191–193 of 193 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've always thought that works of software that represent an actual effort of development comparable to physical invention should enjoy the benefit of patents. There is no "effort" requirement for patents on physical inventions. There's also no "it was done by experts" requirement.
Incorrect. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_having_ordinary_skill_...
You can imagine each company keeping a private/internal log of innovation in Merkle trees (with timed signatures by some central authority). All innovation and production is assumed to be original works of art until proven otherwise. In the current patent system, all innovation is public, but there is only 1 winner. In the new system, everybody can win if we all arrive at innovations independently.
Problem solved, + you enforce good documentation practices.
This is an engineering problem. Why don't you fund a startup that builds this system? If we all start using it, that's when we have the power to change the status quo. If we don't know what alternatives are out there, we have no chance of disabling the current system.
I doubt that keeping the government out of software IP disputes altogether is a good idea, because realistically that won't work out -- it'll encourage stealing and the playing field will change for the worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
1) There can be no doctrine to protect ideas, because any sufficiently complex software system to be marketable also relies on so many different ideas that the cost of licensing patents to enter the market is prohibitive. See for example the mobile OS market, which is effectively inaccessible for new players right now unless they have a billion-dollar bankroll.
Your example of cryptography is a bad one, because those ideas are usually developed in educational environments, funded by tax dollars. For those rare classes of software where the idea really is non-obvious and takes a large time to develop, government can provide the necessary funding to develop it, without the other 98% of software having to suffer under a restrictive patent system.
2) The current system is flawed conceptually, we don't need a software patent system, never did. It's a myth, and there's no cost/benefit analysis that ever proved it as anything else. We don't need a patent system for many other classes of invention also. In most industries it's a net negative, not much more than a tax on doing business.
3) Whether or not software is like making art has nothing to do with the legal situation. If the laws covering art are even worse than the laws covering technological invention then those laws need to change as well. That copyright has been misappropriated to the degree that it has is not something you solve by making less subject matter copyrightable, but by fixing the law.