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Enough Is Enough

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161–170 of 193 posts

Re: Enough Is Enough

#161

Post by lallysingh »

seats wrote: post #141
jpadvo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is inevitable. There is not an inherent reason why the Patent Office needs to award trivial patents. If they tighten up (or apply) their standards, the problem would be tremendously reduced.

The USPTO is overwhelmed and understaffed, so I can understand why they have poor QC on patents, particularly when they require technical knowledge to determine triviality. What I don't get though is why it seems to be such a challenge to prove the invalidity of these crap patents in court. The google loss to bedrock (the linux kernel troll) is a high profile example of this. Maybe the standards that need to be looke…

So, to put it bluntly, they can't do a good job, so they shouldn't do the job at all. I agree.

Re: Enough Is Enough

#162

Post by lallysingh »

bostonpete wrote: post #57
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think your company deserves to be protected against others independently developing a similar algorithm?

This argument can be made against patents in general. If people want to argue that all patents are bad, that's fine, but most people draw a tenuous distinction between software patents and other kinds of patents. I agree with DrJokepu -- the real problem (assuming that you're not opposed to all patents) is that patents are being given for ideas that are moderately to extremely obvious.

.. and that they're for 20 years. That's 5 generations in software, easy.

Re: Enough Is Enough

#163

Post by pbhjpbhj »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #93
DrJokepu wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your question assumes two things that I haven't said, implied and are simply untrue. I'm not sure if that's due to a misunderstanding on your part or a lack of clarity on my part. First, it assumes that we want to be protected against "others independently developing a similar algorithm". Second, it assumes that I "believe that my company deserves to be protected" from such other people. We're not concerned about oth…

I was asking this question because protection against others independently developing a similar algorithm is what the patent system provides, and that's why many people, including myself, are opposed to it. I wasn't assuming that you personally or even your employer actually wanted that kind of protection. So my rather rhetorical question was intended to highlight that discrepancy. You want to prevent others from cop…

>"protection against others independently developing a similar algorithm is what the patent system provides, and that's why many people, including myself, are opposed to it"

Flip this around. It is protection against others wasting research on something that has already been invented and [supposedly] enables them to add their research to your own and thus add effort rather than waste it. Is that not a noble cause?

Patents have a double purpose: One is to ensure implementation details of inventions enter the public domain and the second is to provide a limited monopoly as a bribe to ensure that the public domain will ultimately benefit.

In this way patents promote innovation, encouraging the release of new technological developments quickly to other practitioners in the art and so accelerate said development.

The only (large) part I see broken in the current patent system is that the duration of monopolies hasn't reduced to keep pace with the acceleration in the life cycle of new technologies.

Re: Enough Is Enough

#164

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jxcole wrote: post #69
Joakal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's called a copyright. People have disputed the originality of movie ideas including Matrix [0] and Harry Potter [1]. [0] http://blogcritics.org/video/article/author-sues-matrix-writ... [1] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/18/entertainment/main...

Totally not copyright. Copyright applies to software too, but patents are the one everyone cares about. The idea of patenting plots is a good one. In fact, it might even be legal _except_ that everything that can be done in a book has been done already. Software is such a young field these immodest trolls are able to exploit them. So to clarify: Saying two different movies both of which has the "friend turns out to b…

>"everything that can be done in a book has been done already"

Doubtful. But, given that if diversity in movie plots benefits mankind (!) then offering an incentive to develop a new plot could be worth it. If the plot is entirely disclosed so that it can be used for free by anyone in a few years then is this not a benefit?

Re: Enough Is Enough

#165

Post by fauigerzigerk »

MaysonL wrote: post #155
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was asking this question because protection against others independently developing a similar algorithm is what the patent system provides, and that's why many people, including myself, are opposed to it. I wasn't assuming that you personally or even your employer actually wanted that kind of protection. So my rather rhetorical question was intended to highlight that discrepancy. You want to prevent others from cop…

The trouble is that it's a lot easier to copy an algorithm without in any way violating copyright than it is to copy it without violating a patent on it.

I'm not so sure about that. If the license prohibits reverse engineering and someone still does it, that's clearly a violation of the law. If a commercial company does it, it's going to be difficult for them to keep secret as some employees will surely know about it.

I agree that part of what patents intend to do, protecting original invention from copycats, is legitimate. But if it's done in a way that punishes original invention that seems counter productive to me.

Re: Enough Is Enough

#166

Post by bostonpete »

lallysingh wrote: post #162
bostonpete wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument can be made against patents in general. If people want to argue that all patents are bad, that's fine, but most people draw a tenuous distinction between software patents and other kinds of patents. I agree with DrJokepu -- the real problem (assuming that you're not opposed to all patents) is that patents are being given for ideas that are moderately to extremely obvious.

.. and that they're for 20 years. That's 5 generations in software, easy.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. 20 years is 5 generations for many types of hardware too.

Re: Enough Is Enough

#167

Post by ChuckMcM »

russell wrote: post #145
ChuckMcM wrote: post #97

"I believe that software patents should not exist. They are a tax on innovation. And software is closer to media than it is to hardware. Patenting software is like patenting music." This is what I fear. I worry this idea will take hold and we'll get copyright protection for software 'design' instead of patent protection, and then that happens, the Lodsys crap will have a lifetime of 85 years not 20. We need to be abl…

There has never been copyright for design. Copyright for source code and for binaries works quite well for protecting software from wholesale copying, piracy notwithstanding. Software ideas are a dime a dozen. The real protection comes from the difficulty of the implementation, the pace of change, and the first mover advantage.

Copyright is provided for the expression of a work. So if I tell the story of a girl who wears a red cloak and visits her ailing grandmother who lives in a remote estate, only to find her grandmother has been eaten by an anthromorphized wolf. I run the risk of violating the copyright on the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Except that it was a folk tale before 1900 and yet even though its 'out of copyright' there is a pall over whether or not Google can show you their scanned copy from 1909 of the story illustrated by artists at the time.

My thesis is quite simple;

1) There must be a doctrine for protecting the origination and implementation of complex systems, whether their components are manufactured from solid materials or are simply algorithmic components.

You'll recall that software patents came to be when it was shown that implementation via software was indistinguishable from implementation in hardware for some classes of problem. Your "first mover' advantage is worthless if someone else controls all the distribution.

Further, not all software efforts are 'trivial' and while we see those stories all the time I don't believe you could make a similar argument for the implementation of assymetric cryptography as a 'trivial' software patent.

2) The current system is clearly flawed in many ways, but the concept is not.

3) Pushing otherwise technologically illiterate but 'wanting to help' policy makers toward the concept that all software is more like creating 'art' than it like creating 'machines.' Would have the un-intended side effect of having those policy makers moving the necessary protection doctrine to the only other set of laws we have which are copyright.

Copyright, being even more easily argued than software, has been completely corrupted by media 'barons' and their efforts around the world. Which is why the question of whether or not I could legally copy a book printed in 1900 about a story that was 'old' even then, is currently 'questionable' whereas building a steam engine and selling it for profit is not.

Re: Enough Is Enough

#168

Post by biafra »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #165
MaysonL wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that it's a lot easier to copy an algorithm without in any way violating copyright than it is to copy it without violating a patent on it.

I'm not so sure about that. If the license prohibits reverse engineering and someone still does it, that's clearly a violation of the law. If a commercial company does it, it's going to be difficult for them to keep secret as some employees will surely know about it. I agree that part of what patents intend to do, protecting original invention from copycats, is legitimate. But if it's done in a way that punishes orig…

If the law allows reverse engineering (like here in Germany) your license can prohibit it as much as it wants. It's still legal and no violation of the law.

Re: Enough Is Enough

#169

Post by biafra »

mindcrime wrote: post #157
citadrianne wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's hard to predict what abolishing patents would do to innovation. For example, there are no patents in fashion, which actually ends up putting pressure on creators to be superinnovative to stay ahead of the copycats. Ref: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang///id/866

My personal opinion - for what that's worth - is that this kind of scenario comes pretty close to representing what would happen if there were no patents in software (or any other field for that matter). Innovation would still happen, and would probably happen even faster than it does now, because of the "arms race" effect. Simply put, a firm would be forced to innovate constantly, quickly and fiercely, to stay in fr…

In Europe there are no software patents. Do they develop software and innovate there?

Re: Enough Is Enough

#170

Post by lwat »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #97

"I believe that software patents should not exist. They are a tax on innovation. And software is closer to media than it is to hardware. Patenting software is like patenting music." This is what I fear. I worry this idea will take hold and we'll get copyright protection for software 'design' instead of patent protection, and then that happens, the Lodsys crap will have a lifetime of 85 years not 20. We need to be abl…

No I disagree. We don't need patents. We just don't. The world, on average, is much better off without them.
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