
Software patents should be abolished - dwynings
http://www.cdixon.org/?p=1090
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ZeroGravitas
Someone asks in the comments why patents work better in pharmaceuticals.

A book I read recently claimed it all came down how precisely and clearly the
patent is defined and delineated.

Imagine you moved into a lush valley with a new town in it to do business. If
you found all the best spots had been taken and fenced in then that would kind
of suck.

Imagine now that people had secretly claimed land, and done so in a way that
even they didn't know what the boundary was. "That land over there" or "the
thickest part of the forest" and yet these secret, vague claims could be
legally enforced. Imagine investing money to build on that land, trying your
best to avoid accidentally stepping on anyone's property.

The first case is chemical compounds, it's either got those atoms in that
arrangement or it doesn't. The latter is "selling shoes over the internet" and
other alleged software patents.

Though having said that I think patents are still broken and lead to the
promotion of some very strange behaviour in the medical field. But in software
they are appallingly bad.

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cabalamat
> _Imagine now that people had secretly claimed land, and done so in a way
> that even they didn't know what the boundary was. "That land over there" or
> "the thickest part of the forest" and yet these secret, vague claims could
> be legally enforced. Imagine investing money to build on that land, trying
> your best to avoid accidentally stepping on anyone's property._

That's a nice analogy. I'm writing a book about intellectual property and the
Pirate party movement; mind if I use your analogy?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Feel free.

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juhbiu
I already patented it - 1, a system of using a simple picture to represent a
complex idea

2 a specific inplementation of 1 where the picture involves green grass.

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jeromec
For those who haven't read Paul Graham's essay on software patents I highly
recommend it. It's wonderfully insightful, and gave me perspectives I never
considered.

<http://paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html>

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btn
_And I am absolutely sure that if we got rid of patents tomorrow innovation
wouldn’t be reduced at all_

I don't think this is true at all. While most of the bad press about software
patents comes from frivolous patents and companies that troll with their
portfolios, that doesn't mean there are no _legitimate_ software patents.

Consider the patents held by MPEG LA (MPEG codecs, Firewire, H.264, etc.)
These patents represent years of R&D work by their member companies and
describe inventions that are non-frivolous. Surely these companies deserve
some kind of protection for their work to encourage them to continue to invest
in such research and publish it.

One of the difficulties in the software patents issue is where to draw the
line---how to define what is a "software patent" and what defines the
patentability of inventions in that class. The debate on software patents is
shifting more towards this issue, and articles that make sweeping statements
like "software/internet/hardware patents have no benefit to society and should
be abolished" add nothing to it.

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cabalamat
> Consider the patents held by MPEG LA (MPEG codecs, Firewire, H.264, etc.)
> These patents represent years of R&D work by their member companies and
> describe inventions that are non-frivolous. Surely these companies deserve
> some kind of protection for their work to encourage them to continue to
> invest in such research and publish it.

There are two separate issues here, (1) whether patents are necessary to
encourage innovation, and (2) whether companies "deserve" patents.

To answer the first question, the existance of non-patent-emcumbered codecs,
such as Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, demonstrates that software patents don't
need to exist for these things to exist. (I sometimes half-jokingly refer to
arguments of the sort "but without copyright/patent incentives, X wouldn't
exist" as "the Linux-doesn't-exist theory of intellectual property").

To answer the second question, why would companies deserve patents? So they
can make bigger profits, presumably? But why is that a good thing? The purpose
of the economy isn't for companies to make profits, it's for the economy to
make things people need and want. Companies making big profits is a good thing
if and only if it leads to the economy making things people need and want --
so if people want to make money they have to make something people want, not
game the patent system to no-one else's advantage. And since software patents
aren't necessary to produce good software, and since they in fact overall harm
progress in software rather than help it, in the interests of the economy they
shouldn't exist.

~~~
catzaa
> To answer the first question, the existance of non-patent-emcumbered codecs,
> such as Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, demonstrates that software patents don't
> need to exist for these things to exist.

This is an extremely bad example. Ogg Vorbis came years after rival standards
(such as mp3). It is not state of the art at all.

The development of the basis of Theora (VP3) was done by a company (On2) that
protected it with patents. VP3 was a very old decoder that On2 released (all
of their current state of the art decoders are protected by patents).

There are actually patents on Theora but On2 granted a licence for its use
(from WP <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora>):

> On2 also made an irrevocable, royalty-free license grant for any patent
> claims it might have over the software and any derivatives

> To answer the second question, why would companies deserve patents?

The same reason as copyright – to protect innovation.

~~~
scotty79
> The same reason as copyright – to protect innovation.

Does the innovation need protecting? And if so then protecting from whom?
Would copy-pasters do more damage to innovation than lawyers do?

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xiaoma
I agree that the system is a mess, but defining exactly what "software"
patents are is difficult. In machine inventions, the actual invention is
increasingly happening in the software.

Patenting an organic molecule or a gene is a different, and also flawed case.
But most machines, business plans and other inventions could be reduced to
software. As 3d printing becomes more common, this will get more and more
common.

Algorithms currently aren't patentable, but due to semantic manipulation of
the meaning of "algorithm", people are patenting algorithms by calling them a
"system that does x". If software patents were abolished, what would prevent
applicants from using the exact same sort of strategy to get around them?
Rather than patenting a piece of code, people would file a patent for a
machine that does everything the code in question does.

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chrischen
Innovation happens spontaneously and you'll get the irresistible urge to
implement it. If the promise of a patent is your only incentive then you
probably won't do a good job at it.

However there are people who may not be so ingenious, and pour nothing but a
lot of time and effort into something. These may be the ones most interested
in patents. However in a patentless world they still have the advantage of
understanding their work the best, and that gives them an edge.

That being said, I believe anyone capable of understanding another person's
complicated work has the right to duplicate it. In the end whoever can
innovate faster, whoever is better at making it better, and whoever
understands the concepts best will come out on top.

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jfarmer
Is this a reasonable middle ground? All software covered by a patent must have
the source publicly available.

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scotty79
All software that someone wants to be protected by copyright should have
source code publicly available.

That would be exact equivalent of standard patents. If you publish all the
details of your invention you get temporary monopoly on manufacturing it's
copies. If not then you get no protection.

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mr_luc
I'd just like to see the period of time drastically reduced for "inventions"
in domains that move faster.

Any software patent should last no longer than a year, period.

And as long as I'm writing the law, anything patented by Intellectual Ventures
becomes public domain in six days.

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kgermino
It seems to me that with software what the sftware does is usually just solve
a problem. Patents are to protect the method of solving a problem, in RIM's
case mobile email wasn't a method of solving a problem, the lack of mobile
email was the problem. In software the method of solving the problem is the
source code, and that should be protected, which it is, by copyright law.

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vijayr
Just a thought. Why not set a time limit on patents, like copyright? You have
a patent, its valid only for say 30 or 50 years, then its public domain.

or something like this already exists?

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actionjackson
Time limit already exists. The thing with software is that its associated
technology will most likely expire long before its patent does.

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vaksel
could always make software patents last only 2-3 years. That should be enough
for the original company to get noticed

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omouse
Do you think IBM, Microsoft, Apple and that whole bunch will let that happen?

