Subj : Re: Software Patents To : comp.programming From : Joe Seigh Date : Fri Jul 08 2005 08:19 am Peter Ammon wrote: > CBFalconer wrote: > >> There is hope yet. Somebody did the right thing. See: >> >> >> > > Can someone please explain to me why people get so riled up about > software patents? From my perspective, patents are an incentive to > research and invest in novel approaches to problems. Why spend any > effort researching the best approach if competitors can copy it > immediately? > > I agree that software patents are abused in the United States, and > companies that do nothing save accumulate IP for litigation are legal > and economic parasites. But this seems to me to be a symptom of a > patent office that grants overly broad or obvious patents. If patents > were confined to legitimately original inventions that took significant > work to develop, I think they'd be a positive thing. > > But this is just a naive outsider's point of view. I'd very much like > to hear a deeper analysis of why software should not be patentable. > The main problem is software patents are very difficult to say what they actually mean. Even if you are an expert in the area of application. I'm not even sure what the patents I did actually mean. I know what they're supposed to mean. This vagueness contributes greatly to the use of patents for extortion. You can't have any patent lawsuits dismissed on the grounds that it's obvious it doesn't apply. It's not obvious what any software patent applies to. The other problems are related to patents in general. One arises from the practice of cross licensing of large patent portfolios by large corporations. This practice had two advantages. It limited competition from small companies without enough IP to cross license and it allowed companies to develop products without having to check whether they were infringing other people's IP. If they did infringe on some small companies IP they could cut a deal and the small company would have to play along since they needed to compete in that market. This only works of all the players have to produce some product and have to get licenses or cross license. IP companies which just own IP and produce no produce screw this up since they can't be counter sued. The lawsuits in this area have been in both software and hardware patents. Another problem is the pace of technological change is much faster and much more interdependent than when patents were first developed. This makes new techniques much more disruptive than they used to be. You can't ignore them as they tend to become part of a standard, formal or de facto. And then there's the oft mentioned problem if the US Patent Office issuing obvious patents, the most notorious being the "in conjunction with". "in conjunction with" is used a lot in patents to link together elements of the patent. The abuse is with taking common practices and linking them with new technology you haven't invented or hasn't even been invented yet. If you patent using anti-gravity to transport people or goods and materials from the earth's surface to earth orbit, you have a monopoly on all space transportation to and from earth when anti-gravity does get patented without having invented anything really. Some of this is tangentially related to blocking patents which I won't go into but are a real pain also. And I should point out that while patents are required to be non obvious, obvious after the fact isn't the same as obvious. A lot of people confuse the two when claiming something is obvious. I wouldn't throw patents out entirely since there are areas where you want to encourage research and development which otherwise wouldn't occur without some kind of incentive, but there is clearly a lot of abuse going on which needs to be cleaned up. Also I'd like to see human beings being on a equal footing with large corporations in the area of enterprise. Right now you can't create your own business as a going concern. The new model seems to be, start something up, create some IP and get bought by some large corporation. Skip step 3 and you get sued out of business for patent infringement, valid or otherwise, by somebody or other. -- Joe Seigh When you get lemons, you make lemonade. When you get hardware, you make software. .