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Comment by chris_va | Hacker News Reader

> As you said, the sauce is secret. I think the question of whether Qualcomm should be permitted to keep the sauce secret and how much the law should help or hinder this secrecy is worthy of at lease some debate.

This is going in circles. You cannot patent something without disclosing it. So, either Qualcomm has a patent, and it isn't secret, or they don't have a patent (nor can they ever, after 18 months) and the argument is moot.

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> This is going in circles. You cannot patent something without disclosing it. So, either Qualcomm has a patent, and it isn't secret, or they don't have a patent (nor can they ever, after 18 months) and the argument is moot.

Yes, but then software patents should require you to release a full reference implementation with full documentation under a free (BSD, MIT) license as soon as the patent runs out.

If we were going to enforce the same transparency that non-software patents give then they'd release the full reference implementation right in the patent.

This to me is the sticking point. The biggest benefit to society for patents is: you get the formula (but can only use it once the patent expires). I would imagine that no one short of lawyers has ever bothered to read expired software patents. They are literal drivel and until they are useful to have disclosed, they should probably not be patentable, in my opinion.

Exactly — but for all practical measures, it does not differ if they release it in the patent, or only when the patent runs out.

Currently, they don't release it at all.

Additional regulation I'd like to see: Any neural networks trained based on data of users have to be completely public domain. If Google wishes to train recaptcha, they should either pay for people to train it, or give back to the public the value that the public created.

It does matter, because if the publish it in the patent I can start planning to build something with years before the patent expires, or time improvements I make on it for that expiration.

patents should require you to release a full reference implementation with full documentation under a free (BSD, MIT) license as soon as the patent runs out

Why not as soon as the patent is granted?

Because that bill would be even less likely to pass?

It is indeed. You are arguing that the secret sauce is in the baseband, and yes you can't patent it if the competitive advantage is that it's hard to make so long as it is secret. It's novel, you don't need to patent it to make money as copyright takes care of that... And so to complete the circle patents aren't necessary, and don't benefit society in the scenario you present!

edit: you might bring up clean room engineering that AMD did in the 80s. Intel weren't effected, and are bigger than ever. And the pace of innovation is massive.

Yeah, in general stuff pertaining to software can be classified into one of four kinds of IP: copyrights, trademarks, patents, or trade secrets.

The date that matters for trade secrets with respect to patentability is the date that they are first published or offered for sale. I don't believe offering a binary for sale counts as offering the trade secret for sale, but insert usual disclaimer.

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