Somebody please show me a single patent on software or a so called business-process that is worth anything (i.e. not obvious to somebody skilled in the art).
Just one... I'll shut up then.
Patents were supposed to encourage innovation, now they are doing the opposite (at least for software and business processes) and causing billions of wasted dollars and fat bonuses for patent lawyers.
This move seems a bit desperate to me. To avoid fair competition on products, MSFT and Apple are using patents that they did not even invent. Pathetic and despicable.
I'd like to second and amplify this comment. I've been searching for a single example of a software patent having ever been used to protect and promote innovation, rather than to just stifle competition or extort money from people who happen to build a successful business.
If someone can provide a single instance of a software patent being used as a vehicle for promoting the arts and sciences, advancing the state of technology, or providing a means for a small inventor to bring a product to market that otherwise would not have been viable without the patent, I would be enormously grateful.
The RSA patent, 4,405,829, was pretty innovative and also quite useful, although even it had been invented in secret a year earlier by the British.
That said, I don't think there's any evidence that the existence of the patent system prompted its invention, and so I wouldn't call this an argument in favor of patents.
US Pat #4,200,770 Diffie Hellman public key exchange
There are literally dozens, maybe hundreds of good software patents out of the 500,000 or so that have been issued.
We'd all be much better off without any software patents at all but it's not true that they are all fraudulent and abusive like the ones in these lawsuits. A small fraction are decent. Of course the innovations involved in those few patents would all have been discovered and published without patents as an incentive, because that's how software works.
But the rationale for the patent system is to encourage innovation that wouldn't have happened without it, and it isn't clear that either of the public-key crypto patents qualifies. In each case, the inventors included academics (Hellman was on Stanford's faculty) whose job is to innovate and disclose their own innovations. (And while it's common these days for academics to patent and try to monetize at the same time, that wasn't always so. It was rarer, and sometimes controversial, in the 1970s.)
The RSA patent made R, S, and A very rich --- but it isn't clear what it did for the rest of us.
Just one... I'll shut up then.
Patents were supposed to encourage innovation, now they are doing the opposite (at least for software and business processes) and causing billions of wasted dollars and fat bonuses for patent lawyers.
This move seems a bit desperate to me. To avoid fair competition on products, MSFT and Apple are using patents that they did not even invent. Pathetic and despicable.