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Poll: Do you support software patents?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Do you support software patents?

#271

Post by dspeyer »

nimrody wrote: post #21
mrcharles wrote: post #16

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.

Trade secrets are less secret than patents, because outside engineers don't carefully avoid reading trade secrets.

Also, hardly any secret can be kept for as long as a patent lasts.

Re: Poll: Do you support software patents?

#272

Post by [deleted] »

_delirium wrote: post #250
quanticle wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to understand, though, that legalese isn't English. It may look like English, and even work like English in ways, but its not English. Saying that legalese and English ought to be equivalent because they share words and syntax is like saying C++ and Java ought to be equivalent because they share keywords and syntax.

For patents in particular, though, a big part of the justification is that they constitute a disclosure of the invention to other practitioners in the field. It's a quid pro quo: we grant you a limited term of protection, in return for you divulging the details. As part of that arrangement, it seems like we ought to require that the disclosure be in English , not merely in a tongue that shares some English words and…

[deleted]

Re: Poll: Do you support software patents?

#273

Post by [deleted] »

_delirium wrote: post #250
quanticle wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to understand, though, that legalese isn't English. It may look like English, and even work like English in ways, but its not English. Saying that legalese and English ought to be equivalent because they share words and syntax is like saying C++ and Java ought to be equivalent because they share keywords and syntax.

For patents in particular, though, a big part of the justification is that they constitute a disclosure of the invention to other practitioners in the field. It's a quid pro quo: we grant you a limited term of protection, in return for you divulging the details. As part of that arrangement, it seems like we ought to require that the disclosure be in English , not merely in a tongue that shares some English words and…

[deleted]

Re: Poll: Do you support software patents?

#274

Post by dspeyer »

_delirium wrote: post #250
quanticle wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to understand, though, that legalese isn't English. It may look like English, and even work like English in ways, but its not English. Saying that legalese and English ought to be equivalent because they share words and syntax is like saying C++ and Java ought to be equivalent because they share keywords and syntax.

For patents in particular, though, a big part of the justification is that they constitute a disclosure of the invention to other practitioners in the field. It's a quid pro quo: we grant you a limited term of protection, in return for you divulging the details. As part of that arrangement, it seems like we ought to require that the disclosure be in English , not merely in a tongue that shares some English words and…

The rumor I hear from lawyers is that they aren't obfuscated to confuse other engineers (who are never going to read it) but to confuse the patent examiners. If they can understand it, they will call it "obvious", but if they can't read it, they'll assume it's patent-worthy.

Re: Poll: Do you support software patents?

#275

Post by dspeyer »

jobeirne wrote: post #107
kenjackson wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory that shouldn't be patentable. What John Carmack is describing is something that is obvious to a craftsperson in the field. OTOH it does still preclude John from being presented with a problem and then doing someone quite ingenious to do a great solution that seems actually quite "novel", to learn that someone else did it years before. But for patents, if you follow logical steps from a given problem then yo…

> In fact the way patents should work is that the patent officer spends a week trying to solve said problem themselves. Does that really sound at all scalable (or even reasonable) to you? I imagine that many of the proposals that move through the patent office are highly contextual and may be simple ideas wrapped up in daunting language. It seems reasonable that it would take far more than a week to even get your arm…

A scalable proposal:

When a suit is filed, an engineer is given the problem and told to build clean-room implementations. If he gets it in under a month, it's obvious and overturned. If he gets it in a day, it's extremely obvious and the plaintiff is fined three times the asking damages. If he gets it in under an hour, thirty times.

This disincentivizes completely bogus patent claims, and should bring the total rate down to something manageable.

Variant:

When the proposal is submitted, the engineer attempts the recreation. If he fails, the patent office pays him. If he succeeds, the attempted patenter pays for a month of his salary. If he succeeds in under a day, the patenter pays a year.

This gets up-front examination, but weakens the incentive to hire good engineers and doesn't guarantee to make trolling unprofitable.

Re: Poll: Do you support software patents?

#276

Post by cperciva »

Locke1689 wrote: post #125
cperciva wrote: post #7

I see no reason why an invention should be unpatentable simply because it involves software. That said, it's obvious that the current system is broken; there are many patents which do not seem to do anything new, and simultaneously the cost of applying for patents deters the group for whom they are most important -- small innovators who are unable to commercialize their inventions. The system needs to be fixed, not t…

This intrigues me, because fundamentally I see software as a form of mathematics. Given that mathematical equations aren't patentable, I don't believe that software should be either. Moreover, it seems that we already have many things in software preventing people from copying code wholesale (SaaS, the fundamental difficulty in reverse engineering compiled binaries). As a professional cryptographer/mathematician, how…

I think there's a big difference between a process and the underlying mathematics which explains why the process works. The matrix factorization which underlies the FFT was known long before Cooley and Tukey came along, but they were the first people to say "hey, this allows us to compute the DFT in O(N log N) time".

I don't think it should be possible to patent an equation, but I'm perfectly find with people patenting (subject to non-obviousness, lack of prior art, etc.) ways of using an equation to do something useful.

If patents had existed when Scipione del Ferro discovered how to solve cubics, I would have no problem with him receiving a patent on his method -- but because patents did not exist, he never published his method (he kept it as a "trade secret") and it wasn't revealed until 19 years after he died.

Re: Poll: Do you support software patents?

#277

Post by _mrc »

If you're thinking of patenting your software, think about how useful it would be if you had to license absolutely everything you take for granted - algorithms, data structures, compiler optimisations, I/O mechanisms.

Patents were intended to encourage and reward creativity. When they're being used to stifle it, it's time to abolish them.

Re: Poll: Do you support software patents?

#279

Post by westicle »

MBlume wrote: post #232
nitrogen wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is presently true, but shouldn't it be possible to define a legalese that can be parsed as English as well?

Yes, but the fact that it's impossible is considered a feature, not a bug, by those who use it -- it keeps the bastards employed.

That's one way to look at it.

Alternatively, you could say that the point of "legalese" is to define and convey ideas more explicitly than they can be defined and conveyed in English. Try writing a contract in "Plain English" - it will necessarily be full of ambiguity and uncertainty, which defeats the purpose of having a written contract.

Similarly, although programmers don't write code in "Plain English" I don't think we should begrudge them the right to keep using obfuscatory programming languages - even if it keeps the bastards employed.

Re: Poll: Do you support software patents?

#280

Post by monochromatic »

I don't really mean to complain about this poll, because it's a legitimate question and it's sparked some good discussion. But having a poll about software patents on HN feels a little like having a poll about the ATF over on Glocktalk (or some other suitable analogy). Of course everyone (to within experimental error) is against.
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