Subj : Re: Software Patents
To   : comp.programming
From : CBFalconer
Date : Fri Jul 08 2005 05:50 pm

Sc0rpi0 wrote:
> Peter Ammon:
> 
.... snip ...
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Because examples from U.S. show us where it's going to.

About 20 or 25 years ago Unisys got a patent on LZW compression. 
This was a popular technique at the time, replacing Hufman encoding
and other things.  Various variations and methods were being
developed.  (BTW the patent has now expired).

The only effect of the patent was to stop all development cold. 
Other techniques were developed, and by now have far outperformed
LZW. [1]  It is possible that development of LZW would have had
even better results (although not likely, IMO).  Unisys made no
profits.  No causes were advanced, and certainly not human
knowledge, which is what the patent system is supposed to do.

Now we have a plethora of totally stupid patents issued, so every
developer with a brilliant idea may simply be enriching future
generations of lawyers.

[1] I recently compressed a 350 KB file with bzip2, and the old
PKPAK program (which uses LZW), just to see the results.  PKPAK
produced about a 55 KB result, and bzip2 about an 11 KB file.

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