Blog post by Aaron Williamson. Please email any comments on this entry to <aaronw@softwarefreedom.org>.

SFLC is introducing our redesigned website today! We hope you like the new look. While the content is largely unaffected, we've made some improvements to the information design to make the content easier to access and understand. (Take a look at our new publications page for an example.) We also changed our default content license to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (formerly Attribution-NoDerivs).

On the backend, we're still using the excellent free web framework Django running on top of the Apache HTTP Server. The new design brings the frontend up to date with emerging web standards, including HTML5. If you're using a modern, standards-compliant web browser (like Mozilla Firefox 4), you might notice this in subtle ways, like in some of the free fonts we're using.

We hope this redesign to be the beginning of an evolution, rather than a one-time change. We will continue looking for ways to make our content more useful and more accessible to you. To do that, we need your help! Please let us know if you can't find something you're looking for, or if there's anything you'd like to see on our site that's not there. And of course the tires always need kicking—if you notice anything broken or any invalid HTML, tell us about that too.

Blog post by Karen M. Sandler. Please email any comments on this entry to <karen@softwarefreedom.org>.

We applaud the rejection by Judge Denny Chin of the Google Books class action settlement with authors and publishers regarding the digitization of books. SFLC filed a letter with the court on behalf of the Free Software Foundation and author Karl Fogel, urging the court to reject the settlement as it was last proposed and asking the court to consider the impact of the settlement upon members of the class who have distributed their works under Free licenses.

Judge Chen cited the objections of the class members as a key reason for the rejection. In our own objection, we pointed out that the settlement's attempt to balance commercial interests in publication allowed freely licensed books to be distributed without regard for their terms, undermining the community’s unifying values - a harm which could not be addressed a royalty arrangement. We further pointed out that the settlement in essence would replaced the United States Congress as the entity responsible for devising copyright law. As Judge Chin writes in his opinion today, "the matter is best left for Congress."

SFLC is pleased to provide a legal voice to clients like the FSF to defend software freedom and Free licenses generally.

Blog post by Clint Adams. Please email any comments on this entry to <clint@softwarefreedom.org>.

stet, the first program known to be released under the GNU Affero General Public License, has been moved to a git repository on Gitorious for historical archival purposes.

stet is a free software package for gathering comments about a text document via a webpage. It was designed by the Software Freedom Law Center for the Free Software Foundation to use as part of drafting process of the GNU General Public License version 3.

Blog post by Mishi Choudhary. Please email any comments on this entry to <Mishi@softwarefreedom.org>.

According to the Government of India, private service providers like AirTel and Vodafone are failing in their legal obligations under the Information Technology Act, hastily amended in the days immediately following the Mumbai 7/11 attacks, by not providing access to the content of emails and texts sent to or from BlackBerry users. As a lawyer, I have some doubt about this legal position, no doubt under discussion between GoI and the service providers. But there is no doubt that the Government has failed to make clear the context of this dispute, or the real consequences of the demands it is making.

BlackBerry devices use the wireless networks of the local service providers to deliver email and texts through servers operated by Research in Motion located outside India. If you or I as individuals buy a BlackBerry through one of the offering service providers, our email and text traffic will not be encrypted, and GoI will have whatever access to our communications the law requires. If, however, your BlackBerry was given to you as an employee of an MNC or a large local enterprise, for work use, those emails and texts will be encrypted so that only the sender and receiver, but not Research in Motion (RIM) and not the local Indian wireless service provider, will be able to read them. Since these parties do not have access to the content of encrypted messages, and therefore cannot provide what Government says the Act requires, the Government now threatens to force a halt to their services as of August 31.

Unless a ring of terrorists is embedded entirely within some MNC, and is using its email and messaging system to plan terrorist attacks or other crimes using corporate BlackBerries, such a service cut would not be likely to prevent the planning or execution of any attacks. What it would do, however, is effectively cut off India from the global financial system. The ability of banks, insurance companies, law firms, consultancies and other professional service enterprises to operate around the globe depends entirely on the flow of confidential intra-firm communications. People cannot do business anywhere unless they can be sure that their firm's business communications are not being overheard by competitors or other parties using breaches in communications networks. So every such enterprise relies upon mechanisms that ensure complete confidentiality on which the movement of trillions of crores every day in the world economy depend. BlackBerry provides one portion of that network to a large subset of that market. Any country which shuts off encrypted BlackBerry communications has shut down its place in the global economy.

Government knows, what the extent of its threat implies if our connection with the global economy is temporarily lost. But if the Government were clear with the public now about the small security benefit to gain and the magnitude of the harm it will cause if its threat is carried out, its dis-proportionality would raise questions in the mind of the public. Apparently GoI believes that such a threat can, from its very desperate dramatic quality, induce a useful result. Unfortunately, this too is wrong. Because nobody but the enterprises themselves have an access to the decrypted information, Government must get inside the BlackBerry itself if it is to read the messages.

GoI is making threats that could only be fulfilled at cataclysmic cost to the economy. It will in effect result in causing immense harm to India's telecommunications sector and our reputation in the global financial services economy, where so many of our jobs are being created. In the end, it would inflict immense damage, much greater than any terrorist could ever cause scarcely achieving any additional security.

Blog post by Michael A. Spiegel. Please email any comments on this entry to <mspiegel@softwarefreedom.org>.

In the haze of confusion surrounding the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bilski v. Kappos, the appeals board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a ruling last week that takes a definitive stand against the worst kinds of patents that threaten software developers every day.

Despite the Court's failure to provide much guidance or adopt a bright-line test for patentable subject matter in Bilski, the appeals board ruling in Ex parte Proudler is a sign of the growing skepticism towards software patents that continually test the boundary between acceptable technological innovation and impermissible abstraction. In Proudler, the Board rejected a number of claims to a software invention, citing Bilski in its reasoning.

This rejection is particularly noteworthy as it dispenses with a number of fig leaves that patent attorneys have been using for years to make software inventions seem less like abstract ideas, and therefore patentable. While the USPTO has always held that software is unpatentable, patent attorneys were usually able to get software patents granted by adding such seemingly magical phrases as “a computer readable medium containing computer executable instructions” to a series of data processing steps, thus transforming software into a patentable physical component of a computer.

Taking a page from the same playbook, the Proudler application claims a “method of controlling processing of data in a computer apparatus” and a “computer program stored on computer readable media for instructing a programmable computer to implement a method of controlling the processing of data.” Since the Federal Circuit’s infamous 1998 State Street decision which opened the floodgates to software and business method patents, such claims have been deemed patentable without question. Although the Board could have justified the July 7th decision on other grounds, it took particular pains to reject the Proudler application for claiming unpatentable software. “A claim that recites no more than software, logic or a data structure (i.e., an abstraction) does not fall within any statutory category,” the Board said in its rejection. In its rejection, the Board cited both recent Supreme Court cases (including Bilski) as well as pre-State Street decisions from the Federal Circuit.

I believe the Board correctly deduced two notable things from Bilski, in an interpretation which hopefully will take root in the courts as well.

First, the “machine-or-transformation test”, in which a patentable process must either be closely tied to a particular machine or transform a particular article into a different state of thing, survives as a primary test for routine use. Although the Supreme Court held that “the machine-or-transformation test is not the sole test for deciding whether an invention is a patent-eligible ‘process’,” it did characterize the test as “a useful and important clue.” Without any hint of what processes, if any, may fail this test while still being eligible for a patent, the burden will lie with software patent applicants to prove that their processes are patentable after failing the machine-or-transformation test.