Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnid | Hacker News Reader

What is the difference between software as a tool and something mechanical as a tool? Mechanical devices, for which there are many patents, take a state of matter and change it to another state of matter. Why should you be able to patent a circuit board, but not a set of program code that does exactly the same transformation to a set of bits?

Why are mechanical engineers able to patent their devices, but computer engineers are not?

I understand the ramifications of software patents. But the problems with software patents are the same for patents in every other field. Why is software special?

Why are we narrowing the conversation to software? Patents for software, like any other field require research and development, they save time and money, they make things more efficient, they improve life for countless individuals, they do require risk, innovation, and yes reward to survive.

That's what patents are for. They are to reward the risk takers. In the case of software patents, the reward goes to the programmers who take the risk to write all the code that will be patented. They aren't "abstract" ideas, they are lines of code that are concretely typed into a computer. They convert information from one form to another. They control the physical world in previously unidentified ways.

To say software patents are invalid or software can't be patented really puts software programmers at a disadvantage relative to other fields of science and innovation. Why should pharmaceutical companies, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and all other disciplines have the right to patent their inventions -- but not software engineers?

View on HN

What if civil engineers could file a patent that looked like that following:

A method and system for crossing a body of water via a constructed object. The customer starts on one side of the water and walks across the object to the other side.

Your average software patent is roughly equivalent to a patent on the concept of a bridge. If there are useful software patents, they've been overshadowed by the large number of abusive ones.

Are you sure that's the typical software patent?

Some famous law-suits were about patents that are far less trivial than your bridge example.

For example, Pixar holds a patent on Monte Carlo sampling, and has sued or threatened a number of companies that used any sort of randomization in their rendering algorithms. This despite the fact that Monte Carlo methods have been known and used for many decades before Pixar was started. The issue here is not that the concept of Monte Carlo integration is trivial, but instead that Pixar's contribution to it is so tiny compared to the previous state of the art that it should not give them a "right" to own the whole field.

Similarly, some lawsuits were about compression algorithms if I remeber right. Same issue here - it's not that a given compression algorithm is trivial, it is more the fact that it is probably a tiny increment on the top of existing compression techniques, and anybody that also builds on the known ideas should not be threatened by loosely related patents.

Of course, patents are a problem that should be addressed, but I don't think trying to prove that software patents are somehow different than others is the right way.

Well, I'm biased because my company is basically being sued over a patent that is, essentially, about as broad as bridge building (i.e. someone else essentially claims to have patented the idea of storing insurance claims in a database. Seriously.)

But they are fundamentally different in that software is already protected by copyright the same way any other creative work is. Copyright and patent protection are two sides of the same coin that are there in, according to the US Constitution (European theory on the origin of IP rights is different), to provide an incentive to create new things. Unlike a chemical formula or a mechanical invention, the software itself is already protected by copyright, just like a novel or a painting is. It's basically the only thing that I can think of that's protected by both copyright and patent protection.

In many ways, patenting a software system is far more akin to patenting a novel or a how-to book (I'm patenting the idea of a hero that fights an evil villain, and I'm patenting the idea of explaining to people how to fix a leaky faucet).

Again, patents are constitutionally granted on a pragmatic basis rather than on the grounds of some inherent right, so I think it's a perfectly valid to attack them on the grounds that they do more harm than good, and it's also perfectly valid to point out that they are categorically different than patents on mechanical or chemical inventions.

That is most definitely like a typical software patent.

> For example, Pixar holds a patent on Monte Carlo sampling, and has sued or threatened a number of companies that used any sort of randomization in their rendering algorithms.

Actually, Pixar has a patent on certain uses of randomization in rendering. In patent-speak, randomization is the mechanism and rendering is the result.

I mention patent-speak because patents are the use of mechanism to accomplish result.

Would you object to a patent on certain uses of a lever to close a gate? (Ignoring novelty issues - closing gates with levers is well known now, while using randomization in rendering was presumably new when Pixar did their thing.) In patent-speak, the lever is the mechanism while closing the gate is the result.

If not, then you're arguing that a lever as a mechanism is somehow different from randomization as a mechanism. If so, you're pretty much arguing against all patents (using mechanism to accomplish result).

I'm mostly arguing against patenting trivial increments over non-trivial ideas.

It has been long known that MC can be applied to computing any integral over any domain, so computing the integral of color over a pixel is simply a specialization of a general technique, and should not be patented.

Similarly, in akeefer's post above, storing insurance claims in a relational database is a specialization of the well known process of storing anything in a database, so should not be patented.

Were it not for prior art, I'm sure the design for a bridge could be patented. And then someone would invent a truss bridge, a covered bridge, an arch bridge, a cable stayed bridge, etc. each getting a patent because each improves on the state of the art. You can patent just about any physical implement. The reason "obvious" stuff (physical equivalents of OneClick) are not patentable is due to prior art dating back to the stone age. Now computers have opened up a land rush on pure mathematics, which used to not be patentable but now is through clever wording. IMO this needs to be resolved by legislation (whichever way you come down on the debate.) The existing patent framework is just not designed for it. So bringing it up before the supreme court is a good step forward.

The design for an implementation of a bridge, not for all bridges. Most software patents try to patent all bridges.

"Land rush on pure mathematics" is exactly right. They're being allowed to essentially claim the entire problem, rather than a specific solution which happens to be better than well-known alternatives the industry is still free to use.

What's interesting about what you just stated is that the only reason current patents don't stifle innovation is that there is enough unpatented prior art that someone can build a bridge. If someone did patent a simple bridge as stated above no one could build a truss bridge cause it would infringe. It would in effect stifle innovation.

Patents only work when in old industries?

I'm not saying the patent system doesn't need repair but I don't think the problems are as broad as your example lays them out to be. Whenever someone tries to make such a broad patent it's almost always knocked down by the prior art clause (the example you gave would only work if no one had ever put a piece of wood over a puddle to get across before)

I personally favor the establishment of some kind of universal license fee that prevents patent holders from hoarding an innovation or charging ridiculous prices for others to use it. That way those who created a concept still get their just due while not being able to prevent anyone from using their patents to innovate.

I don't know what the "average" software patent looks like, but as someone who has been through the process, I think the examiners are pretty thorough. Through over a year of communication back and forth we lost our most recent patent attempt because the examiner found enough cases of prior art that were similar enough to what we were doing to fail the "not obvious to person skilled in the art" test. And trust me, we tried to find differences, and they were always able to answer our rebuttals with specific examples.

I'm sure there are good examiners and bad ones. Perhaps this time we just got one who was very thorough, but having looked at a number of software patents in my field, I've yet to see anything that I could consider trivial.

So you throw out the ambiguous and obvious patents. It doesn't mean you throw out the entire IP framework.

This is akin to the folks who claim we should go back to physical gold as money because fiat money has been abused. Fiat money isn't evil, it's incredibly useful, but we've failed to stem the corruption in our government that allows it to be abused.

My point is that the abuse of a system does not make that system inherently evil, it just means we need to learn from the mistakes and mature as a society. Lean towards overturning the lame software patents for a couple decades and tighten up the standards for new ones.

Who said "inherently evil?" On the whole, I'd say that software patents do more harm than good, and should be eliminated on that basis. I agree that it's not inherently evil doesn't mean we should do it.

Patents, like copyright, are not a theoretically pure framework like physics or maths. They're a very pragmatic give-and-take agreement designed to achieve a certain result. According to the US constitution, that aim is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts".

In-so-far as software patents do not achieve that aim, they are worthless.

(the same, btw, could be said of copyrights, but not, interestingly, of many other kinds of patents)

Exactly. It's important to remember that both copyright and patents are instances of the public willingly ceding, in very specific cases, some of their constitutionally-protected freedoms (in the case of copyright, freedom of speech) because doing so is seen to have a positive net effect for society (the creation of more art, better technology).

It is not exactly the same transformation as you said. Information and matter are for practical purposes fundamentally different. You can't just copy a device a million times over with near-zero cost, and you also can't change mechanical devices with the same facility that you can change bits.

Patents for software do not save time and money, nor do they make things run more efficiently, nor do they improve life for countless individuals. This is simply not the case.

Also, patents are not made in specific lines of code - patents would be a smaller problems if they did. They do patent abstract ideas.

To put simply, the main difference is that (besides the fact that most software patents are bogus) since software is pretty much a set of ideas and nothing else (as opposed to hardware where you have a few ideas and a lot of work worrying with beauty, physical constraints, durability, etc) a good team of programmers will have a few hundred good ideas in the course of writing any non-trivial piece of software - which means that patents can kill free software (since it is unlikely that people working for free would want to license software patents), and also make commercial software projects impossible (even if you have the money, having to license patents from 100 different companies would surely be discouraging - specially for a small company).

Patents for software do not save time and money, nor do they make things run more efficiently, nor do they improve life for countless individuals. This is simply not the case.

I didn't say patents do that, I said software does that.

I do not believe software is "just a set of ideas." If that was the case, why do we need engineers to take an "idea" for a software system to implement that system? Building an idea with software takes time, experimentation, trial and error. Mistakes are made. Algorithms are optimized.

Do you really believe that software vendors don't worry about beauty and durability of their software product the same way manufacturers of physical products do? In a lot of cases, we have "designed obsolescence" of mechanical products, so I can't avoid disagreeing with your statement there.

The whole point of patents is to share the knowledge learned in the process of going from an idea to an invention that implements the idea. The problem with sharing the knowledge is that it becomes more difficult to capitalize on all the effort that went into building the invention. You let others know of the invention and how it was built so they can use that knowledge to further improve the world, while also protecting their ability to feed themselves while they work on more ideas to improve the world.

I know many believe software should be free, but the ability to kill free software is one of the benefits of patents. If a company or an individual makes some software worth patenting and then someone decides to give away that same software for free, then the patent holder should be able to kill that free software.

I don't believe that free is somehow more moral than not free. I don't see anything immoral about selling software. In fact, the motives of many who give away free software could be argued less moral than those who sell it.

Why is there an association between people who sell software and "bad" software vendors? A lot of proprietary software vendors are good people who want to create companies and employ more software developers to write more code and make the world a better place. I don't believe not showing all of your cards, or code as the case may be, makes you a bad person or a bad company.

Honestly, how many actual software engineers do you know that are in favor of patents and that think it will help them protect their invention, rather than being terrified of accidentally running afoul of someone's patents? And how many cases of software patents have you actually seen used to protect the little inventor from the big bad corporation trying to steal his idea, rather than used by patent trolls to extract money from whoever has deep pockets, by big corporations as anti-competitive tactics against startups, or by big corporations against each other in a kind of mutually-assured destruction detente?

I think that the historical record is pretty clear that software patents are a huge net negative for the industry and do much more to harm innovation than they do to protect it.

How many startups wouldn't be started if people couldn't patent their software, and merely had to have it protected by copyright? Hardly any (probably just ones that deal with things like video encoding). How many startups will be sued out of existence by big corporations or patent trolls due to ludicrous patents, and how many startups won't be started at all because the landscape is already a patent minefield? A whole lot more.

Patenting isn't an inherent right, it's a pragmatic right granted by the government in order to encourage innovation and openness by providing people with temporary monopoly rights in exchange for sharing their inventions. Software patents serve neither to foster innovation nor to foster information sharing, since software patents themselves are pretty much universally unreadable, unenlightening, obvious garbage.

The problems you mention aren't unique to software. How many mechanical engineers look at a device and think it is obvious? Or they read a patent and think, "This is unreadable, unenlightening, obvious garbage?" Lots I'm sure.

To answer your question. Mint.com patented their software. Yext.com has patents. Lots of startups patent their software and the algorithms that give their companies a competitive advantage.

My argument is that software isn't a special case in the field of innovation. If someone can patent a solar panel that extracts 10x more energy from the same area, then why shouldn't a company be allowed to patent a software algorithm that can compress data stored on disk to 10% of its original size? Ultimately, math and science are behind both inventions.

I also do not agree that it is pretty clear that software patents are a huge net negative. You'll have to provide evidence for that. If you do that, you'll also have to show that patents for software are more negative than patents for mechanical devices or designs in all the other fields if you think software patents should be disallowed, but not patents in other fields.

The question is, why don't we disallow ALL patents? Think of all the lives that would be saved if pharmaceuticals could be sold at generic prices!

There's something really wrong with the philosophy, religion perhaps that motivates a group of software engineers to think their work isn't valuable and shouldn't be protected and isn't worth paying for. The arguments just don't seem rational and my experience with the world tends to discount all the arguments in favor of degrading the field of software engineering to that of garage bands just hacking out code because they love it. Eventually those hackers run out of money and need to eat.

Perhaps there is some idea that software engineers should just really really love what they do! They should love it so much they don't care if they get paid. It's as if getting paid for what you do makes it work. That's not true though. Athletes get paid to do what they love. Lots of doctors and lawyers love what they do. I think it's totally fine to get paid to do what you love.

I disagree . . . the fundamental differences are that 1) copyright already protects software, 2) any given software program could literally fall afoul of hundreds or thousands of patents, 3) the patents themselves do little to encourage innovation, and 4) that duplicating a software system is a far different process than copying someone's drug formula, such that patents are unnecessary.

On balance, patents do more harm than good to companies and their engineers.

The companies you mentioned don't patent for competitive advantage, they patent so that when they get sued by someone else they can countersue. That's what everyone does; if you don't have patents and someone sues you, you can't fight back.

Patents on pharmaceuticals do encourage innovation, because the one essential element is the chemical formula (to a lesser extent, the process to produce that chemical), which would easily be copied without protection. A given software application consists of thousands of lines of code and thousands of algorithmic decision (often hundreds of thousands or millions); if you knew that someone was using an XOR in order to flip bits, it doesn't exactly let you copy their system. My argument is that patents on software don't encourage innovation because they don't increase the protection that's already there, and the threat of other people's patents is constantly looming and stifles innovation.

Look, I'm a software engineer, and I know a lot of other engineers, so I'm not discounting my own or anyone's work or saying it's not valuable and that people shouldn't get paid for it. What I'm saying is that patenting isn't a useful or appropriate mechanism of protection, that copyright combined with the inherent difficult of duplicating the thousands of features in someone else's application is barrier enough, and that patents actually hurt entrepreneurs and software companies and make it harder for engineers to get paid for their work.

Yeah and copyright already protects mechanical drawings. If that were all we were trying to protect then no need for patents on anything.

You have effectively killed any sort of technical conversation if everyone must protect trade secrets. You have literally killed any advancement in software if everyone must have a the secret dies with me sort of attitude about every innovative step taken by every software developer out there.

The patent system needs to be reformed but if done away with will leave us with little more than Damascus steel.

I'm just arguing against patents on software, not patents in general. Novels aren't protected by patents, yet people still manage to write books. Athletic training techniques aren't patentable, yet people still manage to innovate and share knowledge there. Recipes are only protected by trade secrets, yet people manage to innovate when it comes to food; people publish cookbooks, restaraunts come out with new dishes. Fashion designs are only protected by copyright, and yet fashion moves at a lightning pace. Mathematical and logical proofs aren't patentable, yet people still do mathematical research, and talk about it. And keep in mind that software patents weren't even recognized until the 1980's, and weren't widely granted until the mid-90's. The majority of the history of computing has advanced without patent protection.

I'm not sure why you'd think that software advancement would be hindered without patents, or that conversation would somehow die out. Patents for software are notoriously useless to read, and only an infinitesimal part of any system is patented anyway, and then generally only as a landmine against future competitors or to enforce mutually-assured destruction. The vast majority of an application's "secret sauce" is protected by trade secrets, not by patents, and copyright guards against the actual theft of resources. I don't think that patents in the software world really do much to open up what would otherwise be a trade secret, with the possible exception of things like compression algorithms. I think that's fundamentally different from how patents function in, say, the pharmaceutical industry, where patent protection does encourage sharing of information.

When the only way to protect knowledge is to make it secret then you literally get knowledge that die like Damascus steel did. It was so advantageous to protect how it was made that now a thousand years after it was first created we have no clue how it was made(or how we have lost nuclear missle secrets because the secret was to well kept.) Just think of how secretive Google is. If it weren't for the patent system how much would us lowly outsiders know about pagerank?

The difference is that source code is the recipe, not the steel. When a company "dies", their trade secrets aren't destroyed, but rather left laying out in the open for anyone to find.

Any patent must satisfy three conditions:

* It must be novel.

* It must not be mathematics. Maths cannot be patented.

* It must be non-obvious.

Most software patents violate one or more of the above three conditions.

My answer: Software patents are invalid as much as hardware patents is invalid. They should be abolished.

From what I have read and learn so far, the patent system and copyright system are redundant. The free market already rewarded risk-takers in the form of first-mover advantage, among other things.

I could summarize you what I learned about the history of innovation.(The early American book publishing industry and their relationship with British authors, James Watt's true contribution to steam technology, the fashion industry, etc). But I think it is better for me to point you a book that have all of that and explain it better than I can.

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

You are absolutely right by saying that all patents should be treated the same. Now depending of the field, their effect may differ. In the pharmaceutical sector, they rise the price of medicine. In the food sector, they allow Monsanto to patent crops, herds, and then sue farmers for their not-even-transgenic goods. In big industries (with big players), it just wastes time and money through cross-licensing, and prevent new, small players to enter the market. In the software sector, it sets an atmosphere of paranoia, and prevent certain kind of free software to exist in some countries (H264 video encoding, for instance).

You are absolutely right when you say that the purpose of patents is to reward the risk takers. Except they actually don't —in my opinion. They tend to favour the big, established players, which cross-licence anyway, nullifying the incentives of patents.

Paul Graham himself basically said the same thing: you can't reasonably reject some kind of patent, and accept the others, if only because you can't set clear legal limits.

Needles to say, I'm against patents. All of them. Rick Falkvinge convinced me.

> In the pharmaceutical sector, they rise the price of medicine.

In the pharmaceutical sector they make new drug discovery economically possible. Were it not for patents we would not have a tenth of the new drugs and treatments available to us today. Marketing costs (an unreasonable expenditure IMHO) and testing costs are completely outrageous and there are so many promising drugs that wash out in stage two or stage three trials that companies need the assured profits of a success to compensate for the risks and costs.

There are many fields that would probably be improved by limiting patents or shortening their lifespan, but in pharmaceuticals the lifespan of patents probably needs to be upped five or ten years...

You may be right, but I seriously doubt it. If I recall correctly, Rick Falkvinge said that research represents 15% of the costs of pharmaceutical firms, and that 2/3 of it (10% of the total) are actually dedicated to the patent system. That leaves 85% for the rest, which is mostly marketing (couldn't they cut that down?).

Now, what kind of drugs pharmaceutical companies will do research on? Cure for rare illnesses? Cure for illnesses widespread in poor countries? This is good for their image, but not their wallet. Far more lucrative are cosmetics, and widely useful medicine in developed countries. Just see the ads, they are likely to match their sells.

I may be wrong on each point, but if I'm right, pharmaceutical companies could reduce their costs down to a third of what it is now, while remaining just as useful. Get rid of patents, and the costs could go down further.

Now if pharmaceutical companies really can't survive in the current world without patents, this still isn't a reason not to ditch them. Specifically, nothing prevents direct state intervention (like spending some of the taxpayers' money). If you are against that, remember this is already happening (at least in the EU), and that patents are a quite intrusive form of state intervention.

You and Rick are incorrect. The pure research part is, as stated, a small part of the costs, but 2/3 of that amount is not dedicated to patent applications, and of the remainder the bulk of it is taken up by the costs of testing. Marketing is a large part of the costs, but it is not the largest component.

> I may be wrong on each point,

You are.

I made another point: that the bulk of pharmaceutical business may not be really useful, or at least not critical (cosmetics and such). Did you say I am wrong on this point as well?

Anyway, I am quite ignorant. Do you have any references I could read so I have a better understanding of the problem? Thank you.

> I made another point: that the bulk of pharmaceutical business may not be really useful, or at least not critical (cosmetics and such). Did you say I am wrong on this point as well?

Cosmetics? What cosmetics does Abbott make?

To the extent that the argument has any connection to reality, it's a combintation of irrelevant and wrong.

If you don't want to pay the costs of "cosmetics", don't buy them.

To the extent that there's any cross-subsidization in Pharma, it goes from the "non-essential but popular" to the critical. In other words, you've got it backwards.

It is also worth noting that a lot of what we consider "non-essential" did not start out that way. Pfizer did not discover Viagra because they were looking to help aging baby boomers get wood; it started out as a treatment for angina (hypertension kills millions...) and it was not until phase one trials that it was discovered that one of the side-effects of sildenafil was to encourage erections. Along the route to trying to cure a deadly disease a blockbuster non-essential drug was discovered.

Again, I don't know much about pharmaceutical industry. Do anyone have any reference?

> Again, I don't know much about pharmaceutical industry.

Not so fast. You made claims that depended on knowledge. You suggested policy.

And now it turns out that you knew that don't know what you're talking about....

My bad. I currently know enough to be wary of even pharmaceutical patents (I think they should disappear, eventually), but still not enough to seriously back my claims. I know this is dangerous, I should have known better.

Anyway, I stumbled upon a better source than myself: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht... (a case against intellectual monopoly). Chapter 9 is particularly relevant here. If you have any counter-argument, I would be glad to hear them.

> That leaves 85% for the rest, which is mostly marketing (couldn't they cut that down?).

Marketing includes giving away free/discounted drugs, telling doctors when a drug works, and telling people that the problem that they have might be curable.

Which one do you want to cut?

> To say software patents are invalid or software can't be patented really puts software programmers at a disadvantage relative to other fields of science and innovation. Why should pharmaceutical companies, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and all other disciplines have the right to patent their inventions -- but not software engineers?

One thing to keep in mind is that, say, mechanical engineers works aren't covered by copyright. They need to apply, pay, and only get it for a short period of time. The advantage they get is that it's general...

Right now, software developers have both, which doesn't seem fair to me.

Besides, right now copyright is way stronger than patents... Though I don't think this should be the case (I'd like to have, say, 5-10 year copyright).

Most software patents I have seen patent the result, not the means to reach that result.

A normal patent is for a specific way to reach a result. I can patent my specific "illumination device" (light bulb), but I can't patent "illumination of a space" (lighting a room).

To bring up a well known softare example, Amazon has a patent on one-click shopping. There is no way to create another way to let customers buy things with a single click without infringing that patent, because the patent is for the result (order & payment of goods with one human-computer interaction) not the way it's implemented.

Are patents a right? If the artificial system is detrimental, then the rules need to change. It's not fair for citizens to be forced to give up their natural rights and not get anything in return. I know a lot of nerds love simple rules, but let's get real. The point is for us to get more tech produced. If it's not meeting that end, then it should be changed.

Patents, copyrights, trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property are not natural rights. They are artificial. Even Thomas Jefferson, who fought pretty darn hard for natural rights, knew that IP was different. http://www.tostepharmd.net/soapbox/ideas.html

Interestingly (to me, at least), the foundation for IP law is different in the US versus the UK. In the US, they're not considered natural rights. The relevant clause of the Constitution is:

"The Congress shall have Power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

In other words, intellectual property rights are artificial constructs that Congress is allowed to grant in order to promote progress.

In the UK, however, the case law works differently, and IP law is more of an outgrowth of the theory of natural rights that a person naturally has a right to whatever it is that they've created, be it something physical or something intangible.

The UK's view might be considered saner since if you can prove you came up with the intellectual property on your own and didn't copy it could be argued that you have a joiont right with the other patent holder. Not sure if they interpret it that way but it would be a logical outgrowth of the view.

> That's what patents are for. They are to reward the risk takers.

That isn't what patents are for. The intent of patents is to get inventors to disclose their inventions to the public for the benefit of all. Rewarding the inventor is the incentive that make this happen, makes it work, not the goal.

According to my copy of the US Constitution the purpose is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts..." and whether this promotion is intended to reward inventors or to convince them to disclose (or both) is open to a great deal of interpretation. Of the two proposals made regarding IP during the drafting of this document one was strictly copyright and the one that covered patents was very clearly about inventors getting a payday...

Science and Arts are public things, promoting their benefit is for the public good. If the goal were about giving inventors a payday, they wouldn't be required to disclose their inventions to the public at all, they'd just be given ownership of the idea forever. One could argue it was designed to help them both I guess, but when founding a nation, it's the nation and thus the public that you're looking out for. Giving a payday to inventors just doesn't make sense as a goal, but it makes perfect sense as an incentive to achieve a large goal.

Because it has been so abused.

I would not have much trouble with a patent on the concept of public/private keys, but patents today are too expensive to get, obscure to read and cover extremely simple material.

In addition software patents lasts way the equivalent of several hundred years because the field moves so fast, imagine that basic concept behind the steam engine was still patented today.

When you sell a mechanical tool, the user can take it apart and construct a similar tool on his own. This will take the advantage of innovation done by the engineer without paying him much. The patent protects the engineer from this exploitation. The users cant take apart a closed source software and reconstruct it. Now a days with few of the arm cores I have worked with, you cant even step through some proprietary code which is running. When you already have protection why would you want a patent. Another thing is the large companies abusing the patents and threatening some new companies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com