I’m Jonathan, the chief counsel for the Israeli Open Source Association. We just submitted our memorandum. Here is the press release:

Press Release.

For Immediate Publication.

[עברית בסוף, האזרו בסבלנות]

Hamakor, the Israeli Free Software Society, calls for the annulment of Software Patents.

Following a call for submissions from the Israeli Patent Authority, the Israeli Free Software Society, Hamakor, submitted a memorandum calling for the annulment of the Software Patents. A Memorandum drafted by Adv. Jonathan J. Klinger, Hamakor’s chief legal counsel, presented a tough and strict approach claiming that software patents harm innovation and incur high legal costs on software developers.

“protecting software through patents shall provide protection on ideas, which are usually expressible in more than one manner, and shall be the beginning to a race to the bottom where every person shall register as many patents possible and incur high costs on each player in the software field”, said Klinger, and added that “the chilling effect created by the fear of using software protected by patents, be it free software or proprietary software, and incur costs on the system solely in order to purchase insurance from the theoretical patent infringement. In such case, any independent development of software without legal assistance from the first day of development shall be problematic, and deter developers from developing free software or promote innovation”.

Until recently, the Israeli patent authority rejected Software Patents and provided protection only regarding hardware (in re Eli Tamir). However, the recent call for submissions had raised the fear that software patents shall be used to deter innovation.

Currently, Israeli venture capital funds and technology evangelists often see patents as the core asset when protecting software companies from competition, which creates a race to the bottom that requires startups and innovative companies to register patents in order to raise funds. Hamakor presents, in its memorandum, a new approach focusing on people and not patents, as the core asset of the Israeli Innovation.

For futher questions, contact Jonathan Klinger: jonklinger@gmail.com, +972-52-3436436

http://www.perl.org.il/

http://jerusalem.pm.org/

There’re no indications that they’re interested in software patents, but they should be willing to help us. Maybe they would be interested in participating in this consultation, or maybe they could help us find organisations that would be interested.

The most recent document of our position is our brief to the US Supreme Court for the Bilski case:
http://endsoftpatents.org/amicus-bilski-2009

The bottom 40% is the most interesting, and the most general. Here’s maybe the best starting point:
http://endsoftpatents.org/amicus-bilski-2009#toc9

When I was researching the Israeli situation, I found some references to the success of the US software industry. It would probably be useful to point out that software patent lawsuits cost the US economy $11.26 billion in the period from March 2006 to March 2007:
http://endsoftpatents.org/2008-state-of-softpatents

…and the USA gained their advanced market position, and Microsoft wrote Windows 95 *before* software patents became widely used:
http://endsoftpatents.org/amicus-bilski-2009#toc12

I’ll assemble more information and will be in contact early this coming week. I’d like to look for other organisations which should be concerned, to ask them if they’re aware of this consultation.

My name is Lior Kaplan, and I’m a member of Hamakor which is an Israeli society for free and open source software (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamakor for more details).

We’re in the process of writing a draft of a position paper for the patent authority about this (only available in Hebrew).

I’ll be happy to use as your point of contact regarding this issue, feel free to contact me.

It will be nice if you could also provide a position paper of your own.

Kaplan

Additionally, software is not bound to a single computer, or single type of computer. Computer processors change; there is more than just the Intel x86 instruction set out there, and each of those instruction sets at the hardware level are very different, but at the software level for developers using most development techniques are the same.