Hacker News Reader

Comment by linuxhansl | Hacker News Reader

Software patents are mostly garbage and unneeded. And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible).

Show me one useful software patent that (a) is not "obvious to one skilled in the art", and (b) benefits society by being granted a monopoly. Just one!

Software rarely requires expensive research that would be worth protecting. Rather than enabling a fair market, this takes fairness out of the market.

Software patents are like getting a patent on "Murder story with final revelation of who did it." Maybe add one or two features, like a "detective with hat", etc. In one fell swoop you would be able to own most murder mysteries.

Software (like books, stories, art, etc) is better handled by Copyright law. May the one who actually has a better product win!

Sorry for the rant.

View on HN

I agree with your rant. I have a similar one. I personally think that software should mostly just not be patentable at all, since (among others) these things are not patentable according to US patent law: scientific discoveries, mathematical methods, aesthetic creations, and rules or methods for performing mental acts.

In addition, software is also copyrightable, which makes much more sense than patents for protecting unauthorized use. IMO, patents for software should be mostly eliminated, and even copyright terms should be much shorter.

5 years full copyright, 5 years noncommercial unrestricted fair use with mandatory attribution, then straight to public domain. Berne Convention be damned, and multigenerational copyrights can go straight to hell as well.

Software patents are stupid, and even more so with AI soon to be able to take arbitrary compiled code and produce readable, well composed source in a target language with documentation and optimizations.

Studios and platforms and funds and giant corporations that "own" terabytes of IP are a cancer.

We're going to have to fix copyright. Until then, pirate everything.

> And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible).

I was originally named on a patent filing (along with the CTO), but left the company and apparently it was too much effort to communicate with me so they just swapped my name for another engineer. But it was literally my idea (in as much as any such software patent is one person's idea). I was literally given a problem to solve and came back with two alternative solutions to implement, without conferring with anyone else at the company or elsewhere. The only input from anyone else in the company was selecting one of the two options, which I then fully implemented entirely myself.

Not only have I always disliked software patents on principle, I was also cheated out on having a patent to put on my resume. (Heck, it was hardly my best idea and for all I know the company patented a bunch of my other work without citing me.) Which is pretty much their only value--as social currency for hiring or highly specious pretend asset security for VC investments.

Technically, removing my name from the filing invalidated the patent, but it's all just a ridiculous shell game.

A huge chunk of software patents are also “well known thing, but with software”. Looking at you, Sonos.

Even if these things were novel at one point, doing them again in software is not novel.

> Software patents are mostly garbage and unneeded. And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible)

I want to know about these patents that you want your name off of! What were they for? Why do you want your name removed? This is the opening to a great story, please tell!

> IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on Generalized Continued Fractions and their Series Transformations and was awarded a Patent

A good portion of the perception and use around patents is the word "awarded", which implies that there was some evaluation, either objective or subjective, by an expert in the topic and that the invention met some high level of… something that made it worthy of being "awarded" for the "work" that it took to invent. Most parents are not evaluated like that today, and software patents specifically probably never have been.

>> IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on ...

we've been through several such cycles - "...on computer", "... on Internet", and now " ... with AI" .

(of course i have several, including couple with AI, and i'm against patents, especially software ones)

What would you think about still having software patents, but having them expire in 2-5 years? I feel like the concept of a patent is still a good one, but the time it takes to go from zero to a product is drastically lower with computer programming. The patent length should reflect that.

How would you feel about patenting language? I.e. If you speak with certain words or certain patterns then you have to pay a royalty (only for 2 to 5 years).

First off, I think that's a false equivalency, as patenting is about ideas (in a platonic sense), not about instances of ideas (which is what copyrighting is).

Secondly, we already have that in limited forms with trademarks and copyrights.

Thirdly, I think the concept of intellectual property is one of the most brilliant social innovations in the past 500 years, as it aligns incentives to innovate (why would I innovate if someone will just steal my work?).

>it aligns incentives to innovate (why would I innovate if someone will just steal my work?)

it was true 200 years ago. It stopped being true about 100+ years ago. Whether somebody innovates or not became unimportant, as a bunch of other people would still innovate the same thing. Just look at airplanes innovation back then - multiple people were doing it simultaneously, and the fact that Wright brothers got patent actually slowed down airplane innovation in US for couple of decades after that.

Let me see if I understand your argument correctly:

1. Before 1900, when someone came up with an idea, it was unlikely that someone else came up with that idea.

2. Because only one person had that idea, patenting protected their idea from being stolen.

3. After 1900, however, multiple people would have the same idea, but only one person could win.

4. Because only one person could win, it became a net loss to all the others, as they could no longer innovate.

4a. One example of this is the wright brothers.

Is that correct? If so:

1/2. I believe that people have been coming up with the same ideas simultaneously for a long time. Leibniz and Newton comes to mind, for example.

3/4. But would any of them have been able to get investments into their projects if they couldn't patent it and then reap the benefits?

You don't get penalized for thinking of the idea independently. You get penalized for creating an instance of that idea. I think it's an apt analogy.

You get penalized for undercutting someone else's work, because there's no good way to tell wether you truly had an independent idea, or whether you're just ripping them off. You can read and share ideas from a patent all you want, so it's very different from freedom of speech.

One cannot (in the US) get a patent for software itself. This was settled a while ago. There needs to be more in the claims. In fact, the patent discussed here does not claim continued fractions and nobody would be in danger using them even if the patent issued as is (which is not certain, because the patent claims rather trivial modification of a classic neural network architecture, which should be brought up by the examiner as obvious).

Patents are propelling the society when they work as intended. They made XIX century and at least good chunk of XX century. Without patents, people fall back to copying each other, because it is much easier to copy than to innovate.

Patents go way back possibly as far as 500 BC, with other examples dating to 1331 etc, yet the introduction didn’t kick off any great wave of progress.

Instead a wide range of factors like better plants feeding both population growth and an ever larger percentage of society could do something other than grow food where the real root causes here. Devoting land and labor to cotton for example requires a surplus of food.

I would rather call the old iterations proto-patents. It took a while to get to a system where anyone can claim an invention as property and make it protected from "borrowing without permission" by law.

A narrower definition is fine, but now you need to define why those specific differences were important and the timeframe + geographic limitation on those specific differences must match what you’re describing.

In other words on paper patents worked like you described in some places well before things kicked off, but the rule of law was more fluid. So you could make the argument that progress depended on some specific level of integrity in the legal system, but that’s now a very arbitrary line which looks like a true Scotsman argument when you try and pin down a specific date for a transition. Similarly you run into issues of which countries what what levels of innovation etc.

> One cannot (in the US) get a patent for software itself. This was settled a while ago. There needs to be more in the claims.

The "more" is basically busywork for lawyers. We effectively have patents for software itself.

> Without patents, people fall back to copying each other, because it is much easier to copy than to innovate.

This is probably the only argument I've seen in favour of software patents in which I see any merit!

I'd be super cool with software patents if they actually open source the software and had actual usable modules included with the patent.

otherwise I agree, copyright is the way to go.

I wouldn't. Many if not most patents are awarded to the first person to encounter a problem and apply a (likely obvious) solution, not the first person to solve a longstanding problem at great expense after many others have tried and failed.

And even if that weren't the case, nobody needs to be given exclusive rights to math. In principle the law says as much, but in fact that's never been an obstacle.

My professor once mentioned how easy it is to be novel and interesting; Just have the interesting part be not novel and the novel part be not interesting!

You make good points, I think of it like this, Patents were meant to be for the public good, aka disclosure.

In modern software terms, to me, that means any software patent should be open sources, and they aren't, which is a worst of all worlds sort of thing.

I agree that software patents are generally garbage and hurt innovation.

Unfortunately, there are probably many people here on HN that make a living off software patents.

RSA

What was the societal benefit of putting 20 years of monopoly on that algorithm? I don't think potential profit was a big motivator in that research work.

And that patent got invalidated in most of the world anyway.

The societal benefit was having RSA publicly described. MIT isn't a charity.

You think they were just going to sit on that and do nothing if they couldn't get a patent? Or that they'd turn it into a product without the underlying math being revealed right away? I don't believe either of those for a second.

There is a rather long history of the workings of cryptography products kept secret, so yes, it is entirely possible that the underlying math would have been kept as a trade secret.

It is also possible that it would have never been created in the first place because resources were allocated to other patentable inventions.

Of course, in the case of RSA, a similar algorithm was developed separately by the British government and kept secret for 24 years.

Kept secret by the government is very different from kept secret in a product anyone can buy and encrypt arbitrary messages with.

What are some message-sending cryptography products where people didn't know how the encryption worked for a long time?

> It is also possible that it would have never been created in the first place because resources were allocated to other patentable inventions.

Given the history of RSA in particular, I'm extremely skeptical of that.

> Given the history of RSA in particular, I'm extremely skeptical of that.

Well then you might want to read about RC4 which only became public after it was leaked. Prior to being leaked, it was RSA's cash cow and one of the most popular encryption algorithms worldwide due to it's speed and the fact that it was exportable (with a 40 bit key).

Indeed, RSA was rather notorious for keeping crypto algorithms as trade secrets (RC2, SecuriID OTP, etc.)

You quoted the wrong part of my post. A trade secret algorithm supports the idea that it would have been made anyway.

Looking at RC4, how widespread was it before that leak? How many users did it have? Wikipedia lists it being added to a bunch of protocols but all after the leak.

Also more recent cryptography has lots of extremely public competition between nonpatented algorithm proposals, which largely undermines this entire realm of study as a reason to continue to have software patents.

> A trade secret algorithm supports the idea that it would have been made anyway

Made and kept secret. If the leak never happened (like it hasn't for other RSA trade secrets), we may not know the algorithm to this day. No one could have built upon it. We may have spent years trying to reinvent the wheel rather than trying to improve upon it.

> how widespread was it before that leak

It was one of the most popular stream ciphers in the world, due to it's speed and the fact it could be exported, and it helped launch RSA as a company.

How sure are we that the "leak" wasn't someone decompiling it? Because if it was decompiled, then even if that post didn't happen someone else doing it was pretty inevitable.

As for any intact RSA trade secrets, I doubt any of them were all that special by the 20 year mark. A trade secret slows down innovation but it has to get pretty extreme before a software trade secret slows down innovation more than a patent. (And yes, sometimes you can build on someone else's patent without waiting for it to expire, but on average the delay to the progress of the arts is pretty big.)

Would it matter if it was? Even if it could be reverse engineered, so can physical inventions.

Just like with physical inventions, the issue of trade secrets isn't just that it can slow down innovation by wasting resources reinventing an existing invention, but also that inventions can be lost altogether just because the inventor failed to popularize or commercialize it.

I really doubt the average delay for improving upon a patent into something novel is very long. I rarely see software patents that don't cite more than a few recently issued patents.

Nor have I seen much evidence of software patents actually stiffing invention, except for overly broad idea patents (thankfully neutered by Alice). Most of the issues with software patents instead seem to be around wanting to use the specific invention rather than improving upon it - which is rather the opposite of innovation. The LZW patent, for example, was an issue because it was used by GIFs, not because no one could invent a novel derivative of LZW - those took less than a year to appear.

That's not to say software patents don't have issues of course. We'd be better off if patent terms were shorter or required compulsory licensing, if applications were detailed enough to actually reproduce the invention rather than vague descriptions (the LZW patent, as annoying as it was, contained actual source code) and if the standards for what was considered novel were based on more than just abstract descriptions.

> I rarely see software patents that don't cite more than a few recently issued patents.

How many are patents by unrelated companies? That's where the real delays are.

> Nor have I seen much evidence of software patents actually stiffing invention

Video encoding has been held back a lot. And it's a bit different but troll lawsuits keep happening over super basic website features. And I'd call instruction sets software and those keep getting piles of patents, doing things like severely limit x86 competition.

And software patents get weaponized so often, there's a million stories about it.

If we have all this hassle and the best we can cite for advantages is RSA, then software patents are not promoting the progress of sciences and the useful arts. Unlike copyright, a more limited duration doesn't really fix anything. Just get rid of them.

Gold star comment.

>Show me one useful software patent that ... (b) benefits society by being granted a monopoly. Just one!

that's a bullshit criterion, and nothing about what you said applies to software in particular.

it's generally agreed that monopolies are bad for society, but patents only grant a temporary monopoly to reward innovation, in exchange for which society gets disclosure (at the time patent systems were promulgated, many ideas died with their inventors as trade secrets) and encourages more R&D by creating a system for payoff.

The only "system for payoff" I've seen with software patents is patent trolls. Are there cases of software inventors being rewarded for their software more fairly because they had a patent?

I think every every company I've worked at that had R&D had some kind of reward system for patents. Yes, most of the software patents were nonsense but those who have their names on it still did get paid.

Guessing those rewards are in the hundreds of dollars, probably a fraction of the engineer salary that went into the technical work.

It's not bullshit. You said it yourself, the benefits are supposed to be disclosure and encouraging R&D.

But disclosure is rarely an issue with software, and patents are bad at properly disclosing software details in the first place.

And in software there's already a huge motivation to do R&D, while patents are more likely to block useful work than in most fields. Even if I think of highly optimization-motivated fields like video encoding, patents slow down innovation more than they accelerate it.

So can you name some software patents where those motivating factors actually worked? It's a fair question.

there are valid arguments about patentability of software, but you didn't make any of those arguments.

> But disclosure is rarely an issue with software

patents require disclosure. patented software requires disclosure. if you are saying that software is often disclosed (open source vs "rarely an issue"? you weren't specific) that doesn't mean you get a free ticket for some other restriction, and open source was not common when software patents were granted.

>So can you name some software patents where those motivating factors actually worked?

I'm not sure I believe that the patent system works to do that. But it is absolutely true that trade secrets can die with their owners an that society benefits from disclosure. I'm not here to defend the patent system. I'm here to say that you did not do a good job of arguing against software patents.

An example of a software patent that I think is fundamentally "solid" is public key encryption. Some people thought of it, they developed it, it is at least as novel and clever and non-obvious as the cotton gin, so if the cotton gin should be patentable, public key encryption should also be.

but I'm not here to defend patents, I'm just saying that you are not moving the needle.

So you can't name a single software patent where the system worked as intended, but you DON'T think that's a valid argument against software patents?

Your standards for a valid argument make no sense.

> An example of a software patent that I think is fundamentally "solid" is public key encryption. Some people thought of it, they developed it, it is at least as novel and clever and non-obvious as the cotton gin, so if the cotton gin should be patentable, public key encryption should also be.

It's cool that they got paid for having those clever thoughts.

But the goal of the US patent system isn't just to enable that payment, it's to encourage more innovation and disclosure via that payment.

And also, those core inventions happened almost 50 years ago with that field getting more collaborative and less patent-using every decade.

If that's the best example multiple people can come up with, then software patents are an extremely failed experiment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com