Hacker News Reader

America needs to follow New Zealand's example:

Ban software patents!

In the video, he says that the politicians stopped the issue from even being voted on. That's without Silicon Valley stepping in to really lobby against that kind of ban (NZ has no equivalent of SV)

Big companies in Silicon Valley can defend themselves, so they don't care. It's small businesses that are affected.

And big companies do not really want competition from small businesses.

Software is not patentable in Brazil either.

Honest question: have anyone seen any software innovation been really protected by a patent litigation? All articles I have seen are about trolls.

Well if you're going to ask that question, I'm going to ask a corollary:

Has anyone seen any innovation that has been really protected by patents, that couldn't have been protected merely with trade secrets and industrial capability (i.e., big companies are physically and organizationally able to make things that small companies cannot due to their resources, therefore they're really the last ones to need patent protection, but they're also the ones most able to afford spending huge sums of money on patent fees and enforcement)?

Medicine, for example, they have to tell what's inside the bottle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com