Software patents are here to stay. Don't fight a battle you can't win, the Patent Office is not going to throw away the billions of dollars they make on this... But you can make it so they get to keep their revenues, but we get to add rules that help invalidate patents, or limits how much the troll gets.
The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community
11–20 of 134 posts
Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community
#12Groklaw's editorializing has gone way downhill since the SCO days. E.g. "I know the USPTO doesn't want to hear that software and patents totally need to get a divorce, but since most software developers believe that, maybe somebody should at least mention it to them, if only as a future topic for discussion. Most developers I know believe software is unpatentable subject matter." Ask software developers who work in d…
Ask software developers who work in defense, aerospace, medical devices, telecommunications, video/audio processing, and other capital-intensive, R&D-intensive fields. I've worked in several of those fields, and I have yet to meet these proponents of software patents you're talking about. Any advantage to having a patent on the results of your own R&D seems to be far outweighed by the persistent threat of being sued…
> If something was useful enough and available enough for multiple parties to invent/discover/exploit it independently
What makes you think the technologies in question are invented independently? Take the Motorola Mobility patents, for example. Most of the patent licensees aren't in a position to hire all the experts and do all the R&D it took Motorola to develop that technology. They just use the end result of all that R&D produced by Motorola. If there was no patent system, they would just use the end result without compensating Motorola for all the work of developing the technology.
Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community
#13Groklaw's editorializing has gone way downhill since the SCO days. E.g. "I know the USPTO doesn't want to hear that software and patents totally need to get a divorce, but since most software developers believe that, maybe somebody should at least mention it to them, if only as a future topic for discussion. Most developers I know believe software is unpatentable subject matter." Ask software developers who work in d…
There will always be some who want to keep a broken system around if they can earn revenue from it. If money can be extracted, you can never get an complete 100% unanimous vote in fixing the system.
For people who owns land, some do not like regulations that forbid dumping toxins into it. But most societies know that forbidding the dumping of toxins are preferable over allowing it because of the ecological damage the toxins causes to society.
Patents causes an ecological damage to the software community. It might be profitable for a few, but for society as a whole it is a net loss. So long the cost-benefit analyze shows that, patents should have no place in software. Considering that patents are granted monopolies given by the government and enforced by the state, if society can't get more from software patents than it cost, society should not be in the businesses of granting said patents.
Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community
#14Groklaw's editorializing has gone way downhill since the SCO days. E.g. "I know the USPTO doesn't want to hear that software and patents totally need to get a divorce, but since most software developers believe that, maybe somebody should at least mention it to them, if only as a future topic for discussion. Most developers I know believe software is unpatentable subject matter." Ask software developers who work in d…
> The guys who write software that implements radio waveforms don't have the same views on patents as the guys who write software to optimize ad display Can you elaborate? It seems bizarre to me that formulas can not be patented, but telling a general-purpose computer to execute that formula, can.
It depends on your definition of "general purpose computer." Technically, a signal processor buried in a radio may be a "general purpose computer," but as a practical matter it's no different than an ASIC that implements the same logic in hardware.
Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community
#15Software patents are here to stay. Don't fight a battle you can't win, the Patent Office is not going to throw away the billions of dollars they make on this... But you can make it so they get to keep their revenues, but we get to add rules that help invalidate patents, or limits how much the troll gets.
I disagree. If we can reclaim that algorithms are mathematical and therefore unpatentable we can regain our ability to actually innovate without fear.
Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community
#16Groklaw's editorializing has gone way downhill since the SCO days. E.g. "I know the USPTO doesn't want to hear that software and patents totally need to get a divorce, but since most software developers believe that, maybe somebody should at least mention it to them, if only as a future topic for discussion. Most developers I know believe software is unpatentable subject matter." Ask software developers who work in d…
Ask them if they'd be OK with a patent that simply read "using a computer to transmit a radio wave" and see if they'd get behind trolls suing every texi-cab company that uses a dispatch radio tuned by a PLL and a microcontroller.
That might help them understand where this is headed (and already arrived in many cases).
They want to patent that brilliant little algo they spent months on to eek out that seemingly impossible spread spectrum noise piercing scheme that they finally got working. That's not how it happens at the patent office these days. Worse still, after all those months of creating something genuinely usefull, they're likely to be sued by someone who's never touched a radio, or made a product, and has a patent that reads more like "walky-talkies with teh interwebs inside".
Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community
#17"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." -- John Carmack
That's one possible narrative. Another would be:
The idea that I can be presented with a problem, hire a dozen experts and spend millions of dollars coming up with a solution to the problem, and have someone come along and just copy the solution and use it in their own product to compete with me is horrifying.
Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community
#18Software patents are here to stay. Don't fight a battle you can't win, the Patent Office is not going to throw away the billions of dollars they make on this... But you can make it so they get to keep their revenues, but we get to add rules that help invalidate patents, or limits how much the troll gets.
The patent office isn't the entity with either the most say or the most desire to keep things the way they are. Congress determines whether or not the patent office even gets the fees or they go straight into the treasury.
Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community
#19Groklaw's editorializing has gone way downhill since the SCO days. E.g. "I know the USPTO doesn't want to hear that software and patents totally need to get a divorce, but since most software developers believe that, maybe somebody should at least mention it to them, if only as a future topic for discussion. Most developers I know believe software is unpatentable subject matter." Ask software developers who work in d…
I have worked in defense. Getting a patent was like "Oooh, that's cool". Finding out if there were patents in the way to do anything was weeks of supporting legal's searches. I'm sure someone, somewhere, at some level, likes patents. I don't think it's engineers though.
I also worked in defense. The company was run by engineering PhD's and the end result of millions of dollars of R&D and man-years of labor was a set of patents.
Your line engineers aren't going to get super excited about patents, because they're not compensated for their innovation (that's a separate rant), but it wasn't my assertion that they'd come to a rousing defense of software patents. Rather, they're not going to come out to a rousing opposition to software patents like Groklaw claims.
Re: The USPTO Would Like to Partner with the Software Community
#20Groklaw's editorializing has gone way downhill since the SCO days. E.g. "I know the USPTO doesn't want to hear that software and patents totally need to get a divorce, but since most software developers believe that, maybe somebody should at least mention it to them, if only as a future topic for discussion. Most developers I know believe software is unpatentable subject matter." Ask software developers who work in d…
I'm sure some engineers like patents. It makes them feel important, it's something to show to their bosses (and parents) and keep a score for promotion purposes.
Managers also like patents to schmooze their bosses.
"See, I did a patent, that's like, very important"
Meanwhile the lawyers say "yeah, sure" while collecting heavy fees.
And 90% of R&D is on the finished products (incl. code/blueprints) not on the "invention".