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.
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.
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.
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.
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