White House Petition to End Software Patents Is a Hit

There is absolutely no justification for flagging this. I am disheartened that hacker news has become a place where people flag stuff they dislike rather than posting a rebuttal. I feel this is a systemic error, it is currently too easy for a few people to kill articles they don't like.

I agree with the other people who replied to you, this was completely uncalled for.

Whoever flagged the post probably should have their HN account nuked.

Actually I think direct links to petitions shouldn't be allowed (much like posts with subjects like "Vote Up If You Like Cookies").

Links should exist for the benefit of the reader, not the benefit of the submitter.

Maybe because yours was the third such submission?

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3028999

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3031574

Why do you think that is going to happen? Their privacy policy doesn't seem to allow email addresses to be used for that purpose. I do not think the Obama campaign could take this lightly, and not only because of the privacy policy. Use of government resources for an election campaing is another issue, one more than just privacy activists care about.

> The only thing less useful than an internet petition is... actually I can't finish that sentence because I can't think of anything less useful than an internet petition.

Oh! I know the answer to that one!

The only thing less useful? An online political statement that doesn't actually accomplish anything!

And my opinion has nothing to do with the White House. In fact, it stems from my only time petitioning my congressional representative. I begged him for no form letters and no additions to any email lists -- and a I got a form letter and put on an email list.

Now I get emails every month or two telling me what an awesome guy he is.

I agree. The UK government has had an online petition system for a number of years, and I am not aware of a single policy that has changed because of it.

You may have seen something about the Air Mag auction over the last few weeks. (Nike's limited edition run of the sneakers Marty McFly wore in Back to the Future 2.) When the auction popped up in the news I ended up on Nike's promotional site and read that the idea was born when "...in 2005, [the shoe designer]’s attention was caught by an online petition asking that the shoes come back." (http://www.back4thefuture.com/#!shoe)

It struck me as the first time I'd ever heard of an online petition achieving its goal.

Here's hoping this becomes second time.

Here in Germany an internet petition helped raising awareness for a problem (internet censorship via DNS-Spoofing) that did not have enough attention before. I think it was very useful in doing that. https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/index.php?action=petition;s...

I wonder if the creator of the petition even noticed the mistake, or he can't edit it anymore. Would that be a real problem giving the title and some of the body are clearly anti-software patents?

No that is generally how the whitehouse miss-writes laws issued..just wait for the over-correction being worse than the original

Exactly. I didn't sign it because I read the text, had no clue what it meant, so I refused to sign, despite the name. And I wrote patents and experienced firsthand the fun of patent litigation.

My position is closer to Jonathan Abrams' tweet: tell the USPTO to stop issuing obvious patents, no matter what form.

For me the problem is that there is frequently "no understanding of the patents being issued". Aside from that, if you are attempting to patent an idea or process I don't see why software should be treated differently than hardware.

Yep. That pretty much assures it's a dead letter.

mp3 perhaps?

A sophisticated algorithm for drug design.

A sophisticated algorithm for simulating turbulent flow near jet engines.

A sophisticated algorithm for optimizing [some complicated industrial process].

If you want a specific example, this is just what I got from a google patent search for "rational drug design", but: http://www.google.com/patents?id=3b8kAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&...

So the economic idea behind a patent is to prevent a free-rider problem. Say I spend years and tons of my money inventing the telephone. I finally make it work, then sell it on the market. Without the patent system, someone can buy my product, reverse engineer it, and release a knock-off at a vastly lower price than me because he doesn't have to recoup all of my R&D investment. If this happens all the time, then we have a market failure, where nobody has an incentive to engage in research-intensive invention where the end result can be easily copied.

This is really the only economically sensible basis for patent law. Unfortunately it tends to get clouded in lots of other fuzzy ideas, like protecting ideas and incentivizing innovation.

So to give an example of something I think is a legitimate software patent: consider a hypothetical solution to the hidden node problem in the context of white space devices and wireless microphones: http://www.shure.com/idc/groups/public/@gms_gmi_web/document...

Basically, say you have a transmitter T and a receiver R, and a whitespace device W. W listens to the spectrum and opportunistically uses whatever radio channels it hears as free. T transmits on a fixed frequency to R, and R receives without transmitting. There are situations where because of geography, R can hear T, but W cannot hear T. So W detects T/R's frequency as free, tries to use it, and interferes with R. This is the problem that Microsoft's white space devices ran into with unlicensed wireless microphones in the FCC tests.

What algorithms could you put in a whitespace device (or a network of whitespace devices) to alleviate this problem? This is not really something that a programmer of average competence would find obvious. Indeed, so far nobody has a good solution to the problem, despite quite a bit of research. However, when somebody does come up with a good algorithm, it will be fairly easy for other manufacturers to copy it. Even if it's not, unless it can be protected by a patent, whoever discovers it will have a huge incentive to keep it secret, which means people can't work on improving it.

I think this is a pretty good case for allowing patenting of the algorithm within the specific context of a whitespace device (which is basically what the current law is supposed to be). You have a situation where solving a problem requires quite a bit of investment. You can't really do research on this without buying a bunch of whitespace devices and wireless mics and doing a bunch of testing in different conditions). At the same time, because the end result would be easy to copy, nobody really has the incentive to work on it, especially not smaller research labs which might be able to solve the problem but certainly wouldn't have the manufacturing muscle to build and sell their own whitespace devices.

The reason so many software patents sound ridiculous is because they don't really require any innovation. They're simply an attempt to take obvious ideas and keep other people from using them. As a rough rule of thumb, for a patent to make sense, it should take way more effort to come up with the algorithm than it does to implement it. If it doesn't then there isn't really any free rider problem.

I thought that too at first. A better title would be "Petition for the White House to end ...".

I haven't even heard of this petition site before, it's interesting that it hasn't been overrun by 4chan scripts inflating whatever. "We petition you to make 4chan the official capital of the internet."

Well, it's soared past the 5000 requirement to 6500+ at time of writing now!