Novell and EEF Call for Software Patent Reforms

Published: May 29, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, Novell, a pioneer in the networking business that has lots of patents but also has caught the open source bug, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is against software patents and seeks to protect civil liberties in the digital realm, said that they would be working together to pressure governments, courts, and players in the IT industry to reform software patents.

In the modern software arena, a patent is as much a weapon as it is a shield. While companies in the IT sector were thrilled that the Supreme Court has allowed for the patenting of software for nearly three decades, nearly everyone agrees--including the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, which grants software patents, and the European Commission, which really doesn't want to start the practice regardless of the pressure that IT companies are bringing to bear--that software patents have some big problems.

"It is increasingly obvious that software patents are not a meaningful measure of innovation," explained Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Novell in a statement. "As a long-time innovator in the industry and a holder of many significant patents, we understand the rationale behind the patent system in general. But we believe that software patent system reform is necessary to promote software innovation going forward."

Novell has over 500 software patents of its own, and has said that it will use its patents to protect the open source community. It has also forged what some see as an unholy alliance with Microsoft that will see Microsoft distribute SUSE Linux to its customers and give Novell's SUSE Linux customers indemnification for any intellectual property issues that Microsoft might decide to take legal action on in the open source community. Microsoft has said flat out that Linux and other open source software products infringe on its intellectual property, but it has not done anything about it thus far but rattle its saber and get Novell to ink a deal that has riled up the open source community.

Novell is going to be lobbying governments to participate in the World Intellectual Property Organization, which is where members of the United Nations are getting together to hammer out global intellectual property issues. Novell also said that it will contribute "significant resources" to the EFF's Patent Busting project, which was launched in 2004 to find specific intellectual property called "prior art" that can disarm some of the big patents held by companies that claim their patents are not based on prior art. EFF wants big, key patents disabled because they are based on other people's work and therefore should not have been given a patent in the first place.

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