Software Patent Abolition Petition
wh.gov
wh.gov
(1) The America Invents act was not toothless. It contains provisions that put major hurt on patent trolls.
(2) It fails to actually state any realistic action items.
(3) It shows a misunderstanding of the role of the President in the patent system. What they are trying to accomplish requires Congressional action, not Presidential action.
Sure, Obama can't just end software patents on his own. But at least it puts the opposition on the map, politically. Still, that's all the more reason to want to make a good case.
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/actually-ta...
(1) It's not just trolls that are dragging us all down with patents.
(2) Eliminate patents, starting with the software ones.
(3) The President doesn't vote on the federal budget either, but it's not correct to say he doesn't have a role in it. In this case the USPTO is under the Executive Branch, so actually, I would think the President would have a lot of authority in the matter.
(2) Patents are good, as long as they are NON-OBVIOUS. In the realm of software, a lot of things are obvious. In fact most of what is patented is obvious. The problem is that its non-obvious until an engineer needs to solve it, then it will become obvious as it is on the path to the solution. Software patent problem: SOFTWARE IS ALGORITHMS; MATH! You cannot patent equations. We have lots of proof that software is just an equation, though more complex and in a different form. Hell implement it in Lisp and you have lambda calculus. That's the point.
Software is mathematics. End of story. Cannot be patented.
(3) President is not in full power, but not powerless either. He can put pressure via the citizens.
Wasn't it Apple that fired the first shot there?
(2) The action item is the title of the petition.
(3) Government branches don't operate in silos. When the President demands something from congress and pushes it hard enough, he usually gets something on his desk.
It's a petition, not a bill. I want my President to act, not pretend that he can't do anything about it. He's the one who lit a fire under Congress and called out obstructing members by name to pass healthcare reform. I've relentlessly contacted all my representatives and senators, but congress does nothing without pressure.
It's pretty hard to overestimate the impact that executive branch policy has on the PTO. If there truly were a "quality-first" directive, with mandates to reject hard-to-understand and overbroad applications on teachability and novelty doctrines, that would have a huge impact on the patent landscape. But there's a ton of work to do in crafting a suggested directive that would accomplish that, and petitions aren't really the proper vehicle for such suggestions.
It might be more productive to interpret the press release as an invitation to work on that document, and the pointer to the AIA page as a forwarding address to take the initiative to the next level.
So: what ought be the content of "Executive Order N to the Patent and Trademark Office?"
I'd imagine most people fall into two camps: (1) business methods shouldn't be patentable subject matter solely because they satisfy the machine-or-transformation test (as articulated in a trilogy of cases from the 1970s and most recent in Bilski); and (2) even if they should be, many of the business methods today fail on non-obviousness grounds.
Proscribing the issuance of 'software patents' isn't the problem. The problem is that in this digital age, we're relying on the machine-or-transformation test for business practices that exist in the virtual world. Because of the prevalence and impact of the internet in the global marketplace, there's now a fundamental difference between a ROM chip in a device containing instructions interpreted by a microprocessor and a software program compiled into machine readable code stored in RAM and processed by your computer's CPU.
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/direct-pate...
This changed with computers. You could never start a car factory in a garage, but there was a golden age where you could start a high-tech electronics company like HP or Apple.
Today you can start a web-based or software company on a laptop in a coffee shop or library. This is a big deal, let's not kill it.
Software patents have to go away or we're going to be stuck in the industrial age, which would be bad because we've already sold off most of our factories.
Actually, it has. Large scale production may have usually been in a factory, but often that factory was small production multiplied. Ford and the like were anomalies, even in the car biz.
> You could never start a car factory in a garage
I don't know about you, but literally thousands of folks did exactly that.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car_brands . Australia is sort of interesting as is Britain.
OK, that's probably 700+ manufacturers after duplicates are counted for. Which is great!
But I can't figure out how to tell how many of them meet my original criteria of manufacturing outside of "freestanding factories". Spot-checking the links from Wikipedia turns up several references to converted bicycle and motorcycle factories. No references to "two guys in a garage" which kinda makes sense considering garages probably came after the early automobiles. :-)
No doubt some of them started in barns, but again, I don't think that was a huge part of the economy.
The US wikipedia entry claims that very few car companies were started after 1930. I know a couple from the 60s that didn't make the list which were literally a couple of guys in a garage. No, they weren't casting their own engine blocks but neither does Lotus for some of their models.
> But I can't figure out how to tell how many of them meet my original criteria of manufacturing outside of "freestanding factories".
Most made very few cars so it's unlikely that they had significant factories.
> I don't think that was a huge part of the economy.
There were two separate claims. The first was that small scale manufacturing was a significant part of manufacturing. I haven't addressed that.
The second was that lots of car companies had almost nothing in the way of "factory". That's the claim that I've supported.
- Small company gets a patent, thinks it will protect them, and either never uses it or quickly learns that their one patent will not protect them from the thousands held by whoever they want protection from. They also don't have the time or money to waste on litigation rather than just building a product.
- Large company gets a patent, adds it to the war chest, uses it as a giant stick to force anyone working in the same general area to pay up. Small companies have to pay up, and Free and Open Source Software gets excluded entirely (or just publishes their code anyway and says "screw patents", which works nicely for people not worth suing but makes anyone else using their code a target).
- Patent trolls, who write or more commonly acquire patents, wave them around like a stick, and extort money from people actually being productive.
One of these cases derives no benefit from software patents, and the other two turn software patents into net losses for the public. So, tell me again how software patents represent a useful tradeoff for the general public, and why we should grant an artificial monopoly that would not otherwise exist?
Not really - it was wrong then/there and it's wrong here.
The official "OK, we're not killing profiles" message does not address the petition directly: http://blog.netflix.com/2008/06/profiles-feature-not-going-a...
So Facebook knows when you go to a government site.
I imagine Facebook also knows which petitions you sign, or at least which ones you click on. I say imagine, because although I'm signed in, it still asks me to sign in before I can sign the petition, and signing in while I'm signed in leads to a 404.