Comment by comex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by comex | Hacker News Reader

> VPlot and Viola were demonstrated to Sun Microsystems in May 1993, months before Doyle claimed to have conceived of his invention.

If you think that it makes sense to give the first person to come up with an idea exclusive rights over it for 20 years, compare the amount of innovation supplied to the world in having the idea of putting something interactive on the Web to the amount of innovation that has been built on interactivity on the Web (and yes, the patent is very close to that broad). The former is hardly trivial - it was a novel idea and would have been a very cool demo at the time - but the latter is half of the technology industry. Consider the tens of millions of dollars Eolas was able to extract from random companies while doing nothing, and how much more they might have gained if they had happened to have been a few months earlier. Consider the stupid hack required for years to work around the patent in IE - it could have been worse, since this patent was broad enough that nobody was going to stop innovating because of it yet not broad enough to lack a simple workaround, but it was still stupid.

I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

> I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

Let's add business methods and existing genetic sequences (thankfully that one has been partially corrected) to the list.

At the very least, one should have to demonstrate economic damages arising from the violation.

If I'm a glass company that spent time and money developing a revolutionary new compound to strengthen glass and my sales are being impacted by someone who copied the compound, then it seems reasonable that I should have some protection.

But if I developed it and then sat on it, I should have zero ability to claim anything.

> I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

Patent trolls and lawyers.

> I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

The lawyers. Hence...

And the crybabies that think that all they do is a unique invention and that it costs millions of dollars to write a couple of lines of code

> And the crybabies that think that all they do is a unique invention and that it costs millions of dollars to write a couple of lines of code

I think that is a great point. I believe that many people think that you should get a patent for something if you thought of something first. It certainly has an appeal towards the common man if you can get rewarded for just an idea. As IT professionals we all know someone who has an idea and just needs someone to execute.

>I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

Companies that have spent billions on defensive patent portfolios, like Google.

Though, ultimately they might still come out ahead, depending on their ongoing patent litigation costs.

that's a bit like saying we may as well have a war, we've spent so much on all this military hardware ... ;-)

> I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

Why limit it to software?

Just because one aspect of the patent system has been abused and applied incorrectly doesn't mean that it's an invalid system. There's a great deal of benefit to the patent system if it is applied correctly.

In what way do you think that patents are broken such that applying them to one field of human invention works, but applying them to another does not? What benefit do you believe that patents bring to other fields? Is there some other way that we could get the same (or better) benefit in those fields?

> In what way do you think that patents are broken such that applying them to one field of human invention works, but applying them to another does not?

Different fields of human invention have different economic characteristics. For a field where patents may be more economically useful than they are in software, consider the pharmaceutical industry. Developing a new drug costs a decade and hundreds of millions, and remains useful for a long time, but once developed is easily copied. None of those conditions are true for software (and there is no equivalent of copyright protection for drugs).

For more, try http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copy...

Pharmaceuticals are a poor example because the (bulk of the) costs aren’t inherent to the discovery process, rather they are caused by the regulatory process that ensure safety for patients. I don’t see a good reason why that same regulatory process shouldn’t grant a limited monopoly instead of depending on patent protection.

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