> Getting rid of software patents altogether is quite extreme.
Really? I'd think that most people in software have the opinion that there should be no software patents at all.
It's kind of silly, frankly.
Really? I'd think that most people in software have the opinion that there should be no software patents at all.
It's kind of silly, frankly.
I am all in for banning obvious or bad patents, as well as shortening their duration, but, perhaps, the i4i patents may be really original or innovative.
Microsoft is known for talking partnership, maybe acquisition, learning all they can and then launching a competitor that kills their "partner". Having strategic patents is the only way a small company can defend from this.
Also, I like the way their name sounds. Sounds appropriate.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
It's not really.
I know there's a rich tradition of objecting to patents on software, but it always strikes me as odd that people think that software is some kind of exception, and that other patents are OK.
Take the pharmaceutical companies as an example of where patents are perhaps worthwhile:
- It costs a lot of money to produce a new drug; high cost == high risk == unattractive field for investment. Patents lower the risk because the pharmaceutical companies know that they will be able to recoup their investment if they actually produce something useful.
- Likewise, it costs a lot of time to do the research and produce something that works. The 20-year timescale (http://law.jrank.org/pages/9086/Patents-Patent-Duration.html) of the patent is approximately in line with the effort expended.
- It is comparatively easy to tell if a drug works.
- After the patent expires, the drug is probably still useful...e.g. aspirin hasn't stopped being a good painkiller just because it's a commodity.
Compare this to software patents. None of the points match up:
- Production costs are zero == low risk == attractive field for investment.
- Production time is almost zero. You can submit software patents literally as fast as you can write them up.
- Most software patents are completely intangible and have very fuzzy edges. If you're a patent examiner in 1980, how do you verify that this "web browser" idea will in fact work?
- After 20 years, the patent is likely to be worthless. As a trivial example: yes, people still use GIF but JPEG and PNG are far more common.
All of these things encourage the system we have now--"throw it against the wall", patent trolling, etc--instead of what patents were Constitutionally intended to be: an incentive to grow the arts, sciences, and economy.
In the case of drugs, the patent can be chemically specific. It's easy to tell whether another drug infringes.
Software patents are sufficiently vague that it's hard to tell what they cover. Which has a chilling effect on people making software. How do you know whether you'll be sued?
What I'm left wondering is, what is it specifically (for people who hold that some patents are OK, while software patents are not) that makes software different?
Edit: I just saw dstorrs comment, and I think what he seems to be implying is that patents on software are not comparable to other industries because of the relatively lower barrier to entry, and the relatively higher cost of enforcement. I think that this is a good argument for holding software patents to different standards (i.e. shorter statute lengths and more specificity in the application) than pharmaceuticals, etc. but I still don't see how patents are entirely misguided in the case of software.
Patents generally cover a whole _invention_, not an implementation, and each implementation requires a license from the patent holder. So, in the case of the web browser, had Mosaic or Netscape patented this concept every competitor would be forced to obtain a license from the patent holder and open-source or free browsers would be impossible. Patents in the case of software therefore have a chilling effect and prevent significant competition for a long time.
Pharmaceuticals only get patented by publicly divulging their significant modes of operation; a software patent outlines only vague processes, like the i4i patent that's brought this whole thing up.
Software is also merely a high-level implementation of an algorithm. Algorithms are non-patentable and all math is discovered, not invented; this has been settled earlier, and is the reason that algorithms alone are not awarded patent protection. Software is no different.
In software, the implementation details are significant enough that patent protection is not only undesirable but in fact crippling to the industry as a whole. Take a look at some software patents; in fact, take a look at i4i's patent specifically. It's applicable to basically that edits XML documents, whether it be a word processor, an IDE, or anything else. These things are way too vague and they encroach on prior and future art in a hugely negative way.
See http://w2.eff.org/patent for a list of some rather absurd software patents granted by the USPTO; even if we ignored everything else and assumed that software patents were OK for things that deserved them, the people in charge of patents don't have anywhere near the kind of knowledge necessary to make intelligent decisions.
Those are my reasons for opposing software patents. It makes development a complete minefield, and only the big guys can afford to wade through that. I just have to hope that I don't do anything too successful until the patent laws are revoked or until I make enough money not to care.
Out of curiosity, what do you (and others) think of a patent for something like Google's PageRank?
Copyright already covers specific implementations. That's as far as it needs to go in software.
Of course, apparently Google feels they have more to gain by keeping their algorithm secret than by patenting it.
Look at the patent that caused the injunction against Word ( http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=y8UkAAAAEBAJ ); it's rather vague and basically includes anything that uses or modifies XML to create a product for end-user consumption.
The enforcement depends on the judge and the parties to the suit, but it's got a really, really broad potential scope. It's not unique; most software patents are that way. You think that's a good thing?
From the Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
So: some people may create software, incentivized partly by the prospect of patenting it.
Other people will be unable to create or sell software, because of those same patents.
The question is, which factor is larger? If software patents are decreasing the amount of good software being produced for the public benefit, then the public no longer has a reason to grant them.
Has that point been reached? Many say yes. And the same logic may apply to other areas of IP.
There are untold exception to this - It's important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Drug Patents, in particular, are incredibly important. Large Pharmaceuticals spent decades and billions of dollars on developing, trialing, and getting their new drugs approved. Why on earth would they have any incentive to do that if, once it was approved, they didn't have a temporary monopoly on it?
Remember - Patents are good for only a short period of time, under twenty years in most countries, and after that it's a free for all - anyone can use the process's and systems that were shared and documented.
With all that said - 90% of the software patents really are nothing more than crap - usually consisting of an engineer having an idea that most of their "skilled and educated in the arts" peers could have come up with in less than a week's worth of work and discussion. Public-Key cryptography class patents are few and far between.
Check it out, I just looked up Pfizer's 10k for fun: http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials...
If you check out their data from 2006-2008, they spend about 16% of revenue on R&D. They spend about the same on marketing, though in 2007 they spent 23%, which drags the amount up a bit. But...
They spend 30% on SI&A, which stands for "Selling, Information, and Administrative" purposes. This includes "Direct selling expenses are expenses that can be directly linked to the sale of a specific unit such as credit, warranty and advertising expenses. Indirect selling expenses are expenses which cannot be directly linked to the sale of a specific unit, but which are proportionally allocated to all units sold during a certain period, such as telephone, interest and postal charges. General and administrative expenses include salaries of non-sales personnel, rent, heat and lights."
So, you can't _really_ be sure of what they're spending on selling, because it's mixed in with non-sales personell... but bottom line is, they don't spend that much on R&D, not compared with what they're making, anyway.
And they wouldn't have an incentive, but I'd argue that they _shouldn't_. Something as important as drugs should really be one of the legitimate functions of government. If I ran things, I'd be throwing out patents, but turning up NSF funding.
Patents, and Supplementary Protection Certs (SPC) which extend drug patents to 25 yrs in the UK IIRC, are temporary.
Also it's always worth remembering that drug companies spend vastly more (3 times, might even be 4) on marketing than on producing drugs and make humongous profits.
Of course, that kills the generics market, and I suspect it's not such a difficult problem to RE a drug, but... just curious.
My wife did a stint as a student with AstraZeneca (global pharma corp) they were making "new" drugs. One thing they do is take an existing drug and try swapping out different parts for functionally equivalent parts and run tests to see if the drug is effective enough to warrant proper trials and check to see if it circumvents the opposition patents.
The implementation of that algorithm would be googles trade secret but you or anybody else would be free to come up with their own implementation.
Technically speaking google has patented a number with this (the number required to program a universal Turing machine to exhibit the behavior the algorithm describes).
I don't think they should be able to do that.
The fact that microsoft is now prohibited from selling their flagship software means that some people might wake up to the downside, the one that smaller parties have been aware of for a much longer time.
Of course this will most likely simply end with MS buying up the party that sues or some cross license deal but the better outcome would be a total abolishing of software patents.
They're a plague and a brake on progress.
And PageRank is a trade secret, not IP. There's a reason that Coke hasn't gotten a patent on their forumla, no?
See http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html#recipe
It's called copyright. Before software patent wars we had software copyright fights
The way things are going we might as well put cooking recipes under patent protection
Do you have any evidence for this? I know very intelligent people (both software developers and CS researchers) who think that software patents are not only necessary, but moral.