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Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun?

inventropy.us

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Re: Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun?

#41

Post by bbarn »

Why is it with patents everything has to be nothing ever, never a good reason? I'm sure my perspective here might get this downvoted to oblivion, but really, think for a second what would happen if tomorrow, no software was patentable? Why would a large company focus any effort on R&D, new idea development, vs investing that money in just ripping off the competition and scaling it better? (not that that ever happens as is..) There are lots of us that make our living designing or developing things that some business or shareholder wants developed simply because they want to be the ones that did it, or did it in a way no one else could steal.

I don't think zero patents for software is a great idea, but I also don't think the lawyerization of patents has helped anyone long term. Perhaps a better approach is to get actual developers and software professionals in patent approval/dispute resolution positions? A parallel to that might be the advent of the Test Engineer or the Dev Ops positions. Test Engineering showed the world the value someone with development skills could have over classic point and try to break testing, just as Dev Ops showed what having some dev chops does for deployment/network infrastructure.

Re: Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun?

#42

Post by shmerl »

bbarn wrote: post #41

Why is it with patents everything has to be nothing ever, never a good reason? I'm sure my perspective here might get this downvoted to oblivion, but really, think for a second what would happen if tomorrow, no software was patentable? Why would a large company focus any effort on R&D, new idea development, vs investing that money in just ripping off the competition and scaling it better? (not that that ever happens…

I think zero patents for software is a good idea. At least it's better than leaving the situation as is. May be there are better ways of fixing the current mess (something more generic, than simply carving software out of patentability, since such singled exceptions make the law more complicated), but I didn't see practical proposals.

Re: Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun?

#43

Post by [deleted] »

beepp wrote: post #36
austincheney wrote: post #19

I included a full language specification with my patent application. Reading boring specifications can also be a drag, so I even wrote a version that sorts information by color. Its all available on http://mailmarkup.org/ If you are aware of any prior art please do the right thing. I have not been able to find any, but that does not mean it doesn't exist.

I have a few thoughts: - Your patent application is much more readable than most. That's a good start. - hosay123 has already said basically what I would've - you may have found something that no one else has done 100% before, but it is clearly very similar to HTML in email with a few minor differences. Here are a few examples that I think would bring both the idea's novelty and non-obviousness into question: http://…

[deleted]

Re: Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun?

#44

Post by krschultz »

bbarn wrote: post #41

Why is it with patents everything has to be nothing ever, never a good reason? I'm sure my perspective here might get this downvoted to oblivion, but really, think for a second what would happen if tomorrow, no software was patentable? Why would a large company focus any effort on R&D, new idea development, vs investing that money in just ripping off the competition and scaling it better? (not that that ever happens…

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Note that according the US Constitution the most important reason for the existence of patents & copyright is the promotion of science & art. If the net result of the patent system is not promoting science & art, it is not operating as intended. Certainly there will be winners and losers under any scheme, but in my experience the current setup is a net drag on innovation. Making buckets of money by being first and being innovative is reward enough to incentive progress. These days most companies filing for patents are doing it defensively anyway.

Re: Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun?

#46

Post by PythonicAlpha »

bbarn wrote: post #41

Why is it with patents everything has to be nothing ever, never a good reason? I'm sure my perspective here might get this downvoted to oblivion, but really, think for a second what would happen if tomorrow, no software was patentable? Why would a large company focus any effort on R&D, new idea development, vs investing that money in just ripping off the competition and scaling it better? (not that that ever happens…

When the software business was young, software was not patent-able at all. And that was good so, because if it where in the same degree as today, I guess we all would still have DOS on our desktops or worse.

Just think, quicksort would have been patented. Or binary trees, or arrays.

The horror scenario that you give is just a bad example that could have been constructed by patent attorneys.

Of course you can not just rip-off the software of a competitor, because the software itself is copyrighted.

We all are profiting from the fact, that many things in the software world are just not patented. Because in the knowledge world and more so in the software world, nobody just sits on his island and makes something totally new ... everybody depends on the work of others.

The patent system taken to extreme: Only a handful companies dominate the market and nobody else can do anything anymore. As much I understood, in the hard disk business we have this situation already -- three to five big corporations dominating the market, because they own the key patents.

Re: Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun?

#47

Post by onion2k »

bbarn wrote: post #41

Why is it with patents everything has to be nothing ever, never a good reason? I'm sure my perspective here might get this downvoted to oblivion, but really, think for a second what would happen if tomorrow, no software was patentable? Why would a large company focus any effort on R&D, new idea development, vs investing that money in just ripping off the competition and scaling it better? (not that that ever happens…

Patents don't really work in software because a patent is supposed to be a temporary monopoly on a method of implementing something, and in software there's always more than one way to implement something. A patent on, for example, "enabling the user to buy something with one click" is far too broad - it covers any implementation on a relatively trivial idea. That's the fundamental problem with patents today - at some point they switched from being protection of a process for making something to "idea copyright". Now, the broader you can make your patent the more money you'll reap from it.

Patenting an algorithm, if it's truly non-obvious and hasn't been done before is fine in my opinion. The R&D dollars should still be spent, but spent on things that move humanity forward and not nonsense like buying a monopoly on "a process people have done for decades, but on a computer!"

Re: Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun?

#48

Post by ihnorton »

austincheney wrote: post #31
carrotleads wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell us in 2-3 sentences the application of this patent and then it would easier to come up with prior art examples. Like hosay said is it like a "novel" bus ticket design but for emails.

The intended goal of this thing is to fully describe email threads in a manner that is durable. To my knowledge, even today, there are no structures or grammars that are capable of describing email content and fully retaining their original definitions after full exposure the various software of the email platform. Rich text format comes close, though.

http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-HTMLThreading-0105

("but XSLT" does not meet the standard of non-obviousness to a person of normal skill in the art)

Re: Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun?

#49

Post by rcthompson »

PythonicAlpha wrote: post #29
dropit_sphere wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse, patent obfuscation is baldly contrary to the purpose of patents, which is to make the knowledge contained in them available to the public. Were someone to start a startup where users got paid-by-the-view for making educational videos, that would not be too far off from the original intent of patents .

Most of today's patents don't contain any valuable knowledge that could be useful for the public. Also the invention does not. So it is not that bad. Of course, there are some patents that could contain some valuable information, but today's patent attorneys are drilled to hide any valuable information from public.

Why doesn't this run afoul of the enablement requirement?

Re: Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun?

#50

Post by euank »

onion2k wrote: post #47
bbarn wrote: post #41

Why is it with patents everything has to be nothing ever, never a good reason? I'm sure my perspective here might get this downvoted to oblivion, but really, think for a second what would happen if tomorrow, no software was patentable? Why would a large company focus any effort on R&D, new idea development, vs investing that money in just ripping off the competition and scaling it better? (not that that ever happens…

Patents don't really work in software because a patent is supposed to be a temporary monopoly on a method of implementing something, and in software there's always more than one way to implement something. A patent on, for example, "enabling the user to buy something with one click" is far too broad - it covers any implementation on a relatively trivial idea. That's the fundamental problem with patents today - at som…

The problem with "patenting an algorithm" is that it's "not allowed" by the rules of patents. You cannot patent laws of nature, like math (not that that stopped everyone [0]). Algorithms are purely mathematical constructs. The idea that someone "owns" something just because they discovered it, not invented it, is scary.

Of course, I'll give you that algorithms sort of feels like a gray area. Even though they're pure math, they also sometimes feel like inventions to me.

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Math-You-Cant-Use-Copyright/dp/0815749...

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