
Software Patents Considered Harmful - danyork
https://medium.com/@jdrosen2/software-patents-considered-harmful-868166fa437d
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tabtab
The practical downsides of software patents are overwhelming the upsides. For
every "good" patent, there are dozens if not hundreds of trivial or ill-
conceived patents. Perhaps if the review process were cleaned up and made
rigorous, the net benefits would appear, but I'm not confident the Patent
Office and Congress can pull that off. The current system benefits lawyers and
patent hoarders, not inventors nor consumers.

At least enforce and scrutinize "non-obvious" better. The "obvious" problem is
probably the biggest and most obvious current flaw. And the mere act of
automating and/or emulating a physical process should be tossed out. A
specific implementation may count (if non-obvious), but the very act of
emulation by itself should not count as a patent. For example, emulating a
physical slide-lock to unlock a smart-phone was granted a patent. All
implementations of the emulation appeared to be susceptible to successful
lawsuits. That is pure nonsense.

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kerpele
I wholeheartedly agree with this article. The common defense for software
patents is that a small company doesn't have any other means to prevent a big
company from copying its invention, but I'd claim that a small company can't
afford to build the patent portfolio in the first place and thus even that
point is moot.

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pedalpete
IANAL but I believe copyright infringement cases if the infringing party is
found guilty, the damages are based on the lost revenue or other damage
inflicted by the use of the material.

If patents used the same process, the invention could be used by other
companies as long as it did not harm the business of the patent owner.

