Subj : Re: Software Patents To : comp.programming From : websnarf Date : Fri Jul 08 2005 09:16 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. And ordinary product development and marketing isn't good enough to do that? > [...] Why spend any effort researching the best approach if competitors > can copy it immediately? Software that is sold is often compiled to a binary form. So copying of software ideas, generally becomes more expensive than paying the cost of simple reimplementation (which patents don't protect you from anyhow). The other point is that when a company *does* steal from you, the penalty is generally just some fine that doesn't return that company to a pre-exploitation state. The classic example is Microsoft in advertantly stealing code from Apple's Quicktime codecs (Microsoft hired the same contractors who developed the codec for Apple, but apparently some combination of this contractor and/or Microsoft, didn't have enough ethics to know that code they developed for Apple didn't belong to them.) Microsoft paid some tiny fine, and just moved on, while retaining the "infringing software". Apple was not irreparably harmed by this, and hasn't stopped "developing codecs" for QuickTime or been able to sell QuickTime as a result. Apparently Creative Labs, actually patented implementation of digital sine-wave tone generators. This is kind of fundamental, so what competitors did was implemented "approximations of sine"-wave generators that human ears can't detect any audible difference with. So exactly what good did Creative's patent do them? BTW, direct copying is already covered by copyright law. So patenting of software truly offers little or nothing useful. Its basically useful just for "patent building" for use by corporations would want to intimidate each other with the *size* of their patent portfolio. > 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 my claim is that this problem basically cannot be solved. And it overshadows the benefits. For patent reviewers to be successful at only awarding "worthy" patents, they require skill levels comparable to actual developers. So the patent office has to hire a large number of skilled developers who are willing to review patents instead of working on actual projects. But they also require lawyer skills that can read through the obfuscated style that patents are written in. As best as I can tell, the only thing the patent reviewers do, is try to detect if a patent is too similar to an already existing one, and to always deny patents that claim to implement perpetual motion machines. So presumably, you could easily patent a software algorithm that claims to compress all possible inputs by at least one byte 100% of the time. Patents do not incentivise developers, salary and stock options do. And patents are for corporations, not individuals. -- Paul Hsieh US Patents: 5883640, 5949439 http://www.pobox.com/~qed/ http://bstring.sf.net/ .