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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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