U.S patent

A patent ( /ˈpætənt/ or /ˈpeɪtənt/) is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention.

The procedure for granting patents, the requirements placed on the patentee, and the extent of the exclusive rights vary widely between countries according to national laws and international agreements. Typically, however, a patent application must include one or more claims defining the invention which must meet the relevant patentability requirements such as novelty and non-obviousness. The exclusive right granted to a patentee in most countries is the right to prevent others from making, using, selling, or distributing the patented invention without permission.^[1]

Under the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, patents should be available in WTO member states for any invention, in all fields of technology,^[2] and the term of protection available should be a minimum of twenty years.^[3] In many countries, certain subject areas are excluded from patents, such as business methods and computer programs.

Definition[link]

The word patent originates from the Latin patere, which means "to lay open" (i.e., to make available for public inspection). More directly, it is a shortened version of the term letters patent, which was a royal decree granting exclusive rights to a person, predating the modern patent system. Similar grants included land patents, which were land grants by early state governments in the USA, and printing patents, a precursor of modern copyright.

In modern usage, the term patent usually refers to the right granted to anyone who invents any new, useful, and non-obvious process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter. Some other types of intellectual property rights are also referred to as patents in some jurisdictions: industrial design rights are called design patents in the US, plant breeders' rights are sometimes called plant patents, and utility models and Gebrauchsmuster are sometimes called petty patents or innovation patents. The additional qualification utility patent is sometimes used (primarily in the US) to distinguish the primary meaning from these other types of patents.

Examples of particular species of patents for inventions include biological patents, business method patents, chemical patents and software patents.

History[link]

U.S. patents granted, 1790–2010.^[4]

Patents in force in 2000

In 500 BC, in the Greek city of Sybaris (located in what is now southern Italy), "encouragement was held out to all who should discover any new refinement in luxury, the profits arising from which were secured to the inventor by patent for the space of a year."^[5]

The Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi received a three-year patent for a barge with hoisting gear, that carried marble along the Arno River in 1421.^[6] In 1449, King Henry VI granted the first English patent with a license of 20 years to John of Utynam for introducing the making of colored glass to England.^[7]

Patents in the modern sense originated in 1474, when the Republic of Venice enacted a decree that new and inventive devices, once put into practice, had to be communicated to the Republic to obtain the right to prevent others from using them.^[8]

England followed with the Statute of Monopolies in 1624 under King James I, which declared that patents could only be granted for "projects of new invention." During the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14), the lawyers of the English Court developed the requirement that a written description of the invention must be submitted.^[9] The patent systems in many other countries, including Australia, are based on British law and can be traced back to the Statute of Monopolies.^[10]

In 1641, Samuel Winslow was granted the first patent in North America by the Massachusetts General Court for a new process for making salt.^[11]

In France, patents were granted by the monarchy and by other institutions like the "Maison du Roi".^[12] The Academy examined novelty.^[13] Examinations were generally done in secret with no requirement to publish a description of the invention. Actual use of the invention was deemed adequate disclosure to the public.^[14] The modern French patent system was created during the Revolution in 1791. Patents were granted without examination since inventor's right was considered as a natural one ^[15]

In the United States, during the so-called colonial period and Articles of Confederation years (1778–89), several states adopted patent systems of their own. The first Congress adopted a Patent Act, in 1790, and the first patent was issued under this Act on July 31, 1790 (to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for a potash production technique).

Law[link]

Effects[link]

A patent is not a right to practice or use the invention.^[16] Rather, a patent provides the right to exclude others^[16] from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the patented invention for the term of the patent, which is usually 20 years from the filing date^[3] subject to the payment of maintenance fees. A patent is, in effect, a limited property right that the government offers to inventors in exchange for their agreement to share the details of their inventions with the public. Like any other property right, it may be sold, licensed, mortgaged, assigned or transferred, given away, or simply abandoned.

The rights conveyed by a patent vary country-by-country. For example, in the United States, a patent covers research, except "purely philosophical" inquiry. A U.S. patent is infringed by any "making" of the invention, even a making that goes toward development of a new invention—which may itself become subject of a patent.

A patent being an exclusionary right does not, however, necessarily give the owner of the patent the right to exploit the patent. For example, many inventions are improvements of prior inventions that may still be covered by someone else's patent.^[16] If an inventor takes an existing, patented mouse trap design, adds a new feature to make an improved mouse trap, and obtains a patent on the improvement, he or she can only legally build his or her improved mouse trap with permission from the patent holder of the original mouse trap, assuming the original patent is still in force. On the other hand, the owner of the improved mouse trap patent can exclude the original patent owner from using the improvement.

Some countries have "working provisions" that require the invention be exploited in the jurisdiction it covers. Consequences of not working an invention vary from one country to another, ranging from revocation of the patent rights to the awarding of a compulsory license awarded by the courts to a party wishing to exploit a patented invention. The patentee has the opportunity to challenge the revocation or license, but is usually required to provide evidence that the reasonable requirements of the public have been met by the working of invention.

Enforcement[link]

Patents can generally only be enforced through civil lawsuits (for example, for a U.S. patent, by an action for patent infringement in a United States federal court), although some countries (such as France and Austria) have criminal penalties for wanton infringement.^[17] Typically, the patent owner will seek monetary compensation for past infringement, and will seek an injunction prohibiting the defendant from engaging in future acts of infringement. To prove infringement, the patent owner must establish that the accused infringer practices all the requirements of at least one of the claims of the patent. (In many jurisdictions the scope of the patent may not be limited to what is literally stated in the claims, for example due to the "doctrine of equivalents").

An important limitation on the ability of a patent owner to successfully assert the patent in civil litigation is the accused infringer's right to challenge the validity of that patent. Civil courts hearing patent cases can and often do declare patents not valid. A patent can be found invalid on grounds that are set out in the relevant patent legislation that vary between countries. Often, the grounds are a subset of requirements for patentability in the relevant country. Although an infringer is generally free to rely on any available ground of invalidity (such as a prior publication, for example), some countries have sanctions to prevent the same validity questions being relitigated. An example is the UK Certificate of contested validity.

Patent licensing agreements are contracts in which the patent owner (the licensor) agrees to forgo their right to sue the licensee for infringement of the licensor's patent rights, usually in return for a royalty or other compensation. It is common for companies engaged in complex technical fields to enter into dozens of license agreements associated with the production of a single product. Moreover, it is equally common for competitors in such fields to license patents to each other under cross-licensing agreements in order to share the benefits of using each other's patented inventions.

Therefore, patents may be enforced through litigation, and a common defense is an invalidity challenge. Patents may also be subject to licensing agreements. The vast majority of patents are however never litigated or even licensed.^[18]

Ownership[link]

In most countries, both natural persons and corporate entities may apply for a patent. In the United States, however, only the inventor(s) may apply for a patent although it may be assigned to a corporate entity subsequently^[19] and inventors may be required to assign inventions to their employers under a contract of employment. In most European countries, ownership of an invention may pass from the inventor to their employer by rule of law if the invention was made in the course of the inventor's normal or specifically assigned employment duties, where an invention might reasonably be expected to result from carrying out those duties, or if the inventor had a special obligation to further the interests of the employer's company.^[20]

The plate of the Martin ejector seat of a military aircraft, stating that the design is covered by multiple patents in Britain, South Africa, Canada and "others". Dübendorf Museum of Military Aviation.

The inventors, their successors or their assignees become the proprietors of the patent when and if it is granted. If a patent is granted to more than one proprietor, the laws of the country in question and any agreement between the proprietors may affect the extent to which each proprietor can exploit the patent. For example, in some countries, each proprietor may freely license or assign their rights in the patent to another person while the law in other countries prohibits such actions without the permission of the other proprietor(s).

The ability to assign ownership rights increases the liquidity of a patent as property. Inventors can obtain patents and then sell them to third parties.^[21] The third parties then own the patents and have the same rights to prevent others from exploiting the claimed inventions, as if they had originally made the inventions themselves.

Governing laws[link]

The grant and enforcement of patents are governed by national laws, and also by international treaties, where those treaties have been given effect in national laws. Patents are, therefore, territorial in nature.

Commonly, a nation forms a patent office with responsibility for operating that nation's patent system, within the relevant patent laws. The patent office generally has responsibility for the grant of patents, with infringement being the remit of national courts.

There is a trend towards global harmonization of patent laws, with the World Trade Organization (WTO) being particularly active in this area. The TRIPs Agreement has been largely successful in providing a forum for nations to agree on an aligned set of patent laws. Conformity with the TRIPs agreement is a requirement of admission to the WTO and so compliance is seen by many nations as important. This has also led to many developing nations, which may historically have developed different laws to aid their development, enforcing patents laws in line with global practice.

A key international convention relating to patents is the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, initially signed in 1883. The Paris Convention sets out a range of basic rules relating to patents, and although the convention does not have direct legal effect in all national jurisdictions, the principles of the convention are incorporated into all notable current patent systems. The most significant aspect of the convention is the provision of the right to claim priority: filing an application in any one member state of the Paris Convention preserves the right for one year to file in any other member state, and receive the benefit of the original filing date. Because the right to a patent is intensely date-driven, this right is fundamental to modern patent usage.^{[citation needed]}

The authority for patent statutes in different countries varies. In the UK, substantive patent law is contained in the Patents Act 1977 as amended.^[22] In the United States, the Constitution empowers Congress to make laws to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts..." The laws Congress passed are codified in Title 35 of the United States Code and created the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

In addition, there are international treaty procedures, such as the procedures under the European Patent Convention (EPC) [administered by the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg)], and the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) (administered by WIPO and covering more than 140 countries), that centralize some portion of the filing and examination procedure. Similar arrangements exist among the member states of ARIPO and OAPI, the analogous treaties among African countries, and the nine CIS member states that have formed the Eurasian Patent Organization.

Application and prosecution[link]

A patent is requested by filing a written application at the relevant patent office. The person or company filing the application is referred to as "the applicant". The applicant may be the inventor or its assignee. The application contains a description of how to make and use the invention that must provide sufficient detail for a person skilled in the art (i.e., the relevant area of technology) to make and use the invention. In some countries there are requirements for providing specific information such as the usefulness of the invention, the best mode of performing the invention known to the inventor, or the technical problem or problems solved by the invention. Drawings illustrating the invention may also be provided.

The application also includes one or more claims, although it is not always a requirement to submit these when first filing the application. The claims set out what the applicant is seeking to protect in that they define what the patent owner has a right to exclude others from making, using, or selling, as the case may be. In other words, the claims define what a patent covers or the "scope of protection".

After filing, an application is often referred to as "patent pending". While this term does not confer legal protection, and a patent cannot be enforced until granted, it serves to provide warning to potential infringers that if the patent is issued, they may be liable for damages.^[23][24][25]

For a patent to be granted, that is to take legal effect in a particular country, the patent application must meet the patentability requirements of that country. Most patent offices examine the application for compliance with these requirements. If the application does not comply, objections are communicated to the applicant or their patent agent or attorney and one or more opportunities to respond to the objections to bring the application into compliance are usually provided.

Once granted the patent is subject in most countries to renewal fees to keep the patent in force. These fees are generally payable on a yearly basis, although the US is a notable exception. Some countries or regional patent offices (e.g. the European Patent Office) also require annual renewal fees to be paid for a patent application before it is granted.

Costs[link]

The costs of preparing and filing a patent application, prosecuting it until grant and maintaining the patent vary from one jurisdiction to another, and may also be dependent upon the type and complexity of the invention, and on the type of patent.

The European Patent Office estimated in 2005 that the average cost of obtaining a European patent (via a Euro-direct application, i.e. not based on a PCT application) and maintaining the patent for a 10 year term was around 32,000 Euro.^[26] Since the London Agreement entered into force on May 1, 2008, this estimation is however no longer up-to-date, since fewer translations are required.

In the United States, in 2000 cost of obtaining patent (patent prosecution) was estimated from $10,000 to $30,000 per patent.^[18] When patent litigation is involved (which in year 1999 happened in about 1,600 cases compared to 153,000 patents issued in the same year ^[18]), costs increase significantly: while 95% of patent litigation cases are settled out of court,^[27] but when the case reaches the court, direct legal costs of patent litigation are on average in the order of a million dollars per case, not including associated business costs.^[28]

Alternatives to applying for a patent[link]

A defensive publication is the act of publishing a detailed description of a new invention without patenting it, so as to establish prior art and public identification as the creator/originator of an invention, although a defensive publication can also be anonymous. A defensive publication prevents others from later being able to patent the invention.

A trade secret is the act of not disclosing the methods by which a complex invention works or how a chemical is formulated. Trade secrets are protected by nondisclosure agreements and employment law that prevents reverse engineering and information leaks such as breaches of confidentiality and corporate espionage. Compared to patents, the advantages of trade secrets are that a trade secret is not limited in time (it "continues indefinitely as long as the secret is not revealed to the public",^[29] whereas a patent is only in force for a specified time, after which others may freely copy the invention), a trade secret does not imply any registration costs,^[29] has an immediate effect,^[29] does not require compliance with any formalities,^[29] and does not imply any disclosure of the invention to the public.^[29] The disadvantages of trade secrets include that "others may be able to legally discover the secret and be thereafter entitled to use it",^[30] "others may obtain patent protection for legally discovered secrets",^[30] and a trade secret is more difficult to enforce than a patent.^[30]

Economics[link]

Rationale[link]

There are four primary incentives embodied in the patent system: to invent in the first place; to disclose the invention once made; to invest the sums necessary to experiment, produce and market the invention; and to design around and improve upon earlier patents.^[31]

1. Patents provide incentives for economically efficient research and development (R&D). A study conducted annually by the IPTS shows that the 2,000 largest global companies invested more than 430 billion euros in 2008^[32] in their R&D departments. If the investments can be considered as inputs of R&D, real products and patents are the outputs. Based on these groups, a project named Corporate Invention Board, had measured and analyzed the patent portfolios to produce an original picture^[33] of their technological profiles. Supporters of patents argue that without patent protection, R&D spending would be significantly less or eliminated altogether, limiting the possibility of technological advances or breakthroughs.^{[citation needed]}Corporations would be much more conservative about the R&D investments they made, as third parties would be free to exploit any developments. This second justification is closely related to the basic ideas underlying traditional property rights.^{[31][specify]}
2. In accordance with the original definition of the term "patent," patents facilitate and encourage disclosure of innovations into the public domain for the common good. If inventors did not have the legal protection of patents, in many cases, they would prefer or tend to keep their inventions secret^{[citation needed]}. Awarding patents generally makes the details of new technology publicly available, for exploitation by anyone after the patent expires, or for further improvement by other inventors. Furthermore, when a patent's term has expired, the public record ensures that the patentee's idea is not lost to humanity.^{[31][specify]}
3. In many industries (especially those with high fixed costs and either low marginal costs or low reverse engineering costs — computer processors, and pharmaceuticals for example), once an invention exists, the cost of commercialization (testing, tooling up a factory, developing a market, etc.) is far more than the initial conception cost. (For example, the internal "rule of thumb" at several computer companies in the 1980s was that post-R&D costs were 7-to-1). Unless there is some way to prevent copies from competing at the marginal cost of production, companies will not make that productization investment.^{[31][not in citation given]}

One effect of modern patent usage is that a small-time inventor can use the exclusive right status to become a licensor. This allows the inventor to accumulate capital from licensing the invention and may allow innovation to occur because he or she may choose not to manage a manufacturing buildup for the invention. Thus the inventor's time and energy can be spent on pure innovation, allowing others to concentrate on manufacturability.^[34]

Another effect of modern patent usage is to cause competitors to design around (or to "invent around" according to R S Praveen Raj)^[35] each other's patents. This may promote healthy competition among manufacturers, resulting in gradual improvements of the technology base.^[36] This may help augment national economies and confer better living standards to the citizens. The 1970 Indian Patent Act allowed the Indian pharmaceutical industry to develop local technological capabilities in this industry. This act transformed India from a bulk importer of pharmaceutical drugs to a leading exporter. The rapid evolution of Indian pharmaceutical industry since the mid-1970s highlights the fact that the design of the patent act was instrumental in building local capabilities even in a poor country like India. ^[37]

Criticism[link]

As state-granted monopolies, patents have been criticized as inconsistent with free trade. On that basis, in 1869 the Netherlands abolished patents, and did not reintroduce them until 1912.^[38]

Patents have also been criticized for being granted on already-known inventions, with many complaining in the United States that the USPTO fails "to do a serious job of examining patents, thus allowing bad patents to slip through the system."^[18] On the other hand, it has been argued that because of low number of patents going into litigation, increasing quality of patents at patent prosecution stage will increase overall legal costs associated with patents, and that current USPTO policy is a reasonable compromise between full trial on examination stage on one hand, and pure registration without examination, on the other hand.^[18]

Patent trolls are one of common criticisms against patents,^[39] though some commentators suggest that patent trolls are not bad for the patent system at all but instead realign market participant incentives, make patents more liquid, and clear the patent market.^[40]

Pharmaceutical patents prevent generic alternatives from entering the market until the patents expire, and thus maintain high prices for medication.^[41] This can have significant effects in the developing world, as those who are most in need of basic essential medicines are unable to afford such high priced pharmaceuticals.^[42] Critics also question the rationale that exclusive patent rights and the resulting high prices are required for pharmaceutical companies to recoup the large investments needed for research and development.^[41] One study concluded that marketing expenditures for new drugs often doubled the amount that was allocated for research and development.^[43] Other articles shed light on the problems of today's medical research. It sets wrong priorities in research and pricing, and pushes the state-run healthcare systems even of rich nations to their limits.^[44]

In one response to these criticisms, one review concluded that less than 5 percent of medicines on the World Health Organization's list of essential drugs are under patent.^[45] Also, the pharmaceutical industry has contributed US$2 billion for healthcare in developing countries, providing HIV/AIDS drugs at lower cost or even free of charge in certain countries, and has used differential pricing and parallel imports to provide medication to the poor.^[45] Other groups are investigating how social inclusion and equitable distribution of research and development findings can be obtained within the existing intellectual property framework, although these efforts have received less exposure.^[45]

Some public campaigns have expressed a concern for "preventing the over-reach" of IP protection including patent protection, and "to retain a public balance in property rights" of this kind.^[46]

According to James Bessen, the costs of patent litigation exceed their investment value in all industries except chemistry and pharmaceuticals. For example, in the software industry, litigation costs are twice the investment value.^[47]

Proposed alternatives to the patent system[link]

According to James Bessen, elimination of the patent system would increase the incentives for innovation in all industries except Chemistry and pharmaceuticals by eliminating startup litigation costs.^[48]

Alternatives have been discussed to address the issue of financial incentivization to replace patents. Mostly, they are related to some form of direct or indirect government funding. One example is the idea of providing "prize money" (from a "prize fund" sponsored by the government) as a substitute for the lost profits associated with abstaining from the monopoly given by a patent.^[49] Another approach is to remove the issue of financing development from the private sphere all together, and to cover the costs with direct government funding.^[50]

Trade secrets are an existing alternative to the patent system. Given their popularity, it has been proposed^{[by whom?]} to strengthen nondisclosure and employment law pertaining to trade secrets.

See also[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Patent

• Glossary of patent legal concepts
• List of patent related topics
• List of people associated with patent law
• Category:Patent law

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Patents

Look up patent in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Directory of Intellectual Property Offices, maintained by World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
• Useful links, maintained by the European Patent Office
• OECD Patent statistics

Drew Curtis (born February 7, 1973) is the founder and an administrator of Fark.com, an Internet news aggregator. He is also the author of It's Not News, It's FARK: How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News in May 2007. He is a guest on WOCM's morning show The Rude Awakening Show every Tuesday.

Fark[link]

Fark began in 1993 when Curtis was a student in England, sending links back to his friends.^[1] Curtis registered Fark.com in 1997 but did not begin posting links on the site until 1999.^[2][3] The first story on Fark was a news article about a fighter pilot who crashed while attempting to moon another fighter pilot.^[4] Since then, the site has become one of the most popular link dump sites on the internet^[2] with nearly 50 million pageviews a month.^[1] As of 2006 the site was getting over 2,000 link submissions every day.^[5] It was the first indie blog to earn one million dollars a year in profit^[1] and its classifieds section alone generates as much as $40,000 per year.^[6]

Although Fark is a million-dollar business, Curtis takes a yearly salary of $60,000. The rest of the money goes to the site's legal 'war chest' and to pay other expenses.^[6] Under Curtis, Fark has purposely shied away from the Web 2.0 mantra of total user control.^[5] "I don't care what anyone says, the masses are morons. You can't count on them to pick good stuff. Just check out Network TV to see what the masses want for entertainment. There's certainly a place for that kind of thing but it's not on Fark."^[5] According to Drew, Web 3.0 will be "something called Good Editing."^[5] Speaking at a media conference in Washington, DC hosted by the Poynter Institute, Curtis stated, "The 'wisdom of the crowds' is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb. It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter."^[7]

In 2006, Curtis was featured on the cover of Business 2.0 magazine as the feature in a story about successful websites.^[1] Lexington Weekly named him one of their businessmen under 40 to watch.^[2]

On November 28, 2007, Curtis filed an application to trademark the phrase "not safe for work" a common phrase on Fark.com.^[8] His application was denied.

[edit] It's Not News, It's FARK

Curtis published his first book, It's Not News, It's FARK: How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News in May 2007.^[9] It soon became a bestseller. An in depth analysis of the state of modern media, It's Not News, It's Fark slams news organizations for running smaller versions of his not-real-news. In his review of the book, Farhad Manjoo of Salon.com said that "[Curtis] even seems to go after the audience -- his audience -- for indulging in [not-real-news] Curtis seems to want us to be repulsed by them instead."^[10]

Curtis's book peaked at #12 on Amazon.com's non-fiction bestseller list. Media critic Jack Shafer noted that despite the book's success, it surprisingly received "scant attention" from mainstream media outlets.^[11] The book was later released in paperback.^[12]

Personal life[link]

Drew Curtis graduated from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa in 1995.^[13] From 1996 to 2002, he owned and operated DCR.NET, an ISP based in Frankfort, Kentucky.^[14] He is currently enrolled in the Berkeley-Columbia Executive MBA program, a joint venture of New York’s Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley.^[15] Curtis lives in the suburbs of Lexington, Kentucky with his wife, Heather, and children, Chance, Storm, and Sierra.^[6][16]

Presentations[link]

Drew Curtis makes several presentations and public appearances. He regularly appears on the Twitch and ZRock Morning Show on ZRock 103.3 FM every Thursday in Lexington, Kentucky, and makes periodic appearances on the podcast Free Talk Live.

Books[link]

• Curtis, Drew (June 2007). It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News. New York City: Penguin Group (USA), Inc.. pp. 278. ISBN 978-1-59240-291-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=0Ak9Veq_CTgC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 

References[link]

External links[link]

• Fark.com
• Interview with Drew Curtis on Bad Mouth

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (February 2011)

Ellen F. M. 't Hoen (born 1960) was until end 2008 the policy and advocacy director of the Médecins sans Frontières^[1] campaign for the access to essential medicines. She has trained as a lawyer (masters degree from Amsterdam University) and a social worker, but has spent the main part of her professional life as an activist for patients rights and more equitable pharmaceutical policies.

She won several awards for her work on the effects of exposure to the drug diethylstilbestrol (DES) in the 1980s and 1990s, including the prestigious Harriet Freezerring award in 1989.

She is currently also a research fellow at the University of Amsterdam doing research on the implementation of the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health.

After working, amongst others, for Health Action International she joined Médecins sans Frontières access campaign in 1999.

In 1981 she co-founded DES Action the Netherlands. In 1990 she joined Health Action International to head the policy and campaigns unit. From 1996 until 1999 she was the international coordinator of the independent medicines journal La Revue Prescrire/Prescrire International and the International Society of Drug Bulletins (ISDB).

She is an expert in medicines policy and intellectual property law and has been a consultant to a number of countries and international organisations.

In 2005 and 2006 she was listed as one of the 50 most influential people in intellectual property in the world by the journal Managing Intellectual Property.

Ellen 't Hoen is now executive director of the Medicines Patent Pool[1], cofounded by UNITAID.

References[link]

• Medicines Patent Pool

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (July 2009)

Alex Tabarrok speaking at TED in 2009.
Photograph by Bill Holsinger-Robinson.

Alexander Taghi Tabarrok (born 1966) is a Canadian-American economist and co-author, with Tyler Cowen, of the economics blog Marginal Revolution.

Both Cowen and Tabarrok are professors at Virginia's George Mason University and fellows with the school's Mercatus Center. In addition, Tabarrok is director of research for the Oakland, California based think tank the Independent Institute. He is the son of the late Mechanical Engineering professor, Dr. Behrooz (Bez) Tabarrok.

His doctoral studies were done at George Mason University where he received his Ph.D. in 1994.

He has done work on dominant assurance contracts, law and economics and health economics.

External links[link]

• Tabarrok's GMU home page
• Podcast featuring Tabarrok Tabarrok discusses medical malpractice on EconTalk.
• Tabarrok's talk at TED 2009

This biography of a Canadian economist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Richard Matthew Stallman
Richard Stallman at the University of Pittsburgh 2010
Born	(1953-03-16) March 16, 1953 (age 59) New York City, New York, United States
Nationality	American
Other names	rms, St. iGNUcius (avatar)
Alma mater	Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Occupation	President of the Free Software Foundation
Known for	Free software movement, GNU, Emacs
Website
www.stallman.org

Richard Matthew Stallman (born 16 March 1953), often shortened to rms,^[1] is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project^[2] to create a free Unix-like operating system, and he has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement; in October 1985^[3] he founded the Free Software Foundation.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.^[4] Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management, and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs,^[5] the GNU Compiler Collection,^[6] the GNU Debugger,^[7] and various tools in the GNU coreutils.^[8] He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.

Early years[link]

Stallman was born to Daniel Stallman and Alice Lippman,^[9] in 1953 in New York City. His first experience with computers was at the IBM New York Scientific Center when he was in high school. He was hired for the summer to write a numerical analysis program in Fortran. He completed the task after a couple of weeks and spent the rest of the summer writing a text editor in APL.^[10] Stallman spent the summer after his high-school graduation writing another program, a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM System/360.^{[citation needed]}

During this time, Stallman was also a volunteer laboratory assistant in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in mathematics or physics, his teaching professor at Rockefeller thought he would have a future as a biologist.^[11]

As a first-year student at Harvard University, Stallman was known for his strong performance in Math 55.^{[citation needed]} In 1971 he became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and became a regular in the hacker community, where he was usually known by his initials, rms (which was the name of his computer accounts). In the first edition of the Hacker's Dictionary, he wrote "'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'."^[1] Stallman graduated from Harvard magna cum laude earning a BA in Physics in 1974.^[12]

Stallman enrolled as a graduate student at MIT, but then ended his pursuit of a doctorate in physics to focus on his programming at the MIT AI Laboratory.

While a graduate student at MIT, Stallman published a paper with Gerald Jay Sussman on an AI truth maintenance system, called dependency-directed backtracking.^[13] This paper was an early work on the problem of intelligent backtracking in constraint satisfaction problems. As of 2003, the technique Stallman and Sussman introduced is still the most general and powerful form of intelligent backtracking.^[14] The technique of constraint recording, wherein partial results of a search are recorded for later reuse, was also introduced in this paper.^[14]

As a hacker in MIT's AI laboratory, Stallman worked on software projects like TECO, Emacs, and the Lisp machine Operating System. He would become an ardent critic of restricted computer access in the lab, which at that time was funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. When MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) installed a password control system in 1977, Stallman found a way to decrypt the passwords and sent users messages containing their decoded password, with a suggestion to change it to the empty string (that is, no password) instead, to re-enable anonymous access to the systems. Around 20% of the users followed his advice at the time, although passwords ultimately prevailed. Stallman boasted of the success of his campaign for many years afterward.^[15]

Decline of MIT's hacker culture[link]

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the hacker culture that Stallman thrived on began to fragment. To prevent software from being used on their competitors' computers, most manufacturers stopped distributing source code and began using copyright and restrictive software licenses to limit or prohibit copying and redistribution. Such proprietary software had existed before, and it became apparent that it would become the norm. This shift in the legal characteristics of software can be regarded as a consequence triggered by the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, as stated by Stallman's MIT fellow Brewster Kahle.^[16]

When Brian Reid in 1979 placed time bombs in the Scribe markup language and word processing system to restrict unlicensed access to the software, Stallman proclaimed it "a crime against humanity."^[17] He clarified, years later, that it is blocking the user's freedom that he believes is a crime, not the issue of charging for the software.^[18]

In 1980, Stallman and some other hackers at the AI Lab were refused access to the source code for the software of a newly-installed laser printer, the Xerox 9700. Stallman had modified the software for the Lab's previous laser printer (the XGP, Xerographic Printer), so it electronically messaged a user when the person's job was printed, and would message all logged-in users waiting for print jobs if the printer was jammed. Not being able to add these features to the new printer was a major inconvenience, as the printer was on a different floor from most of the users. This experience convinced Stallman of people's need to be free to modify the software they use.^[19]

Richard Greenblatt, a fellow AI Lab hacker, founded Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI) to market Lisp machines, which he and Tom Knight designed at the lab. Greenblatt rejected outside investment, believing that the proceeds from the construction and sale of a few machines could be profitably reinvested in the growth of the company. In contrast, the other hackers felt that the venture capital-funded approach was better. As no agreement could be reached, hackers from the latter camp founded Symbolics, with the aid of Russ Noftsker, an AI Lab administrator. Symbolics recruited most of the remaining hackers including notable hacker Bill Gosper, who then left the AI Lab. Symbolics forced Greenblatt to also resign by citing MIT policies. While both companies delivered proprietary software, Stallman believed that LMI, unlike Symbolics, had tried to avoid hurting the lab's community. For two years, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman worked by himself to clone the output of the Symbolics programmers, with the aim of preventing them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers.^[20]

Stallman argues that software users should have the freedom to share with their neighbor and to be able to study and make changes to the software that they use. He maintains that attempts by proprietary software vendors to prohibit these acts are antisocial and unethical.^[21] The phrase "software wants to be free" is often incorrectly attributed to him, and Stallman argues that this is a misstatement of his philosophy.^[22] He argues that freedom is vital for the sake of users and society as a moral value, and not merely for pragmatic reasons such as possibly developing technically superior software.

In February 1984, Stallman quit his job at MIT to work full-time on the GNU project, which he had announced in September 1983.

GNU project[link]

Richard Stallman in 2003 at the opening ceremony of NIXAL (a GLUG) at Netaji Subhash Engineering College, Calcutta, India

Stallman announced the plan for the GNU operating system in September 1983 on several ARPANET mailing lists and USENET.^[23]

In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix." Soon after, he started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement. Stallman is the nonsalaried president of the FSF, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in Massachusetts.^[24] Stallman popularized the concept of copyleft, a legal mechanism to protect the modification and redistribution rights for free software. It was first implemented in the GNU Emacs General Public License, and in 1989 the first program-independent GNU General Public License (GPL) was released. By then, much of the GNU system had been completed. Stallman was responsible for contributing many necessary tools, including a text editor (Emacs), compiler (GCC), debugger (gdb), and a build automator (gmake). The notable exception was a kernel. In 1990, members of the GNU project began a kernel called GNU Hurd, which has yet to achieve the maturity level required for widespread usage.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student, used the GNU development tools to produce the Linux kernel. The existing programs from the GNU project were readily ported to run on the resultant platform; most sources use the name Linux to refer to the general-purpose operating system thus formed. This has been a longstanding naming controversy in the free software community. Stallman argues that not using GNU in the name of the operating system unfairly disparages the value of the GNU project and harms the sustainability of the free software movement by breaking the link between the software and the free software philosophy of the GNU project.

Cover picture for O'Reilly Media's book Free as in Freedom

Stallman's influences on hacker culture include the name POSIX^[25] and the Emacs editor. On UNIX systems, GNU Emacs's popularity rivaled that of another editor vi, spawning an editor war. Stallman's take on this was to canonize himself as St. IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs^[26][27] and acknowledge that "vi vi vi is the editor of the beast," while "using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance".^[28]

Around 1992, developers at Lucid Inc. doing their own work on Emacs clashed with Stallman and ultimately forked the software into what would become XEmacs.^[29] Technology journalist Andrew Leonard has characterized what he sees as Stallman's uncompromising stubbornness as common among elite computer programmers:

There's something comforting about Stallman's intransigence. Win or lose, Stallman will never give up. He'll be the stubbornest mule on the farm until the day he dies. Call it fixity of purpose, or just plain cussedness, his single-minded commitment and brutal honesty are refreshing in a world of spin-meisters and multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns.

—Andrew Leonard, Salon.com^[30]

Activism[link]

Richard Stallman giving a speech on "Free Software and your freedom" at the biennale du design of Saint Etienne (2008)

Stallman has written many essays on software freedom and since the early 1990s has been an outspoken political campaigner for the free software movement. The speeches he has regularly given are titled The GNU project and the Free Software movement,^[31] The Dangers of Software Patents,^[32] and Copyright and Community in the age of computer networks.^[33] In 2006 and 2007, during the eighteen month public consultation for the drafting of version 3 of the GNU General Public License, he added a fourth topic explaining the proposed changes.^[34]

Linus Torvalds has criticized Stallman for what he considers "black-and-white thinking" and bringing more harm than good to the free software community.^[35]

Stallman's staunch advocacy for free software inspired the Virtual Richard M. Stallman (vrms), software that analyzes the packages currently installed on a Debian GNU/Linux system, and report those that are from the non-free tree.^[36] Stallman would disagree with parts of Debian's definition of free software.^[37]

In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free on-line encyclopedia through the means of inviting the public to contribute articles.^[38] The resulting GNUPedia was eventually retired in favour of the emerging Wikipedia, which had similar aims and was enjoying greater success.^[39]

In Venezuela, Stallman has delivered public speeches and promoted the adoption of free software in the state's oil company (PDVSA), in municipal government, and in the nation's military. In meetings with Chávez and in public speeches, Stallman criticised some policies on television broadcasting, free speech rights, and privacy.^[40][41] Stallman was on the Advisory Council of Latin American television station teleSUR from its launch^[42] but resigned in February 2011, criticizing pro-Gaddafi propaganda during the 2011 North Africa uprisings.^[43]

In August 2006 at his meetings with the government of the Indian State of Kerala, he persuaded officials to discard proprietary software, such as Microsoft's, at state-run schools. This has resulted in a landmark decision to switch all school computers in 12,500 high schools from Windows to a free software operating system.^[44]

After personal meetings, Stallman has obtained positive statements about the free software movement from the then-President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam,^[45] French 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal,^[46] and the president of Ecuador Rafael Correa.^[47]

Richard Stallman giving a speech at WSIS-2005

Stallman has participated in protests about software patents,^[48] DRM,^[49][50] and proprietary software.

Protesting against proprietary software in April 2006, Stallman held a "Don't buy from ATI, enemy of your freedom" placard at a speech by an ATI representative in the building where Stallman works, resulting in the police being called.^[51] ATI has since merged with AMD Corporation and has taken steps to make their hardware documentation available for use by the free software community.^[52]

Stallman has also helped and supported the International Music Score Library Project in getting back online, after it had been taken down on October 19, 2007 following a cease and desist letter from Universal Edition.^[53]

After the death of Steve Jobs, Stallman wrote the following eulogy:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Richard Stallman using his Lemote machine at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai before his lecture on 'Free Software, Freedom and Education' organized by Free Software Foundation, Tamil Nadu (FSFTN).

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.

—Richard Stallman^[54]

Stallman's remark stirred up accusations of being in bad taste, while Eric S. Raymond, author of Cathedral and the Bazaar, summarized that Stallman's statement was not personal, but was simply criticizing walled gardens.^[55]

Stallman's only computer is a Lemote Yeeloong netbook (using the same company's Loongson processor) which he chose because it can run with 100% free software even at the BIOS level, stating "freedom is my priority. I've campaigned for freedom since 1983, and I am not going to surrender that freedom for the sake of a more convenient computer."^[56] Lemote is a joint venture of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an institution of the State Council of China.

Stallman has suggested that the United States government may encourage^[57][58] the use of software as a service because this would allow them to access users' data without needing a search warrant.^[59][60][61]

Terminology[link]

Richard Stallman gets into his St. iGNUcius avatar at Techniche, IIT Guwahati, India

Stallman places great importance on the words and labels people use to talk about the world, including the relationship between software and freedom. He untiringly asks people to say free software and GNU/Linux, and to avoid the terms intellectual property and piracy (in relation to copyright). His requests that people use certain terms, and his ongoing efforts to convince people of the importance of terminology are a source of regular misunderstanding and friction with parts of the free software and open source communities.

One of his criteria for giving an interview to a journalist is that the journalist agree to use his terminology throughout the article.^[62] Sometimes he has even required journalists to read parts of the GNU philosophy before an interview, for "efficiency's sake".^{[citation needed]} He has been known to turn down speaking requests over some terminology issues.^[63]

Stallman rejects a common alternative term, open source software, because it does not call to mind what Stallman sees as the value of the software: freedom.^[64] Thus it will not inform people of the freedom issues, and will not lead to people valuing and defending their freedom.^[65] Two alternatives which Stallman does accept are software libre and unfettered software, but free software is the term he asks people to use in English. For similar reasons, he argues for the term "proprietary software" rather than "closed source software", when referring to software that is not free software.

Stallman repeatedly asks that the term GNU/Linux, which he pronounces "GNU slash Linux", be used to refer to the operating system created by combining the GNU system and the Linux kernel. Stallman refers to this operating system as "a variant of GNU, and the GNU Project is its principal developer."^[63] He claims that the connection between the GNU project's philosophy and its software is broken when people refer to the combination as merely Linux.^[66] Starting around 2003, he began also using the term GNU+Linux, which he pronounces "GNU plus Linux", to prevent others from pronouncing the phrase "GNU/Linux" as "GNU Linux", which would erroneously imply that the Linux kernel is maintained by the GNU project. (See: GNU/Linux naming controversy)

Stallman argues that the term intellectual property is designed to confuse people, and is used to prevent intelligent discussion on the specifics of copyright, patent, trademark and other laws by lumping together areas of law that are more dissimilar than similar.^[67] He also argues that by referring to these laws as property laws, the term biases the discussion when thinking about how to treat these issues.

These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues. Copyright law was designed to promote authorship and art, and covers the details of a work of authorship or art. Patent law was intended to encourage publication of ideas, at the price of finite monopolies over these ideas — a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others. Trademark law was not intended to promote any business activity, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying.^[68]

An example of cautioning others to avoid other terminology while also offering suggestions for possible alternatives, is this sentence of an email by Stallman to a public mailing list:

I think it is ok for authors (please let's not call them creators, they are not gods) to ask for money for copies of their works (please let's not devalue these works by calling them content) in order to gain income (the term compensation falsely implies it is a matter of making up for some kind of damages).^[69]

Personal life[link]

Stallman has devoted the bulk of his life’s energies to political and software activism.^[70] Professing to care little for material wealth, he explains that "I've always lived cheaply ... like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do."^[71]

Until around 1998, his office at MIT's AI Lab was also his residence.^[72] He was registered to vote from there. Nowadays he has a separate residence in Cambridge not far from MIT.^[73] His position as a research affiliate at MIT is unpaid.^[74]

In a footnote to an article he wrote in 1999, he says "As an atheist, I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said."^[21] Stallman often wears a button that reads "Impeach God".^[75][76]

Stallman chooses not to celebrate Christmas, instead celebrating "Grav-mass" on December 25. The name and date are references to Isaac Newton, whose birthday falls on that day on the old style calendar.^[77]

When asked about his influences, he replied that he admires Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ralph Nader, and Dennis Kucinich, and commented as well: "I admire Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, even though I criticize some of the things that they did."^[78] Stallman is a Green Party supporter,^[1] and a supporter of the National Initiative proposal.^[79]

Stallman recommends not owning a mobile phone,^[80] as he believes the tracking of cell phones creates harmful privacy issues.^[81] Also, Stallman avoids use of a key card to enter the building where his office is.^[82] Such a system would track doors entered and times. For personal reasons, he generally does not actively browse the web from his computer; rather, he uses wget and reads the fetched pages from his e-mail mailbox, claiming to limit direct access via browsers to a few sites such as his own or those related to his work with GNU and the FSF.^[83][84]