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Comment by timwiseman | Hacker News Reader

This very much makes me think about the line: "One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general. " from http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html . While it sounds like this dispute is more about the mathematical algorithm, that is very little different from software, and while the article never explicitly stated it I very much suspect they put their algorithm into machine code.

Things like this make me almost think I should be going into law. This will truly matter to a large number of companies, and probably more so to start ups than to larger more established companies that already have market share.

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I'm against patents in general. I think they were a great idea for a time when a product could be easily taken apart and reimplemented based on looking at its physical components. Now that many patents are based on protecting the right of someone who expresses a simple concept with or without any effort in implementation, I think they've lost any meaningful value they had.

I think they were a great idea for a time when a product could be easily taken apart and reimplemented based on looking at its physical components.

You've actually got it somewhat backwards--patents were in large part originally motivated by inventions where reverse engineering was not possible--metalworking techniques, for instance. By granting a temporary monopoly, patents would encourage inventors to publish their ideas. Otherwise, to protect their advantage, inventors would keep their methods secret, preventing others from improving on them and eventually taking the secret to the grave with them.

In that situation, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that patents were a bad idea.

PG is wrong on the subject of patents though: the problem with software patents is that if you are building a car the price of having a lawyer work out if you are violating a couple patents is a lot less than 1%, but it would properly make it many thousand times more expensive for a startup to develop a piece of software (assuming that we don't count the founders time).

And unlike physical patents it costs nothing to produce the software once the innovation has been made, so there is no need for a small guy to have something to sell to a big company to ensure the innovator is getting something for his efforts.

pg is completely correct regarding "principled" arguments against software patents. There's no consistent way to assert "temporary property rights to ideas about physical devices are fine, but owning ideas about math is morally wrong".

If you (quite sensibly) throw out the obfuscating language about morality and property rights, however, it's certainly possible to assert "temporary, government-enforced monopolies on ideas of this type will encourage innovation, but government-granted monopolies on ideas of that other type will hinder progress and encourage misuse". This is a statement of factual nature, that may be correct or incorrect, but is not logically inconsistent. It also makes it more obvious that patents, despite being called "IP", are not actually about property at all--they're a regulatory hack, the government deliberately distorting the market with the goal of subsidizing particular behaviors, namely innovation and invention.

PG has said in other essays that it often makes sense for a startup to not worry about whether what they are trying to do until they are sued. If they are still tiny it is unlikely they will be sued even if they are infinging, and if they are large then they will have the resources to either defend against the suit or make a reasonable settlement.

But that is a practical matter. None of that changes the fact that it borders on logically inconsistent to argue for patents of machines while against the patenting of algorithms (and a program is nothing but an algorithm that has been properly formatted).

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