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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

> If we take the position that an inventor

But most software patents aren't inventions; they're just brain farts with money behind them. They might not be trolls, but they went to the toilet, had some random idea I had 20000 times in my life already, but they patent it genuinely thinking it's anything original.

There are many none trolls, like the famous Amazon one-click buy one; everyone in web dev invented that in the 90s by themselves; they patented it. How is it worth protecting?

If you did invent and put the time and effort, how about selling your products; if someone else does it better, that's life. Especially in software; the pain is in the development and finishing, not the invention. The idea is absolutely worthless, outside this broken patent system.

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>had some random idea I had 20000 times in my life already,

Aren't patent systems already supposed to reject "inventions" that are common sense? Perhaps the problem is not the system itself but rather the humans who are approving these.

That’s definitely part of it: in the 90s you saw a ton of “on the internet” patents which looked a lot like the examiners not having had enough experience to say that something was either an obvious adaptation of an existing concept to the web or that the two systems had almost nothing in common other than using a computer (I remember a patent troll hitting a customer with a 1980s patent for cash registers connected to a minicomputer using a phone line, claiming it covered their web store). A younger generation of patent clerks hired with more experience seems to have helped there.

The other problem is funding: look at the patent examiner listings right now and think about how many people they’re going to be able to get with the federal pay scale having been prevented from keeping pace with the market for years:

https://www.usajobs.gov/Search/Results?l=&l=&a=CM56&hp=publi...

The parent system will accept pretty much anything if your lawyers ask them enough times. I've seen algorithms from the 80s patented today, with no real changes. The patent examiners have no idea what's novel or common sense, and just accept everything.

It is not reasonable to expect humans to assess the novelty or obviousness of software "inventions". Too many of them can be created too fast for any conceivable patent office to handle. The only solution is for Congress to write a law saying algorithms can't be patented. SCOTUS tentatively said it already, but nobody listens to them.

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