Maybe patents is a bad idea and should be removed.
(Some sort of IP protection or reward system is still needed for real inventions - where it takes serious money, expertise, time, etc. to achieve something major.)
But maybe a better moral would be that shell corporations (& lawyers playing shell games with them) should be outlawed.
Some examples:
- Rust memory management
- New models in machine learning that enables amazing results
- Protocols
Rust's memory management was invented without any such incentive, and the world is richer for it.
Once I had an idea while sitting on the toilet, about how to use past log data to pre-emptively scale up, when the peak hour is about to come.
I had the idea just randomly sitting on the toilet for a few minutes… it was already patented.
I imagine that this is the case for most stuff in the world. Ideas are not usually unique but it's the great execution of the idea that present the real challange.
Just the testing procedures involve massive investment.
I'm not in favour of patents at large by the way, but they make even less sense for software.
Ideas may also require intellectual labour. But one may not receive the protection of the government for them to give temporary advantage over competitors. Ideas are a collaborative venture, protocols being the very epitome of this - since a "protocol of one" is a bit like a birthday party for one... a bit sad and pointless.
If one wants to make money, by all means invest time in pursuing patentable inventions, but do not presume that mere ideas (most of which are "nothing new under the sun") should be afforded the same protection.
The problem we have today is that the patent system is derelict. The goalposts have shifted to allow almost all and any silly idea to obtain a patent and the system itself is weaponised for extraction. It has not shown any will to reform, so abolition may be its ultimate fate.
Your post seems to entirely misunderstand the patent system. “But one may not receive the protection of the government for [ideas] to give temporary advantage over competitors.” This is just flat out wrong. The purpose of a patent is literally to receive the protection of the government for your ideas in order to give you a temporary advantage over your competitors via a government granted monopoly on an idea. The bargain that’s struck is that the patent owner gives the details of their patented idea to the world so that anyone can eventually practice it or build off of it in exchange for a limited exclusionary protection in commerce.
I have plenty. Now, I do not wish to be rude Abduhl, but I find your "question" a little disingenuous, and your expectation that I act as your personal tutor on well documented matters a tad entitled. This isn't my full-time job, and I come here mainly to look for interesting and unusual viewpoints. Have you done even the most cursory research into the history of patents as I indicated? Do you need some reference material or links to get started?
How about reading some lecture notes and essays (some of the finest on the formation of copyright, patent and trademarks) on the site of Havard law professor Lawrence Lessig [1]
One example I saw just today :
Thomas Savery getting a patent on "make, imitate, use or exercise any vessells or engines for raiseing [sic] water or occasioning motion to any sort of mill works by the impellent force of fire,", which I assume subordinated Thomas Newcomen during the patent's duration = all of his life to Savery, despite Newcomen's engine being much more advanced & commercially successful... (at least he didn't end up destitute, like some of the previous steam engine inventors !)
You can argue that the patent system in the US is partially broken because of how broadly patents are granted nowadays, but that does not support the GP’s contention that there is some kind of distinct line that can be drawn between an idea and an invention, which is why the patent system is what it is now. And, again, your own link underscores how far we’ve come in understanding that unlimited monopolies on technologies/ideas are bad and how limiting patents durationally can help with that. Note that one of the requirements for a patent to issue is called “enablement” which basically means that your patent MUST describe the invention with sufficient particularity that a person with ordinary skill in the art could make and use your invention.
(Also, I don't think that in that case the patent expired because its holder died, more likely it came to a term (after being renewed ?) after 35 years (which I agree is a tad long), otherwise my source wouldn't have put it in this way ?)
Consider the idea of "going to the moon" versus the implementation of Project Apollo.
Even if it would have stopped java from being a thing it's just not worth it.
And if so, do they outweigh legal costs and chilling effects of patent trolling, and the inefficiencies of people having to engineer around patented ideas.
Intellectual property is a fairly artificial concept. It's quite "big government" when you think about it - government grants a monopoly on the application of an idea. It is only worth preserving if it makes the country richer.
Shell companies have done more damage to the world than most tyrants ever could - enabling tax evasion, escaping responsibility for substandard construction (you close the company after completing contruction of a house) or for decommissioning toxic assets like exhausted mines or oil rigs. They are uaed to obscure land ownership.
Usually people talking about shell companies are referring to companies with no business interests at all or if they are bring expansive only contracts/ip agreements. A construction company is doing actual business. Land owned in a corporation has an actual asset etc.
Most startups start as shell companies, you sort of can’t create a corporation without being one for some amount of time.
So I’m ok with the idea of corporate ownership reform but I think you’d need to get more specific than “shell companies == bad”
I think you could fix a lot of the issues by requiring that all companies must be recorded in a public registry that includes contact information, owner and executive names, as well as a list of actual physical locations where the company operates (if any -- online businesses don't need to have a physical location).
The states decide the information requirements in their jurisdictions and many have vested interests in not changing them (particularly Delaware where this case is).
https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fact-sheet-benefic...
So we’d need to get specific about which practice is duplicitous. Is it the treatment of IP as an asset? The transferability of patents ? Limited liability of patent defense?
I am no expert in any of those things but I bet there is value in each and bad unintended consequences of each.
If I described to a lay person that there was a hacker website frequented by lots and lots of people with an active forum community, you’d likely get at least some of them to suggest banning it…
Different things. In this case you have a pathological outcome in the process. "Free real estate" as it were because you've got an organizational structuring that is essentially censure proof by the Court unless you pierce the corporate veil.
Remember, corporations are suffered to exist as a courtesy, and a means to distribute risk, but our Court system is very much tuned to "there is a person, get them in here now, and lets get this sorted."
If the Court has to choose between being ineffectual and exploitable, and piercing the veil in order to get to the bottom of duplicitous behavior, one can only hope the Judge will settle in and push the issue.
Surely the basis of all corporations is to trade and to undertake usefull economic activity.
We spesifically don't want them to limit liability where profit is made upfront, owners take off with the money, and there is no-one left to pay the costs.
There are endless examples of this because ideas are not scarce and there are typically multiple intelligent people who have the same idea. All patents do is allow somebody who fails to successfully execute an idea to weaponize the legal system to extort money out of people who do successfully execute "their" idea.
That's not even getting into how the US Supreme Court allows GMO seed companies to patent plants and sue farmers for patent infringement because the neighboring farm's GMO seeds cross-pollinated with their seeds. In Bowman v. Monsanto, the US Supreme Court actually ruled that farmers can't plant their own seeds (when this cross pollination happens) without paying the patent trolls at Monsanto! Patents are simply corrupt, innovation stifling monopolies the entire way down and should be completely abolished and banned from ever coming back via constitutional amendment.
(Current copyright terms are excessive but copyright itself along the lines of the US Copyright Act of 1790 is reasonable as a tool to encourage creative works and copyright abolition would likely be even worse than the status quo's century long copyright terms. Likewise, trademarks are also legitimate as a fraud prevention tool. They shouldn't be conflated with patents as they are in the concept of IP.)
Trademark also has a good few issues, aside of being abused to the point where it becomes obviously stupid (like trademarking colors, common words and similar idiocies). It also cannot prevent counterfeits, which is more a game of whack-a-mole than anything else.
As it is common, the idea was fine, it even somewhat worked in few places, but applying it everywhere turned out to be silly. We have medical companies changing an atom here in there to make "same" but legally distinct drugs, and software people patenting half a day of work of someone as some "invention" (and my favourite [1], "playing with cat using a laser pointer").
It failed as a system decades ago and if anything it became blockage to innovation (gotta check thousands of patents, they might be too similar!).
More than that, it is peanuts in cost for corporation but significant one for a single "inventor" so majority of it lies in hands of corporations that would do that R&D anyway.
The protection it provides was also supposed to encourage publishing the science (as opposed to just lock up your trade secrets and never show it to the world) but frankly long patent interval makes it a bit pointless, competition can just invent "same/similar legally distinct process in many situation and only people getting richer by patents are lawyers, not "inventors".
I start to think laws should have "best by" date, and be re-evaulated after 10 or 20 years whether they served a purpose well and still serve it...
[1] Method of exercising a cat https://patents.google.com/patent/US5443036A/en
There is another model for innovation, however, and that is the government research grant model. The government taxes wealth, the taxes accumulate into massive funds, government experts hired from the field identify compelling research topics that would benefit the collective, funds are made available and other researchers submit proposals of what they would do with that money, government experts choose the most promising proposals, money goes to things based on research merit versus the product or technologies potential to take money from people's pockets.
So, to solve the triviality, the patents shouldn't be worth more than it would take for a competitor to reinvent the end result - so if we're talking about a truly advanced chemical process, sure, takes time and reasearch and people and experiments... definitely worth millions. In contrast, pressing pageDown and in result moving one (full) page down (instead of moving a screen-height) should be practically worthless, since it'd take someone just a few hours to reimplement. Valuing would be hard but still better than nothing.
The other is the time limits.. especially in software, a year is a lot of time, really a lot... and 20 years is way too much.
I mean the marketing blabla behind patents is always the little inventor who found something incredible but will be eaten by the large corps, right? Which means they should be interested in actually creating a product out of it to make money, and the patent gives them a "safety" period before the big corps stomp the little guy to the curb. Or ... maybe this whole thing was a pure marketing ploy and patents have been misused in all kinds of ways in the 19th century already?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33505728
Some decades later, however the (much less broad ?) patents over steam engines able to produce circular motion, seem to have forced Watt to differentiate and improve his "2nd engine" so much that it could be differentiated enough from the other patents :
https://technicshistory.com/2021/10/10/the-steam-revolution/
Note also that Watt was bad at business, and only owned 1/3rd of "his" patents.
Our post-modern issues seem to me to instead stem first from :
- it being too easy to shelter liability (and tax fraud !) behind complex company trees
- a failure of antitrust and lack of goal/duration-limited companies allowing companies to grow waaaay too big to the point where they have enough power to heavily weigh on governments (note though that Watt had already managed to convince the British government to give a 25 year extension on "his" "1rst" steam engine)
The problem with multinationals is just icing on the cake, because they use all kinds of tools to block off competition, not just patents and copyright. And compared to the small inventor they do have the means to control for patent violations by others and go through court with that, if needed. So the whole process is highly aligned towards the wealthy to begin with.
For example, Coca-Cola never patended their formula. So you might think: I can copy it and sell my own right? Well, yes, legally yes, if you ever found their formula, somehow. They been successful for more than a hundred years now in hiding that formula.
Thing is, software patents allowed people to actually patent ideas, concepts, stuff that is obvious and don't need sharing, for example: "ghost racer" is a patented concept, for a while any game that wanted to display to the player his past run by showing a slightly different copy of himself so he can compare, had to pay patent royalty. But the concept is obvious, it is simple, it is there, nobody used a ludicrous amount of money and time to invent it.
This is different than the patent for Michael Jackson dance moves that requires specialized devices, he patented physical objects that required time and money to make, they had a non-trivial purpose on his dance and he had to work to create them to make his dance moves possible. And now that he is gone, the awesome stage tricks he invented can keep existing, because he wrote detailed patents explaining how to repeat his feats.
Stuff that is obvious cannot be patented, according to the law. The problem is the system's implementation of the law.
Software shouldn't be patentable because math isn't patentable.
Is physics patentable? Everything in the real world eventually depends on physics. Yet despite the unpatentability of physics, patents built on physical properties of the world exist as well. Why should mathematics and software be different?
To create a solution within the constraints given is what engineering is all about, and requires expert domain knowledge and creative thought. Software isn't just math, it operates on real processors with real limitations. I'm not arguing that software patents should be valid, but the "software is just math" argument is too weak to carry much weight.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210824042808/https://www.gamas...
That doesn't make it any more deserving of a patent.
I don't really buy your argument since the same could be said for obvious stuff in the physical world as well.
I still think I am leaning towards companies keeping their secrets if patents is the only solution we can bring to the table.
This is a legend. Coca Cola is just water with sugar. The "formula" tastes different in every country. And today's coca cola is not the same like yesterday, so they shall fill a patent every other year in every country.
As for the "no effort" claim, reminds me of the :
Henry Ford vs Charles Steinmetz' (of General Electric) invoice for fixing a generator : "Making chalk mark [showing where the issue is], $1. Knowing where to make mark, $9,999."
In general, the software world sees plenty of innovation, and would continue to see that innovation without patents. Besides, software is much closer to mathematics. The idea that e.g. long-division is patentable is ridiculous, but if you write "long-division, but on a computer" the only thing that prevents a patent is how glaringly obvious the prior-art is.
If you are working as an inventor it's your own responsibility to market and sell your ideas and create appropriate contracts when selling your inventions to someone.
A patent has to go through several layers and areas of concern before finally being approved. The entire approval process must be documented and publically available.