51–60 of 319 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
devils advocate: What if you independently came up with tablet like device and called it an 'iPad'
That's not a patent question.
I'm curious though: what do people see as being the alternative?
In principle, they could give a lone programmer or small company that invents something awesome the edge needed to break in to a market dominated by large companies. I consider this to be desirable. In practice, they're used by large companies to prevent lone programmers or small companies from breaking in to the markets they dominate. I do not consider this to be desirable. They're more trouble than they're worth.
My vote would be "Yes, if the Patent office approved only real innovative things". For example if I come up with some revolutionary face recognition technology, that seems novel enough to be patented. But if I just make a form with a submit button (Google's Patented home page), or Amazon's one click purchasing those are just ridiculous as a patents.
I have a hard time with this topic. Of course the only thing that ever gets covered in main-stream tech media is the abuse by patent trolls suing Company X because they are using their "electronic key-input device" patent to type on their computers. We all roll our eyes and go "Damn these patents! DAMN THEM!" But then I think of the purpose of the patent system in general: to protect and encourage innovation. I think…
That requirement was abolished (in the US, at least) in 1880. I've been told that the USPTO still asks for working models when people try to patent perpetual motion machines, but I don't know if this is true.
I can't stand the idea that I might be at my computer, working with code, and develop something independently which later causes me to get sued. Abolish all software patents. edited to add "software".
If you abolish all patents you leave two options for inventors [some patents truly are ingenious]: - Keep it as a trade secret. You get one source for a product, and less innovation. - Publish it and suffer the consequences of the big companies copying it and making profit on your work.
Let's take what I often here cited as one of the best software patents (personally, I think it is the worst.. but that's another story), RSA. Did that patent really prevent others from using/profiting on it? Hardly (although in most cases the "profiting off of" thing is a stretch, unless the explicit purpose of their product was cryptographic in nature.
Now, what if they had kept it a trade secret? Just look at their RC4. They kept it a secret and got a few years of exclusivity but eventually we all got the algorithm, because that's just how software works.
20 year exclusivity contracts are waaaay too long. I think the trade secrets route where "you have it until others figure it out" is far more fair and workable.
I can't stand the idea that I might be at my computer, working with code, and develop something independently which later causes me to get sued. Abolish all software patents. edited to add "software".
Conversely a software idea can be thought up in a few minutes and implemented in the same. In app purchases isn't exactly a clever idea or something that was revelatory. It was simple software evolution.
I think that the principle of patents is okay. Invest time and money developing an idea, with a guarantee of exclusivity on executing on that idea in the marketplace for a period of time. It encourages a level of risk taking for "getting there first".
Software patents aren't any different in many respects because somebody has to go through the time and effort to actually come up with the idea.
The problem that software patents face is that, while many of the ideas are new and innovative to non-software people, software people tend to groan about seemingly obvious amalgamation of common software techniques into another idea. But really, most patents (non-software) are the same:
Cooking an egg with an electric heater http://www.google.com/patents?id=RgcEAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...
Glasses for a chicken http://www.google.com/patents?id=M5BGAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...
Making water hot with the sun http://www.google.com/patents?id=YBwrAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...
Resoling a shoe http://www.google.com/patents?id=895CAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...
Keeping paper dry http://www.google.com/patents?id=7IBqAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...
That was 60 seconds of searching the patent database of common sense ideas. Clearly obviousness is not much of a threshold in patents, software or otherwise.
Perhaps a better way to think of software patents is not "obvious ideas" but "soon to be obvious ideas". In my experience, most software patents become blindingly obvious after the fact, but if they were so obvious beforehand, somebody would have:
a) implemented it into a working system (prior art)
b) patented it themselves first
Our principle problem is that the world of software moves breathtakingly fast, and keeping soon-to-be-obvious ideas locked away for a long time can seem ridiculous. But make no mistake, even implementing some obvious ideas can be the investment of millions of dollars in R&D.
For example, a system integrator I know of had an IR&D program that spent $130 million dollars just in the R&D phase for what amounts to off-the-shelf software, installed on a few VMs, on rackmounted servers, in a large plastic shippable box with a few perl scripts and cron jobs hacked together to shuttle data between the COTS software and an Oracle database running in one of the VMs. Obvious? Perhaps. But nobody had gone through the trouble to actually do it, and spending that kind of overhead was a significant risk.
Should they own this idea for the next decade or so? Probably not, but how about the next 12-24 months? At least long enough so that they get a head start against competitors who didn't get there first.
I do think the patent system is need of serious reform w/r to getting rid of patents with prior art. Fighting a bad patent can be more expensive than getting one in the first place. And software patents are too frequently granted in cases where there is obvious prior art, common algorithms for example.
If we really want to fight software patents of obvious ideas, or permutations of obvious ideas, perhaps somebody should write a tool that simply combine every obvious idea in software into some greater system, then documents it all thus creating prior art that stops all of these so called bad patents...and then patent the "prior art permuter". In other words, if the ideas are obvious, a piece of software that does this should be buildable. I call this the "obviousness of software patents theorem".
I can't stand the idea that I might be at my computer, working with code, and develop something independently which later causes me to get sued. Abolish all software patents. edited to add "software".
> I can't stand the idea that I might be at my computer, working with code, and develop something independently which later causes me to get sued. Abolish all patents. I can't stand the idea that I might be in my shop/lab, working with metal/wood/plastic/chemicals, and develop something independently which later causes me to get sued. Abolish all patents.
Programmers on the other hand can indeed pop open an editor, spend a few minutes with Ruby on Rails implementing "a standard business procedure, but on the Internet!", and violate a patent. Or multiple patents. In fact, the very fact that we have patent trolls that can run around and sue business after business after business for the same patent, while the businesses have no evidence that shows they have communicated with each other about the patented subject, ought to be proof positive that the patent is obvious and shouldn't be patentable.
An amazing number of patents that actually are being litigated really are "X, but on a computer!" or some variant thereof ("X, but on a network device!" is one the company I work for has gotten hit with). I'm not exaggerating, for all the verbiage and diagrams this really is a reasonable summary of many of them.
Your metaphor fails, because what is not a realistic risk for people working in shops or labs is a perfectly reasonable risk for a hobby programmer, let alone a pro.
Perhaps programmers are overreacting because of all the bad ones and there is a core of goodness deep down in there, but I'm willing to find out the hard way.