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New Zealand bans some software patents

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Re: New Zealand bans some software patents

#171

Post by foobarbazqux »

betterunix wrote: post #117
foobarbazqux wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the reason I brought up physical property is because if that's not a complete fiction then it's bizarre for intellectual property to be a complete fiction. Governments don't create things out of whole cloth, the laws always correspond to something, even if they do it badly.

"the reason I brought up physical property is because if that's not a complete fiction then it's bizarre for intellectual property to be a complete fiction" I am not following your logic here. The notion of physical property predates written records and codes of law, even if it has been approached differently by different cultures. The notion of intellectual property is a far more recent development that has nowhere…

The intellectual property laws are protections around concepts that existed previously. IP refers to trademarks, patents, trade secrets, and copyright.

Trademarks protect brands and go back a very long way; primitives would use them to distinguish themselves from each other, farmers would mark sheep, etc.

Patents are really protections on inventions. Inventions also go back a long way, although they were previously treated as trade secrets rather than open descriptions. Reverse engineering and a desire for openness instead of secrecy created the need for patents (I'm not saying the governments are doing a good job.) A chef's secret sauce is his intellectual property.

The idea of copyright stems from a desire to protect the older concept of authorship and goes back to antiquity as well; drawings in caves were certainly made by cavemen; the Greek philosophers certainly originated their words; narration in the bible is attributed to certain authors (although there is sometimes dispute here); Mozart (barely) survived on the patronage of his compositions.

That's all I mean by it's not a complete fiction: it's a set of protections around things that we already valued but that were started to get degraded by modern society.

Re: New Zealand bans some software patents

#172

Post by homosaur »

orclev wrote: post #136
homosaur wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're aiming at but if you're holding the shotgun, that's not government. Government is when I cede the right to protect my forest with a shotgun in order that a government entity will do it for me. We give government a monopoly on force under the agreement that I generally should not be shooting people to protect my rights.

That's not entirely true, at least in the United States. That's part of the purpose of the 2nd amendment. We cede some of our rights to use force to the government, but things like Castle Doctrine and the 2nd amendment mean we also retain those rights in specific circumstances. Another aspect of the 2nd amendment people often overlook (particularly gun control advocates) was that it was originally intended as a check…

In general, the point of something like castle doctrine is to maintain defense of life, not property. If I went down to the edge of my property and someone came onto my property and was not threatening me you can't then shoot them. The argument for castle doctrine is you can consider the act of home invasion itself to represent deadly force and can respond freely.

Castle doctrine is a states-only policy and the feds have no position on it. The second amendment states only that people's right to bear arms shall not be infringed, it doesn't state anything about the application of force.

I don't want to get into this debate on HN but there's not that much evidence that the 2nd Amendment was meant to be a check on the army. It's related to the long-standing English principle of the right to self-defense and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. The English always thought you had the right to defend yourself with deadly force and a long standing tradition of a natural right to bear arms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms

Re: New Zealand bans some software patents

#173

Post by skybrian »

TylerE wrote: post #169
skybrian wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not as black and white as it seems. An implementation of a compression algorithm is typically a particular library written in a particular computer language. A specification of a compression algorithm is typically described in a specification document such as an RFC. We don't call an RFC an implementation.

Some reason, if someone comes up with a highly valuable proprietary algorithm, I don't seem them issuing an RFC on it.

Now you're nitpicking. The only reason I mentioned RPC's is as an well-known example of a specification, to contrast that with a concrete implementation.

My point is that an algorithm is more general than any particular implementation. They aren't concrete. They're abstract. (And of course if patents only covered one concrete implementation then nobody would bother getting them.)

Re: New Zealand bans some software patents

#174

Post by TylerE »

skybrian wrote: post #173
TylerE wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some reason, if someone comes up with a highly valuable proprietary algorithm, I don't seem them issuing an RFC on it.

Now you're nitpicking. The only reason I mentioned RPC's is as an well-known example of a specification, to contrast that with a concrete implementation. My point is that an algorithm is more general than any particular implementation. They aren't concrete. They're abstract. (And of course if patents only covered one concrete implementation then nobody would bother getting them.)

I don't think it's nitpicky. Often the bulk of the work is implementing a given algorithm efficiently, instead of just writing a formal paper with lots of hand-wavy "a sufficiently smart compiler..."

Re: New Zealand bans some software patents

#175

Post by Karunamon »

orclev wrote: post #136
homosaur wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're aiming at but if you're holding the shotgun, that's not government. Government is when I cede the right to protect my forest with a shotgun in order that a government entity will do it for me. We give government a monopoly on force under the agreement that I generally should not be shooting people to protect my rights.

That's not entirely true, at least in the United States. That's part of the purpose of the 2nd amendment. We cede some of our rights to use force to the government, but things like Castle Doctrine and the 2nd amendment mean we also retain those rights in specific circumstances. Another aspect of the 2nd amendment people often overlook (particularly gun control advocates) was that it was originally intended as a check…

>your average group of citizens wouldn't stand a chance against the military in serious armed conflict

I disagree with this - traditionally the US military hasn't fared very well in guerrilla warfare scenarios. Look at the number of deaths out in the middle east - fighting in city streets, that kind of thing.

I'd also wager that if the military was used against the populace, a great deal of the military would defect out of principle. So not only do you have an armed public in unfavorable conditions, our hypothetical evil government also has an unknown number of traitors in the ranks.

That leaves more indiscriminate options (bombs of various flavors) - and if things ever got that bad, we'd probably have other countries getting involved and even more defection.

In short, it's not near as simple as "government has tanks, therefore government wins".

Re: New Zealand bans some software patents

#176

Post by jandrewrogers »

leeoniya wrote: post #139
cromwellian wrote: post #72

Software patents are an abomination. I could stomach copyright on software, because at least one is still permitted independent implementation and expression. I can't copy your code, but I can rewrite it. Software patents on the other hand put a fence around ideas themselves. You can't draw a cursor using XOR by implementing it yourself, period, for 20 years. The patent system is deeply broken, and it doesn't even st…

"Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement." -- John Carmack from http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/patents/carmack

This is obviously not true in many cases. There are countless algorithm problems where decades and thousands of pages of published literature on the problem go by before some researcher manages to make a material advance. Computer science is full of cases like this.

If all of the interesting problems were so trivial to solve, they would not be "problems" by definition. The idea that smart programmers could solve these problems any time they wanted to if they put their minds to it is unrealistic. They are considered "hard problems" precisely because countless smart programmers have failed to find a solution after no small amount of effort.

Re: New Zealand bans some software patents

#177

Post by nitrogen »

TylerE wrote: post #174
skybrian wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you're nitpicking. The only reason I mentioned RPC's is as an well-known example of a specification, to contrast that with a concrete implementation. My point is that an algorithm is more general than any particular implementation. They aren't concrete. They're abstract. (And of course if patents only covered one concrete implementation then nobody would bother getting them.)

I don't think it's nitpicky. Often the bulk of the work is implementing a given algorithm efficiently, instead of just writing a formal paper with lots of hand-wavy "a sufficiently smart compiler..."

But that's not innovation or an inventive step, that's just hard labor, sweat of the brow.

"Except, of course, patents aren't about the sweat of your brow and how much work you put into something." - http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130415/16444322713/suprem...

Re: New Zealand bans some software patents

#178

Post by nitrogen »

rayiner wrote: post #149
troyastorino wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal concepts that are derivative from the natural right to liberty, e.g. freedom of speech, are protected by the government, but that is not the same as them being created by the government. An individual certainly has liberty, and thus freedom of speech, in the context of a state of nature. He does not, however, have a guarantee that an organization with a monopoly on the use of force, i.e. a government, will prot…

I can't believe that there are so many people in a scientific, technical, industry like the software industry that believe in something as facially superstitious and handwavy as "natural rights."

I can't believe that there are so many people in a scientific, technical, industry like the software industry that believe in something as facially superstitious and handwavy as "natural rights."

As a first pass at a definition, anything you could do in the absence of any other people stopping you from doing it could be considered a "natural right."

That's not superstitious or handwavy, and I didn't have to belittle my audience to express it.

Re: New Zealand bans some software patents

#179

Post by ScottBurson »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #176
leeoniya wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement." -- John Carmack from http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/patents/carmack

This is obviously not true in many cases. There are countless algorithm problems where decades and thousands of pages of published literature on the problem go by before some researcher manages to make a material advance. Computer science is full of cases like this. If all of the interesting problems were so trivial to solve, they would not be "problems" by definition. The idea that smart programmers could solve thes…

Well -- there are hard problems -- and then there are hard problems.

It seems that a lot of patents are being granted for solutions to problems that are only moderately difficult, if even that. Certainly, I have seen a number for which the solution seems quite standard given the problem. I think what happens here is that new technologies create new problems, which though not deep, are novel. These are solved in quite standard ways, in many cases; but since the problem is novel, technically, so is the solution, so the PTO grants a patent for it. And a large fraction of the patents being issued are of this nature.

I think the solution is to restrict patents to problems that are demonstrably hard -- of the kind that you describe, where there is objective evidence (in the published literature, for example) that people have thought about the problem for some time without solving it.

Re: New Zealand bans some software patents

#180

Post by saraid216 »

humanrebar wrote: post #60
foobarbazqux wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. Every legal concept is entirely the government's creation, including both physical and intellectual property, so I'm not sure it's worth quibbling about that part.

While intellectual property is almost entirely a legal creation, government is not necessary for property to exist. Indeed, John Locke considered property to be a natural right along with life and liberty.

Incidentally, this entire thread can basically be summarized here:

http://www.justiceharvard.org/2011/02/episode-04/

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