patent his technology around the world. In early 2022, Microsoft registered a software patent on ANS. Google tried to do the same a few years ago but failed. We can't catch them all.
The free software community is fighting an unfair battle. Megacorporations are stealing people's work by imposing unjustified patent rights. The patent offices grant software patents despite obvious existence of prior art.
ESP Wiki March 2022 project updates
This is the first post on Lemmy related to ESP Wiki. I will be posting updates here from now on. Please share this site if you can. Combating software patents is very important for user freedom.
Some notes: I'm trying to make ESP Wiki a user-friendly place so that anyone can find it easy to contribute information. For this reason, I focused on creating a style guide and some neat templates. Templates are especially important because we can use them to easily mark entries that need work, so we can focus on them first.
Here is an overview of March 2022 project updates so far:
This is why we can't have nice things, potentially
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/177331
An article I wrote for ESP a few months ago. I thought it would be good to have it posted here too.