Software is already covered by copyright. Granting it parent protection as well allows software companies to double dip in a way that no other industry can.
Copyright and patents protect entirely different kinds of software. Copyright protects software that's more work to write than to think about ( e.g. Windows). Patents protect software that's more work to think about than to write ( e.g. PageRank or whatever's inside Google's self-driving cars).
A very large number of patents also protect Windows and its component parts and methods such as the file system; when other OSes have tried to be compatible in any way, Microsoft has demanded and gotten royalties, for example from Android phones.
Software is already covered by copyright. Granting it parent protection as well allows software companies to double dip in a way that no other industry can.
Well, copyright covers an implementation of software, but a clean-room rewrite can get around a copyright of software. In that way, no, copyright is not a real way to protect software.
That's what ought to be correct, but the recent decision against Facebook on VR cut directly against this view - as I understand it unavoidable mathematical and logical similarities were treated as if patented procedures. Similarity was the only thing considered. Which might force companies to the immense expense of "clean-rooming" almost everything they create to avoid problems. And that might not be a guarantee; patent law is very badly messed up by now, and Congress has refused to get involved in many issues, such as patent misuse (since the current confusion favors large companies/political campaign contributors who can best afford large legal teams and long trials.)
> So you don't believe in software patents ? There are two fundamental discussion schemes about software patents: (1) can we patent something that can be described as a mathematical concept and stuff. and (2) why would you want to patent software in the first place. The first discussion is tricky. Comparing algorithms to mathematics, having patents that can be expressed through mechanical OR software, etc. The second…
The big original reason patents came into existence was to reduce the number of trade secrets - an obvious block to progress; by ensuring that more inventions would enter the public domain (which was once rare and much tech was lost as a result, or very local.) See the history of forceps. Secondarily, as with copyright, you are rewarding the task of creativity. So, can you extend this first principle to software? Only if the software could operate in "a cloud" far from the user and therefore never be reverse engineered... which, oops, is exactly where we are. If there are no software patents, don't think that will mean that everyone gets to use the newest and greatest algorithms, it's more likely to mean that they will remain very private property that nobody else can build on top of. That situation could take us back centuries.
Mp3 is also really accessible. Anyone who's ever worked with audio in an amateur capacity knows how to create an mp3. I don't think many people would know how to properly encode an Opus file. I did an informal survey on Quora a while back, and I was surprised to see that almost every audio industry professional had no idea what Opus even was. Mp3 is, for all intents and purposes, the animated gif of audio.
> I was surprised to see that almost every audio industry professional had no idea what Opus even was. Assuming you mean people who deal with audio production, I'm not surprised. Opus is primarily for real-time audio streaming, not for streaming music or for general audio compression or storage.
True enough: the main type of engineer you'd expect to speak the words "Opus codec" is a telecom/SIP engineer, not an audio engineer. It always feels like tech with origins in telecom never gets much notice outside of that realm, even when it's much more widely applicable. (Look at the set of "core" Erlang libraries to see what I mean. Think most programmers have heard of even half of the relevant standards, even as they implement NIH competitors to those same standards?)
Recognizing this adds legitimacy to software patents. Don't. There have been free and open source MP3 decoders for many years now.
Not believing in software patents is unlikely to change a court's mind. Instead, support formats that are royalty free from the start - Vorbis, Opus, and Codec2, for example.
they mader sure to get rid of this option in the obama administration.
now it is first to file. I can just patent all those formats and troll everyone until a court finally decides to consider prior art correctly when someone finally bites the bullet on a defense instead of deal.
The same can be said about inventions in any sphere. But that's exactly what patents correct for; to give value to ideas independent of them being productized. And so your point is not at all an argument against software patents.
Patents are not meant to be a way to stake a claim on an idea ( https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/can-you-patent-an-idea ) — they're a system where you get a temporary monopoly in exchange for sharing a novel, non-obvious and non-abstract invention.
To be clear, I didn't say that's what patents are for (i.e. their purpose), but what they correct for, i.e. what they do in practice.
But I don't see that the two descriptions are different in practice. Patents incentivize publicly releasing an invention instead of keeping it a trade secret (or letting it languish). The problem this is solving is that ideas aren't valued by the market, only products. But society benefits from ideas independent of products. And so the solution is a system to put value on ideas, ergo patents. This meshes with my alternate description.
Patents are not meant to be a way to stake a claim on an idea ( https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/can-you-patent-an-idea ) — they're a system where you get a temporary monopoly in exchange for sharing a novel, non-obvious and non-abstract invention.
To be clear, I didn't say that's what patents are for (i.e. their purpose), but what they correct for, i.e. what they do in practice. But I don't see that the two descriptions are different in practice. Patents incentivize publicly releasing an invention instead of keeping it a trade secret (or letting it languish). The problem this is solving is that ideas aren't valued by the market, only products. But society bene…
Patents don't purport to offer protection for ideas.