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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

So, a thing about patents: they are a way to reward disclosure of useful techniques with short-term exclusivity. As bad as even that type of exclusivity might be, its an improvement on keeping knowledge secret like the inner mysteries of a religious cult.

And about Pythagoras and cults...

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The idea that any person has ever turned to the patent system in order to solve a software engineering problem is pure fantasy. Software patents are only useful for rent seeking and as a moat to squash competition. They exist only as a drag on the economy & on innovation.

> The idea that any person has ever turned to the patent system in order to solve a software engineering problem is pure fantasy.

Holy non-sequitur, Batman.

How about the idea that people have ever used a publicly disclosed technique that has aged out of patent protection? (Including indirectly, such as by using a library incorporating the technique)?

Then they could also have used that technique without the patent system. What is the value in holding an idea hostage for 20 years?

Answered upthread: “So, a thing about patents: they are a way to reward disclosure of useful techniques with short-term exclusivity. As bad as even that type of exclusivity might be, its an improvement on keeping knowledge secret like the inner mysteries of a religious cult.” (emphasis added)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37987214

You can't use information that ia kept secret from you.

I'm sorry, I'm really not following the chain of events you're proposing. You're saying companies would choose not to release profitable software, if it weren't also covered by software patents? I'm skeptical.

> You're saying companies would choose not to release profitable software, if it weren't also covered by software patents?

Yes, keeping software in house and selling services around itbinstead of releasing software has been a popular option as long as software has existed, and changing the IP landscape (or any other part of the legal and business context) in a way which changes the relative incentives between those options changes the frequency at which one option is chosen over the other.

And that's even before considering the way that changing the IP landscape impacts the decision of whether it is worthwhile to develop software for a given market at all.

You can't keep the functionality of your software a secret and still distribute it.

What goes back to the initial reply you got, nobody every read a software patent to understand an algorithm. People would rather decompile and deobfuscate your binary. What has the added benefit that your binary actually contains the algorithm, while most software patents do not really disclose the thing they are reserving.

Algorithm secrecy was historically never a problem in software. Currently with the cloud and SaaS it is starting to be a very narrow one here or there, but since software started being protected, patents never disclosed the things they protected, and there's no movement on making they start to do that.

> You can't keep the functionality of your software a secret and still distribute it.

This is ultimately true of any product. But if you distribute closed-source, compiled software, the only way to discover the secrets is the same as with any product: reverse engineering.

Furthermore, a high percentage of software is never distributed, but exists only as back-end code, or as proprietary software only ever run on-prem.

> You can't use information that ia kept secret from you.

Nor can you use obvious techniques that some prick has patented either. :(

Before computers, and even currently, you were not able to patent "math". Math was considered "facts", and facts were and are not patentable.

So the question becomes "is a software algorithm closer to math or an invention?". I would personally argue the former as you can mathematically model basically any algorithm with TLA+ or CSP or something, and as such it shouldn't be patentable, but I will acknowledge I'm not a patent lawyer and as such I'm kind of speaking out of my ass.

> Before computers, and even currently, you were not able to patent "math".

Well, yes, and that would hvae been a problem if Pythagoras lived when there was a patent system and wanted to patent it. Which one imagines he might have hacked around by avoiding the disclosure of a patent and keeping it as cult knowledge.

Because, you know, even without a patent system...

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