Paper 4: Patents / Software Trust

Do software patents help or harm progress

Or do they retard invention? Do they tie up ideas for the duration of the patent?

Discuss both sides, and come to some sort of conclusion (not necessarily either/or). Feel free to consider both intentional consequences of the patent system (the monopoly to the inventor) and "unintentional consequences" (eg the litigation costs). Consider also the other stakeholders: businesses, users, the rest of us, and any other groups you can identify.

Feel free either to include open source, or to leave it out.

(Note that the argument here is fundamentally utilitarian.)

Software trust

And does it matter if the software is free?

Discuss this from the perspective of the reasonable expectations of users. Are there specific license issues that users should watch out for? What should users be able to expect? One thought is that software vendors have no responsibilities except to abide by the terms of the license agreement; at the other end of the spectrum is the idea that software must act on the user's behalf at all times, as a sort of "fiduciary agent" (except not about money). Is "user beware" the doctrine of the day, or should users be entitled to some expectations? If you feel the license agreement says it all, are there any terms that would be inappropriate there?

This is a good example of an issue that is relatively undecided, and yet there are very specific expectations in place when you buy food, or toasters, or automobiles; the manufacturer is most definitely not permitted to claim "caveat emptor" (buyer beware). Feel free to draw analogies, if you feel they help. (Or not, if they don't; there are essentially no free manufactured physical products.)

Here are a few problematic examples and essays:

• The Sony music-copy-protection scheme caused computer problems for many users, who installed the software unknowingly. That scheme clearly betrayed user trust.
• Microsoft stamps the identity of the creating machine on MS Word documents. This has been used to identify the source of documents in criminal cases, though this apparently was not the original intent. The trust implications are unclear.
• Digital-rights-management software often faces a conflict here: some of these actions (such as refusal to play unlicensed files) are arguably not in the user's immediate interests, but are perhaps socially appropriate nonetheless, and can sometimes be argued to be in the user's long-term interests.
• Richard Stallman has written about (against) the Microsoft Trusted Computing platform, in Can You Trust Your Software; Stallman feels the answer is no (unless you use GNU/Linux). What you are asked to write about here is whether there are circumstances in which the answer might be "yes". You can find none, thus agreeing with Stallman, or perhaps you can identify some rules or expectations or norms that would support such trust.
• An email client that displays embedded images by default might be considered to violate the trust of users, in that it exposes the users to loss of privacy through embedded email cookies.
• Even technical users of Microsoft's Palladium OS (parts of which are included in Vista) will have to place a great deal of trust in it (as internals will be "invisible" even with special peeking tools); on the other hand, non-technical users of any OS already must trust it. Does Microsoft have some specific obligations here to live up to that trust?
• There are many interesting examples at StopBadWare.org, including some borderline examples of badware/malware.

Obviously viruses and spyware are not trustworthy nor are intended to be; focus on software that is offered for sale, or for download.