Subj : Re: Software Patents To : comp.programming From : Scott Moore Date : Mon Jul 11 2005 01:04 pm 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. > > -Peter > There's nothing wrong with patents concerning computer applications per se, but those existed BEFORE software patents. Ie., patenting "use of credit cards with computers" (aside from the trivial nature of it) didn't need software patents to be issued, its a "novel process or application". The problem is, software is lego blocks, and the software patent is patenting how the blocks are put together, not how they are used in an application. Thus, software patents have created a "gold rush" mentality, where people try to patent stacking up blocks to get money. The best example is the patent for quicksort with a linked list. This is taking two previous "blocks" that both were nontrivial, and sticking them together, which was trivial. You can say that the patent should have been rejected because it was obvious, but the other way to solve that problem is to say that stacking up computer instructions, no matter how interesting, is a trivial change of the real underlying technology, which was the invention of the stored program computer. If something is really novel using a computer, then it can be covered by non-software patent law. As it is, I either have to deliberately write stupid software, or constantly check against the patent office files to see if I have written something I'm not supposed to. No other industry has this "pattern burden". Printers don't have patents for novel illustrations or novel text. Weavers don't have to worry about patterns they weave. Any "IP thieft" in these cases are well covered by Copyright. Patenting a herringbone pattern or using all upper case in a caption is not a useful advancement of technology. Patents are supposed to cover "novel applications or processes". Putting instructions together is not novel. Certainly many programs are novel, but they are covered by non-software patents or copyrights. I would admit there is a class of "novel algorithims". Certainly hashing, quicksort, lists in general, subroutine calls, etc. Are all novel algorithims. However, software patents, from what I have seen, never deal with these issues, probally because the fundamental novelties in stored program computers were worked out long ago, by people who didn't care about trying to get a patent on them. What is left are rearrangements of previous algorithms which the patent office deems patentable. .