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Comment by a_p | Hacker News Reader

If you cannot understand how people could possible think that software patents are acceptable, I recommend reading this article. [1] Not because it will convince you that software patents are good — it won't. But it will help you understand the thought process of lawyers who do think that there should be some software patents. For example, Goetz writes that he supports "patents where the preferred implementation of an inventive machine process is in software (via a computer program), hardware (via circuitry), or a combination of both software and hardware."

[1] http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/09/in-defense-of-softwa...

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Personally, I support software patents. I'm just against idea patents, as opposed to invention patents.

Screen rotation is no invention. It's an idea; once you have it, it's trivial to implement. That, IMO, does not afford patent protection. However, certain things can, and should be patents. RSA, for example. It's a non-trivial procedure that was non-trivial to invent and there are not very many alternatives.

Would you have been okay if Feynman diagrams were patented?

RSA is actually kind of a bad example. It's an eminent example of almost-pure number theory ported over to a software domain, and mathematics is explicitly non-patentable. Next you'd be telling me that Fourier transforms should be patentable.

I get that it's difficult to incentivize the development of truly difficult abstract ideas, but mathematicians and physicists have been doing exactly that for centuries and they appear to be doing alright.

> I get that it's difficult to incentivize the development of truly difficult abstract ideas, but mathematicians and physicists have been doing exactly that for centuries and they appear to be doing alright.

So I was an aerospace engineering major in undergrad. For my professors, financial support came from: 1) government; 2) tuition and fees from students looking to get jobs at Lockheed, Honeywell, Raytheon, etc.

The former is mostly subsidized by the military, while the latter is subsidized directly and indirectly by companies who definitely do leverage patents and trade secrets laws to monetize their developments.

So its a "pick your poison" situation.

That's exactly the issue. Anything that qualifies as not an "idea" patent, like you're using the term, would be an algorithm, which are not patentable. The only thing software patents cover are "idea patents".

There's an interesting question about just what an invention is, though. At least in software, actual implementations are covered by copyright, and I can't see any hard and fast distinction between ideas and inventions.

For instance, determining the optimum layout of a mail application for a four inch screen probably takes a lot of tweaking and user testing. But there's no way that you can call it an invention, and your competitors are free to copy the layout, so long as they change the style enough that customers can clearly distinguish the products.

On the other hand, using a magnet to hold a power connector to a laptop seems like a really obvious idea once you've seen it. You don't have to study detailed documents to see how you could make it. But calling it an 'invention' seems reasonable - and it is patented. And it's perhaps the only thing that attracts me about Apple laptops, but that's not important right now.

I've seen these magnetic power cords on water boilers for a long time. We got one from Asia in the 90s. http://www.zojirushi.com/products/cvdyc

That may have merited a patent (if it wasn't already invented, and I suspect it was), but Apple's implementation does not.

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