End Software Patents (2007)

Furthermore, our company lawyer would probably choke me if he caught me reading patents, as then we'd be subject to much higher damages if we were ever claimed to be infringing something.

Knowing of a software patent exposes you to willful infringement, and you'd need a lawyer to understand what the bloody hell most software patents are even claiming to patent.

But, this is why historically patents were not a big deal: all tech companies (this is before software patents were even allowed, so we're talking hardware patents) all entered into cross licensing agreements and everyone used each other's inventions mostly without royalties paid.

Historically, some of the very earliest documented cases of industrial espionage were performed against China by european powers. - The US is not innocent in that regard either, but probably much better at hiding their activity. We needed Edward Snowden to substantiate what people in the industry here in Germany had been suspecting for decades [0]: I've heard of numerous cases where german companies are developing new tech, and shortly before or after release an american company with close ties to the government releases an equal product.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-intellig...

Public goods are chronically undersupplied in a normal market situation. Providing them imposes a cost on the provider, but because the good is non-excludable you're relying on the goodness of consumers to pay for it. Some will, some won't, but the net amount recovered will be less than it would be otherwise.

So what do we do about the undersupply of public goods? There are a variety of options. Taking knowledge as a particular example, one option is the patent system, which grants a temporary legal monopoly on the claims in the patent. It creates an artificial excludability that allows the provider of the knowledge to recover more of the cost of providing it. Overall that should raise the production of knowledge.

But, you say, that reduces competition. And sometimes it will. But many ideas can be substituted and so the competitors will patent different things. In fact the monopoly of the competitor gives them an incentive to find new ideas that the competitor hasn't found yet, an incentive which was weaker in the original situation.

The alternative is provision through a central supplier, typically: government. But it turns out that the costs of developing knowledge still remain, so how are they paid for? Taxes, essentially. Generally speaking the costs work out to be about the same, but become differently distributed. Instead of knowledge being created by active, incentivised parties who can then get a return from those who value the knowledge most, the incidence of cost falls on everyone.

Someone who doesn't value that knowledge gets ripped off, and someone who values it very highly gets subsidised.

That said: pure research almost always needs to be publicly subsidised because, by very sensible policy, the laws of nature can't be patented. And representatives passing public budgets can give consideration to which public goods ought to be subsidised, beyond the cold light of economics, as a principle of fairness or morality or furthering humankind.

But most knowledge is not pure research. So either we pay for it with taxes, or we pay for it with patents, or we pay for it by getting less common knowledge. Nothing comes for free. Not even ideas.

in the software world 20 years is almost as bad. by the time the patent expires the patented algorithm may no longer be relevant

With respect to patents, inventions are about how you do something. Whether it is written in java or C is irrelevant. Similarly, for gadget patents, the material it is manufactured out of doesn't matter.

That’s not what DNA patents are. People are patenting genes that they find in nature. No invention at all, nothing created.

"Although the Supreme Court has not delimited the precise contours of the abstract idea exception, it is clear from the body of judicial precedent that software and business methods are not excluded categories of subject matter."

https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2106.html

You could present any patent as a discovery of a "pure" fact about physics or mathematics: a particular configuration of physical objects would behave in this particular way according to the laws of physics, or, a certain abstract dynamical system described by this formula (i.e. algorithm) has these properties. The thing is, the patent doesn't protect the discovery or the knowledge or the fact itself. Even with a patent, anyone is free to study the design/algorithm, teach it, write about it, print it on a T-shirt etc.; in fact, patents are meant to help spread the knowledge they contain -- in exchange for a certain protection. What the patent protects is the exploitation of the discovery in some physical product for certain ends, i.e. not the fact about the universe/mathematics, but its practical implementation. So in this respect software patents and, say, mechanical patents are exactly the same: a monopoly is granted for some years on the practical exploitation of certain physical/chemical/biological/mathematical facts in certain ways and for certain means.

Algorithms can actually produce a real physical result, whereas mathematics exists beyond pen and paper.

Algorithms that we (programmers) construct usually aren't done in terms of Turing machines or the lambda calculus. Therefore they're not purely mathematical.

> Premise 3: Hahaha, lawyers don't know math but they do know billable hours.

A patent lawyer I worked with had a mechannical engineering degree. I'm fairly sure he knew some math that I didn't.

But the EPO keep polluting France with software patents.

Are those the companies that force patented technology, to the exclusion of free alternatives, into widely used standards, so that they can charge everyone that wants to read a FAT32 filesystem?

The ones that patent an idea, not method, like one-click buying, or minigames in loading screens?

The ones that have some overly broad, unreadable patent, that would be invalidated in court due to countless prior art, but use it to extort businesses for amounts too small to make litigation worthwhile?

Or is this some mythical inventor, that creates something actually useful, and licenses it to others at fair prices? Something that improves the state of the art, but bizarrely does not rely on any prior patents in that area (otherwise existing companies could simply block the use of the new method)? And this someone isn't already employed at some company where the invention was made during the normal course of R&D (because otherwise, you already have your answer as to what software inventors do - write software/do R&D for existing companies that need it).

How many such people are there? Enough to justify the enormous headache of software patents?

Software can rarely come under a patent in the EU, but there is a very high bar to reach first. It's not my field so I'll avoid trying to explain where that bar is.