The New Yorker on Business Process Patents

caledon writes "The New Yorker has a clear, concise, nontechnical essay by its finance columnist James Surowiecki criticizing business process patents: Patent Bending. 'Although we have always had a vibrant patent system, we've managed to strike a balance between the need to encourage innovation and the need to foster competition. As Benjamin Day, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton might attest, American corporations have thrived on innovative ideas and new business methods, without owning them, for two centuries. In the past decade, the balance has been upset.' Makes the argument persuasively."

Comments

an elegant solution

[Thinkit3]

Abolish patents. It's a wonder few bring up this possibility.

Re:an elegant solution

[usotsuki]

I wouldn't abolish them altogether, but they should be restricted to physical devices that must be built from components. Not chemicals, not software, and most certainly not business methods!!

-uso.

Re:an elegant solution

[mgs1000]

Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The total lack of patents would put the indivual inventor out of business, because he/she would never be able to compete with large corporations.

Re:an elegant solution

[Anonymous Coward]

is there such a thing as an 'individual inventor' anymore?

Re:an elegant solution

[aborchers]

Abolish patents. It's a wonder few bring up this possibility.

Abolition of patents is a simple-minded, reactionary solution, and if you think it hasn't been brought up plenty of times, you apparently haven't been reading this board for long.

Patents serve a valuable purpose to spur development through economic incentives while ensuring ultimate constributions to the public domain. That they've been abused and overextended is not a reason to throw them away. I agree we need massive changes in how patents are granted, but I've yet to hear a single compelling argument for their abolition that wasn't tinged with drool...

Re:an elegant solution

[darth_MALL]

It seems that the chokehold a patent-holder has on their idea/thing/whatever is destrying the competition process. The patent office seems to be nothing more than a hopeful money grab for people too lazy to do anything but put forth an idea until some fool comes along with the implementation and you litigate him poor and you rich. Seems to antithesize the whole idea of patents.

Re:an elegant solution

[daveaitel]

Speak for yourself.

Dave Aitel Immunity, Inc.

Re:an elegant solution

[Farley Mullet]

I have to take issue with your suggestion that chemicals should be non-patentable. Given the commercial exploitability, R&D costs, and relative ease of copying once the R&D heavy lifting has been done, chemical compounds are exactly the sort of thing that patents should protect. Why would companies sink millions into R&D for potentially useful compounds (say, enzymes to metabolize oil spills, or self-repairing fabrics) if anyone could exploit that R&D latterly?

In general, patents and IP are a more complicated issue than can be dealt with in the sort of single-sentence answers (like "Ban patents!" or "Ban patents on chemicals, software, and business methods!") that are popular here on /.

Re:an elegant solution

[PickaBooga]

The idea that patents help the individual inventor is a myth.

The best resource I know is Don Lancaster's "The Case Against Patents":

For most individuals and small scale startups, patents are virtually certain to result in a net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity.

One reason for this is the outrageously wrong urban lore involving patents and patenting.
A second involves the outright scams which inevitably surround "inventions" and "inventing".
A third is that the economic breakeven needed to recover patent costs is something between $12,000,000.00 and $40,000,000 in gross sales. It is ludicrously absurd to try and patent a million dollar idea.

Don Lancaster is a old-school hardware/AppleII hacker. On his website he lists a lot of alternatives to patenting that are actually helpful to the individual inventor.

Re:an elegant solution

[Java Pimp]

It seems that the chokehold a patent-holder has on their idea/thing/whatever is destrying the competition process.

Perhaps this would be true if patents lasted as long as copyright. If I were to come up with a new technology and not be able to hold my "temporary" monopoly on that technology, some big corporation say (Microsoft, IBM, SCO,...) could take it and profit from it, regardless if I were credited and there would be nothing I could do about it. As an individual, I would be left in the dust unable to compete with the giants. Lazyness has nothing to do with it. If I can't afford to market, produce and distribute an invention, I should be at least able to license it to someone who can and be rewarded for my inovation.

The temporary monopoly gives the inventor the reward of profit for the new inovation, spurs inovation for those unwilling to license the technology to come up with an alternative solution, and eventually expires entering the new technology into the public.

A good example of this is the recently expired GIF patent. The existence of this patent provided the motivation for the push to adopt the PNG format as a royalty free replacement. PNG a superior technology or not, now that the GIF patent is expired, that leverage to push the replacement is gone.

Re:an elegant solution

[darth_MALL]

That clears a lot of things up for me...cheers. I find the discussion of patents/IP/copyright is very volatile around here. It seems there is considerable discussion and angst about intentionally securing the rights to vapourware as cash in the bank. Nice to see a clear point to the contrary.

Re:an elegant solution

[Freedom Bug]

Patenting and enforcing the patent on your idea is the best way to throw the indivdual inventor out of business.

You can't build anything today without infringing on patents. There's millions of them out there: if you make anything, I guarantee you're stepping on somebody's patent somewhere.

But as a little guy, the big guys will ignore your infringement on their stuff. Most big guys work in defensive mode only.

But if you threaten them, they pull out their massive portfolio and lawyer you to death.

The only way to make money as an individual patentor is to patent something obvious and then not build it. Since you're not building anything, you're not infringing. It has to be obvious so that somebody will infringe sometime. Then you sue them.

You win a little, the lawyers win a lot, and society loses big time.

Bryan

Re:an elegant solution

[waterbear]

I wouldn't abolish them altogether, but they should be restricted to physical devices that must be built from components. Not chemicals, not software, and most certainly not business methods!!

The view expressed in the parent post (partly) tallies with older understandings of what the patent (and copyright) clause in the US Constitution meant, where it talks about promoting the progress of useful arts. 'Useful arts' were understood to mean anything about how to make useful things. Processes, as a patentable category, were then understood to mean processes for making useful things or doing something to them for practical purposes. The parent poster goes further than many, in wanting to exclude chemicals too, after all they are manufactured products of a different kind, and making them is clearly one of the useful arts, but business methods have hardly been considered inventions till now.

The Federal appeal courts come very close to taking over lawmaking roles that belong to legislators, when they interpret words in the patent act (such as 'process') in isolation from their context and history. They (in this example) inflate the word to cover some unheard-of category, never previously considered to amount to an invention.

Interestingly, one of the early extensions of patent law going specifically beyond 'useful arts' or 'manufactures' occurred in the former Soviet Union, where the law allowed patents for [business] 'rationalization proposals'. I wonder (perhaps too flippantly, considering the seriously repressive results of this sort of legal development) if the US judges realize that they are following a communist example? :)

About a hundred years ago, an official committee of enquiry into patent law wrote that "the grant of invalid patents is a serious evil insomuch as it tends to the restraint of trade". They meant that honest business people were being harassed and intimidated by the owners of patents that never should have been issued because they were not substantially new. In earlier times, it used to be decided that it was not substantially new just to do something that had already been done, but now to do it in any mechanical way -- the broad idea of mechanising was common currency. IMO it would also be better to consider the broad idea of adapting some existing thing for software, or for the internet, as common currency. Current law surely is not going far enough to protect the business community in the right to do things that should remain open for public use.

Re:an elegant solution

[martyros]

The temporary monopoly gives the inventor the reward of profit for the new inovation, spurs inovation for those unwilling to license the technology to come up with an alternative solution, and eventually expires entering the new technology into the public.

So wait, you're saying that the real advantage of patents is that it makes people re-invent the wheel? That doesn't sound like innovation to me, it sounds like a waste of time.

I went to a conference a couple of years ago and was mystified by one of the presentations. It was some kind of a new cryptographic protocol; but it didn't do anything that existing protocols didn't already do. The only distinguishing factor, its reason for existence, was that it was unencumbered by any patents. Is this really what we need from "innovation"?

Re:an elegant solution

[Chris Burke]

Given the commercial exploitability, R&D costs, and relative ease of copying once the R&D heavy lifting has been done, chemical compounds are exactly the sort of thing that patents should protect.

I'm going to come right out and say that it is not true in the general case that it is easy to copy a chemical. My father works in a pharmaceutical research lab/pilot plant. That research building and the associated pilot plant are major assets the company that recently bought his wanted. Almost all the work done there is not in discovering new chemicals, but in researching how to synthesize those chemicals in a full production plant setting. This process can take years, just like researching the chemical in the first place. Just because you have the chemical formula for a substance doesn't give you the ability to make cheap knock-offs. This isn't Star Trek, and we don't have replicators.

That said, I'm not strictly against pharmaceutical patents. The pharmaceuticals are blatantly lying about why the cost of drugs are so high, but it is still true that R&D costs are substantial and a patent is appropriate to help them recoup those costs. I am strictly against patenting naturally occuring substances (e.g.: my god-damned genes).

Oh yeah:

Why would companies sink millions into R&D for potentially useful compounds (say, enzymes to metabolize oil spills, or self-repairing fabrics) if anyone could exploit that R&D latterly?

For the same reason the makers of Tylenol didn't stop making Tylenol once Kroger Brand Acetominephine came on the market: they still make uber-tons (like a ton, only uber) of money off of it. Do you think the makers of Rogaine wouldn't have wanted to tap the incredibly lucrative hair restoration market if they weren't assured of being the only players? Would the makers of Viagra been unsatisfied being merely very profitable instead of insanely so?

Also remember that even in a patentless world in which you are also required to publish chemical formulas there is still the built-in monopoly time while your competitors bring up their own production processes.

Re:an elegant solution

[Farley Mullet]

For the same reason the makers of Tylenol didn't stop making Tylenol once Kroger Brand Acetominephine came on the market: they still make uber-tons (like a ton, only uber) of money off of it.

That's not the question. They might still be making money off of it, but one key benefit of the patent period is that the original inventor gets to recover their investment during the period where they have exclusive rights. You have to wonder if Tylenol would have been so willing to sink money into R&D for acetaminophen if they knew that Kroeger could exploit their work within a matter of months instead of years. And would they still have a dominant market position if they didn't have their period of exclusivity to establish themselves?

Why aren't we told if it's an editor moderating our posts?

Who cares?

Re:an elegant solution

[mttlg]

is there such a thing as an 'individual inventor' anymore?

Of course there is, haven't you seen the commercials?

"Cleaning with citrus juice was my little secret, but I never patented it. Boy was that dumb!"

Re:an elegant solution

[stewwy]

If you don't include chemicals, (as patentable) you don't include drugs, and you don't get new medicine's. I think you should just stick to excluding non-physical things! p.s. On this, at least, I know what I'm talking about, having been involved with US/UK drug/chemical patents (admittably in the early '80's)

Re:an elegant solution

[Chris Burke]

You have to wonder if Tylenol would have been so willing to sink money into R&D for acetaminophen if they knew that Kroeger could exploit their work within a matter of months instead of years.

Of course. A shit-ton (like a ton, only... uh... shitty?) of money is still a shit-ton of money, even if it's a smaller shit-ton than some other hypothetical shit-ton.

And would they still have a dominant market position if they didn't have their period of exclusivity to establish themselves?

You can't bring a plant up to full production capacity for a new chemical in months, even if you not only had the chemical formula but the process for synthesizing it. Add in the time and expense it takes to reverse-engineer the original compound and then develop the process, and the equation doesn't look so unequal -- the knock-offs have non-zero R&D costs themselves, and the original does get years of exclusive access to the market, just by virtue of being first.

Re:an elegant solution

[Java Pimp]

So wait, you're saying that the real advantage of patents is that it makes people re-invent the wheel?

No, you've missed the point. The real advantage, which was the intended purpose of patents in the first place, is that the inventor is granted a temporary monopoly on the invention. The alternative technologies that result are a fortunate side effect.

People re-invent the wheel all the time, with or without patents. We have a choice of car we drive, computer, stereo, list, goes, on, ... Some inovated based on competition, some as alternative technology.

Patents exist for the sole purpose of protecting the inventor. Which spurs inovation and competition. Say, company A invests a butt load of money and invents a new technology. The bigger more powerful company B with no investment takes that unprotected technology, markets it and drives company A out of business. Two bad things happen, 1) B becomes a permanent monopoly since there is no longer competition. 2) no one wants to inovate anything else if company B is going to legally take it from them.

With patents, if B wants to compete, 1) license the technology and hope they have a better marketing department (nothing says they can't license it and be the dominant supplier), or 2) inovate a better, stronger, faster alternative.

In our open source world, we are trying to do the same thing, only we justify it calling it the GPL. We want to open the technology to the public but we can't just start spewing code out into the public domain. How fast do you think M$ would snatch that up? So we license it to the public calling it a GPL but it's still "our" code! (or FSF if we've signed it over, but it's still owned by someone)

Re:an elegant solution

[phliar]

The total lack of patents would put the indivual inventor out of business, because he/she would never be able to compete with large corporations.

This is not true, of course. Patents are only used in portfolios as a defense/attack weapon. As my patent attorney used to say, "Patents are not a license to produce; they are a means to forbid production."

Sure, every now and then we hear these feel-good stories like that guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and then battled GM for decades before finally winning a big settlement. But how many individual inventors are there who have been able to sue the giant company who stole the idea? Patents are in fact a way that Giant Company Inc. can make sure that you, an upstart inventor, can never make a dime because you can hardly pick your nose without violating a patent.

As a staunch supporter of the small business and individual entrepreneur, I say patents suck and we should toss them all out.

Re:an elegant solution

[phliar]

Patents serve a valuable purpose to spur development through economic incentives while ensuring ultimate constributions to the public domain.

Bah! The bargain that society makes is "Hey, show us your secret ideas (trade secrets) and we will make sure no one else can use it for seventeen years." In other words, to make sure that the market gets to operate efficiently and the everyone has to compete, we will enforce this anti-capitalist monopoly for you. Now, if everyone can already see how your gadget works, why should the market hinder competition?

Think trade-secret <--> patents and the whole capitalist/laissez-faire justification for patents becomes clear. Keep in mind that the Coca-Cola formula is a trade secret that has never been revealed for a century.

Re:an elegant solution

[Rich0]

It isn't like the generic manufacuterer has to completely re-engineer the process.

They just get a guy with a PhD in chemistry to get a job as a janitor in your father's plant. While your father is sleeping at home the janitor is peeking in windows, noting the pilot plant configuration, and while he is cleaning the white-boards he is noting what is written on them. They would be doing this before the branded manufacturer even has their product on the market.

Chances are the generic company would have a product on the market in about a year or two. A year isn't that much time to establish a brand and make money.

Keep in mind that most major pharma companies do not compete with generic companies on manufacturing efficiency - just on innovation. It is unlikely that a US-based pharma which employs union labor is going to compete effectively with Indian pharma which gives its workers a standard of living most welfare recipients would find abhorrent.

I'm all for balance and limits. But don't think that drug development is going to take place in the absence of a decent patent system.

Re:an elegant solution

[ipandithurts]

While a kneejerk reaction to abolish patents might seem attractive to some, it very well might take a constitutional amendment to do so. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Consitution provides that Congress shall "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."

While one may argue that drafters such as Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine were biased in this area toward protecting writings and discoveries being authors and inventors, this requirement to provide patent and copyright protection is part of the Constitution that was ratified by the states.

Of course if you believe that inventions related to business methods aren't "discoveries" then lobby Congress, not the Supreme Court, to change the definition. Of course, even then, it'd have to live up to the Consitutional muster. Maybe a better course is to provide less than 20 years for a business method patent?

Finally, please remember that the S.Ct. didn't change the law, they simply said that all of us patent attorneys simply were wrong about it for the last 100 years or so!

Re:an elegant solution

[aborchers]

Bah! The bargain that society makes is "Hey, show us your secret ideas (trade secrets) and we will make sure no one else can use it for seventeen years."

Since when are patents and trade secrets analogous? So far as I know, the recipe for Coca Cola isn't safe from duplication because it's patented (the patent would have expired long ago, correcct?) but because it's kept secret by contractual obligation with all to whom it is dispensed.

Patents protect things that cannot be protected through trade secret. Many patented devices could be easily duplicated using the original as a model.On which, you said:

Now, if everyone can already see how your gadget works, why should the market hinder competition?

Do you mean why should the government hinder competition? Barring external interference, the market never hinders competition, does it?

I can think of one reason: because wealth leads to accumulation of wealth in the case where it isn't checked, and we have decided as a society that that is not a good thing.

If I were to come up with an absolutely brilliant razor blade design today -- one that would revolutionize shaving and every stubbly guy in American would want -- and could not protect it with a patent, then as soon as I prototyped and released the design, Gillette could come along and duplicate it and run me out of business by virtue of their existing fabrication and distribution infrastructure, and ability to under cut me on price. Why should they be able to use their existing market to destroy my potential one?

So what. The world doesn't owe me a living, right? Absolutely correct, but we have decided as a society that we get more benefit in the long run from encouraging and protecting the entrepenuereal and creative spirit than we do from economic Darwinism.

I'll be first in line to take pot shots at the current failings of the USPTO, fantastical patents on obvious or predictive technologies, and the like, but I've still not heard any reasonable justification for the abolition of patents. But maybe my own view is the one that's irrational. Maybe I just consider a world co-owned between Wal-Mart, General Electric, and Microsoft an undesirable outcome....

Re:an elegant solution

[phliar]

Since when are patents and trade secrets analogous?

Note: I'm not talking about the state of patents we see today. I mean the justification for patents in laissez-faire competition, and the "promote the useful arts" rationale in the US Constitution.

I'm not sure in what sense you mean "analogous" here. I meant it in the sense of: a company has a secret (a design for a gizmo, a formula for a fizzy drink, whatever). The decision they have to make is: should we keep it a secret (and run the risk it might get out and we lose our advantage) or should we get a patent and get seventeen years of guaranteed exclusivity followed by the idea going into the public domain?

Coca-Cola took the first approach, and it has worked for them; they got much more than seventeen years of exclusivity (regardless of whether or not Pepsi has come up with an more-or-less equivalent formula!). Bell Labs decided to get a patent on the transistor, since seventeen years of exclusivity seemed a better bet than hoping it wouldn't leak out or be independently invented.

Patents protect things that cannot be protected through trade secret.

Sorry, I don't buy this at all. Why do you feel this is so?

... we have decided as a society that we get more benefit in the long run from encouraging and protecting the entrepenuereal and creative spirit than we do from economic Darwinism.

Well, I don't know if we have really decided this. I feel that we have only decided this in name; we pay lip service to this ideal but our laws just favor the big established companies regardless. We feature feel-good anecdotes of entrepreneurs and creative geniuses on TV, but it ends there. You can come up with a super-duper revolutionary shaving device, but Gilette and Schick will steal your idea and beat you into the ground because they have the high-powered lawyers. The best you should hope for is a settlement that will probably cover your legal bills.

Patents can only work with a ruthless PTO, and probably with some reforms like the ones suggested here: make them assigned to a person only (not a company) and non-transferable. Or maybe some other reforms we haven't thougth of just yet.

Re:an elegant solution

[aborchers]

Patents protect things that cannot be protected through trade secret.

Sorry, I don't buy this at all. Why do you feel this is so?

I thought I made it clear in my post. Sorry, sometimes I mumble...

My point was that you can't protect every type of invention by keeping its "formula" a secret. Using my razor example, assuming the innovation is in plainly observable gross structure and not some chemical/molecular fabrication technique, anyone with the resources to do so can duplicate my model just by looking at it. This is not so if the means of producing the artifact are a secret recipe or process that can be hidden away (as a trade secret) in the manufacturing plant.

I agree that the current system is hopelessly slanted in favor of wealthy litigants. Going back to my original post, I think the solution is to fix this sorry state of affairs, not to eliminate patents. Certainly there are classes of patents that are highly dubious (business models comes first to mind) and might deserve to be dispensed with, but basic patent protection for truly novel ideas seems to me a pretty valuable thing for society to have.

As for a ruthless PTO, wouldn't it be nice if the government paid those inspectors a salary commensurate with the private R&D and patent litigation sectors? A lot of these problems would disappear overnight.

Re:an elegant solution

[Groote Ka]

they should be restricted to physical devices that must be built from components (...) not software

And what if I would patent a magnetic disk with magnetic characteristics such that reading the disk would enable a computer to perform a certain process? It's all physical.

Furthermore, what if I get a patent on an electrical circuit for signal processing (capacitors, transistors, resistors: the old stuff) so the sound of my stereo gets enhancen and next, someone comes up and writes a plugin for Winamp doing the same?
In other words: with your proposal, a same circuit as mine would infringe, but software performing the same function not. Not very logical, is it?

True, patent law is being bended beyong this example, which might cause undesired effects. But the abolition of software patents is less obvious (no, I am not going to patent it :-) ) than you might think.

By the way, at the moment electronics became as popular as software at this moment, in the beginning of the previous century, people said the same on electronics patents as you do on software patents. l'Histoire se repete...

Nice to see in popular media

[Chris_Jefferson]

Not really a lot I can say, but seeing as I seem to be first(ish) here, I'll say some stuff anyway :)

It is nice to see this kind of coverage in the popular media. It no longer seems as ridiculas as it did to imagine a general shake-up of patents, which is good. The article also describes the problem well, with good examples (as opposed to some of the more usually used stupid examples).

I don't think we should get rid of patents, I don't even think "software patents" are a bad thing (if anyone tries quoting the 'all software is produced by a turing machine, so is all obvious argument, I'll hit them!), but hopefully we can reach a sensible system!

Re:Nice to see in popular media

[aborchers]

(if anyone tries quoting the 'all software is produced by a turing machine, so is all obvious argument, I'll hit them!)

Sorry, but you'll have to pay me a royalty because I have a patent on hitting someoone via Web discussion boards.

Re:Nice to see in popular media

[azadism]

I agree with what you are saying. Patents have a place and a purpose. The systems just needs to be adjusted to meet the demands of the current situation. As more mainstream media begins to discuss this maybe something will get done to resolve the problem.

Re:Nice to see in popular media

[Anonymous Coward]

All software is produced by a turing machine, so it is all obvious.

Re:Nice to see in popular media

[siskbc]

(if anyone tries quoting the 'all software is produced by a turing machine, so is all obvious argument, I'll hit them!),

Best comeback to that inane crap is "Turing thought the brain was a Turing machine - therefore, all innovation of any kind is obvious and unpatentable." See how they like that.

Re:Nice to see in popular media

[Chris_Jefferson]

Damn you!

*thwack*

Re:Nice to see in popular media

[Anonymous Coward]

And I quote: "All software is produced by a turing machine, so is all obvious argument". Now, let me have it.

Re:Nice to see in popular media

[Anonymous Coward]

It is nice to see this kind of coverage in the popular media. It no longer seems as ridiculas as it did to imagine a general shake-up of patents, which is good.

I'll agree that public attention is the first step required for reform, but I don't think it is yet time to relax and assume that the wheels are in motion for progress.

I think that there may be a tendency for people to underestimate the capability of well entrenched players to not only hang on during change, but thrive and dominate. For example, I don't think the internet is turning the tables of individual expression as much as the original architects though. Sure, there are individual sites, and blogs, but the primary focus has gravitated to a few sites, and even though there are new players (Salon, Yahoo, Slashdot), the established players (Time Warner, CNN, Microsoft, New York Time -- "where Slashdot gets its stories ;-) are doing very well. While Microsoft was late to the Internet party, it remains a major influence (leading some to worry how it may abuse this influence -- the naked TCP/IP stack ala Cringley). Even recession, a challenging time for most, is beneficial to well established companies, since it is a good time to reinvest (at lower rates) for future growth.

On the political front, I think this game of change is played in a way that is more relevant to the discussion of patent shake-up. During the 2000 election the Republicans wanted Social Security moved to the stock market (okay, an oversimplification) -- something which they deny now that the markets sunk so much. (For reasons I can't fathom, Bush trash-talked about the economy as he took office -- maybe that recession thing is good for his stake-holders? ;-) Salon had an article a few months back about how new plans for social security may just be the thing to ruin it later on. With the system broken, it is much easier to institute change, and those with the power have more influence on the shape that change will take. You can probably find other examples where politicians trash talk some public infrastructure they want to privatize.

And finally to my point... An article such as this may be the first set of feelers to set the stage for change -- the type of change that the established players can restructure to suit them. Once the discussion begins, established media (much of it owned by established players with an interest in IP and profits -- hey, how much attention did the recent FCC ownership changes get? ;-) sets the parameters and language for such discussion. Maybe a letter from a better informed Open Source advocate, would help to set the foundation for this discussion in a more constructive and favourable way?

G.H.

PS. I think that one problem with the law making process is that they have not learned enough from Software Engineering ;-) It seems all too easy to construct laws which appear to have one purpose (the one they are advertised to have), at the same time having 'intended' consequences that were not apparent or generally desirable. I think that every law should have a post-condition which describes what the intended effect of the law is. Each law then has an evaluation phase. If the law has consequences that do not align with the intended goals, then the law is automatically opened for refinement. If some party has concerns about the possible negative effects of a law, then it is easier to have these concerns included with the law, without trying to finagle the details of the law itself. It would also make debate much more direct (e.g., "A: Your tax bill deprives poor children, B: It does no such thing, A: Then you won't mind making the bill contingent on the goal "does not harm poor children").

For the patent shake-up, such goals could ensure that the resulting reforms level the playing field between big and small players, and generally address reasonable concerns (since refusing to admit that the reforms do, or do not, achieve some particular goal makes greedy, irrational positions much less tenable).

Re:Nice to see in popular media

[notpasteurized]

have you seen this paper that just came out?
Title: Have Business Method Patents Gotten A Bum Rap? Some Empirical Evidence.

http://ssrn.com/abstract=424081

NP

Past Two centuries?

[Quasar1999]

Why 2???

Re:Past Two centuries?

[Chris_Jefferson]

The bicentennial of the patent office was in 2002, so it's close enough to two centuries.

whitehouse.gov

Re:Past Two centuries?

[darkscorp]

I guess the real question is (at least for me)... Why two? What was the process before the patent office was put in place?

Re:Past Two centuries?

[ip_vjl]

Because the quote was:

American corporations have thrived on innovative ideas and new business methods, without owning them, for two centuries.

It didn't say that companies in general have done business for two centuries ... it was specifically speaking about American history, which only goes back (formally) a little over 225 years.

Nothing to take any notice with here.

Re:Past Two centuries?

[IvyMike]

I guess the real question is (at least for me)... Why two? What was the process before the patent office was put in place?

Remember, the US is only slightly older than 2 centuries (the constitution wasn't ratified until 1788). Prior to that, well...this page has some info on inventor protections before the modern patent office.

Business patents and time to railroad

[PhysicsGenius]

When MP3's hit the scene, record companies started to moan about how their profits were being eroded and how Napster (etc) needed to be shut down. The entire userbase of Slashdot (including me) said that there was no legally guaranteed "right to profit" and that if they couldn't make it in the "New Economy", they should get a different business model. "That's how capitalism works" was the libertarian cry.

Now technology has struck again--people are inventing new ways to make money. Instead of applauding their innovations and acknowledging their right of first use on ideas they made up, we are demanding that they share them with us. Instead of being free market, laisez-faire capitalists, we (by which I mean you, I don't subscribe to this) have turned into whiny littly communists. "It's too hard to make money when the other guy has a shiny new business model. Mommy, make him share!" Bah.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[s20451]

there was no legally guaranteed "right to profit" and that if they couldn't make it in the "New Economy", they should get a different business model. "That's how capitalism works" was the libertarian cry.

Heh ... I remember the new economy.

There's no legally guaranteed right to share music or copy software, either -- quite the opposite. Don't forget that without strong intellectual property laws, the GPL would not exist, and it would be in nobody's interest to share code or ideas for fear that they would get stolen. Beware the law of unintended consequences.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[nametaken]

For the most part, you raise a good point... but I think that the regular argument is more along the lines of poor administration of the patent system. I can't argue with people functioning within the framework of the system, I can only complain about the system itself. That's my right and responsibility.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Anonymous Coward]

A physics genius you may be but if companies cannot compete in a market without patent (monopoly) protection then the entire enconomy is a scam. So which is it Einstien, competitive market or patent protection for redundant business models?

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about?

If you're a liberarian, then WHY WHY WHY do they get this artificial government monopoly on their idea?

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Creep73]

I can't disagree with you entirely however I can't agree all together. Some items need to be shared. If some things are not shared innovation will tend to stagnate. Many times the greatest innovation comes after some company shares some piece of information or some design. The problem is that now companies and individuals are trying to make money off anything and everything. If I add a sent to toilet paper I need to patent the idea. We are not talking about any new revolutionary products here. We are talking about ideas on how to run a business. Innovation comes from multiple people working to expand the work that has already taken place by others. If no one shares information, if everything puts a price on every idea that comes forth it drives the cost of that innovation and eventually the price of any product that is a result of that innovation. If every thought that came out of any head had a price we would be living in a world where no one could afford to live. As with most things balance is the key.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Anonymous Coward]

In what way is a government granted monopoly laissez faire capitalism?

The foundations of modern intellectual property doctrine are more political special pleading than the constitution or free market theory.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[DarkSkiesAhead]

Don't forget that without strong intellectual property laws, the GPL would not exist, and it would be in nobody's interest to share code or ideas for fear that they would get stolen. Beware the law of unintended consequences.

I don't think people are calling the principle of strong IP laws into question. That's a different issue. The issue is the breadth these laws have been expanded to in recent years. It's one thing to say "my innovation should be protected for a reasonable time." It's another thing to say "my vague idea should be given absolute power in my field for the next 120 years."

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[ralph_the_wonder_lla]

Instead of applauding their innovations and acknowledging their right of first use on ideas they made up, ...

Had the US Patent Office granted Henry Ford a patent for the assembly line, the world would be a very different place indeed. But then again, under the way we are doing things now one of Henry's competitors would patent it and then sue him for using his own idea.

The core of the problem is that we have a legal system that does not understand nor fully comprehend the impact of its decisions and has allowed anyone who can think up and idea (even after the fact), grab an attorney and go out and blackmail buisnesses into paying them off.

The net effect of this is to chill the competitive business environment. When a business finds a new and successful method of doing business it forces their competition to a) copy them and try to do it better b) find a different way to beat the competition or c) fold up and go out of business.

The way that patents are being awarded for business methods is more akin to the Microsoft Business Model. Dismiss the innovation, create a pile of FUD over the innovation and then buy up the innovator and close them down/assimilate them into the collective. Stifiling isn't it.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Sir/Madam
Your use of sarcasm infringes upon my intellectual property, as defined under U.S. Patent #xxxxxxxxxx. Please remove your Comment and forward all Karma earned by said Comment to myself as the rightful patent holder, so that this may be resolved without requiring legal intervention.

Thank you in advance,
anonymous slashdot process patent holder.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Anonymous Coward]

Now technology has struck again--people are inventing new ways to make money. Instead of applauding their innovations and acknowledging their right of first use on ideas they made up, we are demanding that they share them with us.

I think one of the main issues is that a lot of the "innovations" being patented are basically ideas that have already been used in brick-and-mortar businesses in one form or another for years, but now, taa-daa, it's done on the internet.

The other issue brought up by the article is that many of the patents issued are for seemingly trivial ideas, not what a reasonable person would consider "innovation". For example:

"One inventive soul won a patent for a system of using pictures to train janitors. Another got one for describing a way to cut hair with both hands."

I don't know about you, but I don't consider those "innovative business models" deserving of patent protection.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny. I thought laisez-faire meant hands-off approach. Meaning that the government doesn't get involved in every little detail. However, patents put the legal side of our government right in the middle. It's not about communism and whining. It's about fostering competition. Netflix has patented their process of online, subscription-based rental of DVDs. They then turned around and said in an article recently that Wal-Mart's online subscription system for DVDs looked a lot like theirs. They then would not comment on whether legal action would follow. Of course something is going to follow. Netflix is now going to want royalties from anyone renting out DVDs over the Internet based on a monthly subscription fee. Anyone who doesn't comply will be served with notice of a law suit. We're too law suit happy here in the United States. I believe that we need to revise the patent system and be rid of about 90% of the lawyers (mainly corporate lawyers).

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Anonymous Coward]

Had the US Patent Office granted Henry Ford a patent for the assembly line, FORD would have been up before the DOJ years ago only to claim that the assembly line was indeed an integral part of the car and could not be removed.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Don't forget that without strong intellectual property laws, the GPL would not exist

This is silly. The GPL only needs to exist because of strong (and stupid) "intellectual property" laws. The ideal situation would be where GPL-like responsibilities were the default, and anything else had to be an explicit contract between the author and user.

That the GPL depends on copyright law to succeed is mrely an example of bypassing the 'system' using the 'system' itself.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect. Laissez-faire style capitalism would mean zero patents. It's not about sharing, it's about taking. Patents would never even exist in this model. Free-market capitalism means a market with as few rules as possible, and the ones that exist are there to promote access to products and the information about products. Patents might exist, but only in a very limited form. Certainly none of this "I'll patent the idea of giving things out in exchange for money!" nonsense.

So you might want to rethink your position. Either you are for market restraints, in which case you can support all the patents you want, or you are for a free market, in which case you can use patents at best to protect a specific product, but not an entire idea.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[LilMikey]

Instead of applauding their innovations and acknowledging their right of first use on ideas they made up, we are demanding that they share them with us

So in your world, 'one click shopping' and 'fixed price auctions' are inventions worthy of applause? The Slashdot crowd may be reactionary and leftist but they can usually identify a spade when they see it.

I'm sure there are pleny of shiny new business models worth of a patent but online DVD rentals is just the next iteration in an evolving economy. What if someone had patented online banking, online ticket purchases, etc. These kinds of patents hault the evolution of our economy for the sake of profit. They're stifiling innovation, not encouraging it.

In fact Netflix should be a shining example against business patents. They've been around for many years and some have tried, mostly-unsuccessfully, to mimic them. They've made themselves quite rich and the company how grown to what, 7 distribution centers. It's nearly a household name. And they did it without enforcing the bunk patent they recently pushed through. That's how capitalism works!

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a liberarian, then WHY WHY WHY do they get this artificial government monopoly on their idea?

Is that supposed to be Liberian, librarian or libertarian?

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[molarmass192]

You're obviously confused over the meaning of the word communism. If we were "whiny little communists" we wouldn't have money and neither would the other guy. In fact, the state would have everything and would distribute goods to people as they needed them. Reality is that there has never been a communist government, rather they were all Marxist governments with no intention of ever progressing into communism. The unattainable goal of a "communistic society" was just a carrot used to make totalitarian rule more palatable to those they were oppressing. Marx and Engles were social idiots who probably drank way too much absinthe while in Paris to even realize that their crappy papers were based on anything but reality. Back to the subject ...

Under capitalism, the goal of the state is to promote open competition. You can reconcile this with anti-trust law since it's goal is to restore open competition. However, patent law prevents open competition. It creates state controlled monopolies whose sole purpose is to prevent free market competition. State granted monopolies are a facet of fascism, not capitalism. I don't see how you can call yourself a free market capitalist but still believe in patents.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Poeir]

The entire userbase of Slashdot (including me) said that there was no legally guaranteed "right to profit" and that if they couldn't make it in the "New Economy", they should get a different business model.

They could have an even larger problem on their hands, if that business model is patented.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[an enormous void]

Instead of being free market, laisez-faire capitalists, we (by which I mean you, I don't subscribe to this) have turned into whiny littly communists.

Laissez faire capitalists by definition "oppose government regulation of or interference in commerce beyond the minimum necessary for a free-enterprise system to operate according to its own economic laws". Patents are "a grant made by a government to an inventor, assuring the sole right to make, use, and sell the invention for a certain period of time". Therefore, patents are interferece in the free market system by the government to assure profit to someone, and by definition, violate the tenants of laissez faire capitalism. The people you are calling whiny littly (?) communists are, in fact, espousing the philosophy you are claiming to support.

Definitions quoted from Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[poptones]

Without those "strong property laws" there would be no need for the GPL except to save us from what is already the status quo: that is, even with those "strong property laws" companies still don't "share code or ideas."

Sorry, but that argument is so lacking in logic it has zero relevance. Patents require sharing enough of the process that anyone can reproduce it; copyright, before computer programs, required the product be shared with the public before it was protected. Under the present system neither of these requirements are met. I don't know anyone saying copyright should be abolished (although for individuals it is already arguably become irrelevant), but I know plenty of people saying the laws need to be reformed and restated so to reflect their original intentions.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[phliar]

Oh, come one! You say no legally guaranteed "right to profit", so why do you think you should have a legally guaranteed "right to restrict"? Anything you do in public is free and out there, you don't own it. If someone else sees you and starts doing the same thing, why do you have a right to whine? You did get the "right of first use" -- since you already have your product on the market, but competitors who see you will take time to re-tool etc.

And then, guess what? You have to compete! Because those others might make a better widget based on your widget. This is competition, boy, no time to rest on your ass for the seventeen years of a patent's life, you gotta move, move, move!!!

Now that's what I call laissez-faire capitalism. No whiny crying to the Government, "Mommy! He's imitating me!"

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[FranklyMyDear]

Now technology has struck again--people are inventing new ways to make money.

People are "inventing" (i.e. thinking of) and patenting new ideas, not technology.

...we are demanding that they share them with us.

No, "we" are only demanding that they should not have the right to stop us from expressing or using certain ideas.

Instead of being free market, laisez-faire capitalists, we (by which I mean you, I don't subscribe to this) have turned into whiny littly communists.

If I'm not mistaken, a strictly libertarian point of view (which I do not subscribe to either) would be opposed to any government-granted monopoly (such as patents or copyrights). So... did your cheap ad hominem just backfire?

"It's too hard to make money when the other guy has a shiny new business model. [...]"

Um, make that a shiny new monopoly. And worse, a monopoly not on a technical invention but an abstract idea.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[phliar]

Don't forget that without strong intellectual property laws, the GPL would not exist

Ha! Without strong intellectual "property" laws, the GPL would not need to exist. Evil corporation put some of our free code into their proprietary program? No problem, there are always employees who sympathise (or can be bribed) into giving us the source. No intellectual "property" laws, remember?

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[rossifer]

As the previous poster said, the GPL cannot exist without strong IP laws. The default situation without IP laws is pretty close to the BSD license and not at all close to the GPL.

Remember, the GPL puts obligations on others that require a law to back them up. An IP law.

Regards,
Ross

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Instead of being free market, laisez-faire capitalists, we (by which I mean you, I don't subscribe to this) have turned into whiny littly communists

Um, "free market"? That is, without government interference, right? So let's remove the government from the debate -- extend no artificial protections to intellectual property. Allow it to settle to its free market price -- which is infinitesimally above zero. The marginal cost to replicate information is almost zero. Sure, there's usually a huge upfront cost, but really, that doesn't set the price. The price is set by, How cheap can I get it? Since copying is free (almost), you can't charge anything.

But then those whiny communists come along and say, "Waaah. The government should protect me, by giving me an artificial monopoly. If the essentially unlimited abundance of information would drive me out of business, then we must dam that flow and create scarcity -- because my business model depends on scarcity." Doesn't sound all that "laissez-faire" to me. But then, alleged free-market capitalists seem always to lose their faith in the market when it turns against them.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Eccles]

The issue is the breadth these laws have been expanded to in recent years.

But then we must look to why these laws have been expanded, and how we can reform them. One can say patents on the obvious should be denied, but how do we enforce that? It's clear that with enough lawyers, the blatantly obvious can become brilliant insights -- just ask ebay. It may be that the only workable reform is to sharply curtail patent expiry dates on conceptual things, or eliminate broad classes of patents altogether.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh shit. This troll got moded up?? WTF?

Who is paying you?

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[Spunk]

You're obviously confused over the meaning of the word troll.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[thdexter]

First: It's "Engels." Second: In communism, money still exists. In Russia, there was cash currency. What doesn't exist is private property. You still own things, but you don't own your land or the food you grow.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[GlassHeart]

Under capitalism, the goal of the state is to promote open competition. [...] State granted monopolies are a facet of fascism, not capitalism. I don't see how you can call yourself a free market capitalist but still believe in patents.

No, the goal of a democratic state is to promote the general welfare of its constituents, and to protect the minorities from oppression. To this end, it is sometimes more efficient to grant monopolies. For example, without local cable TV or telephone monopolies, there could be wires from multiple companies crisscrossing everywhere. It can also grant monopolies to encourage certain desirable behavior, such as invention (patents) and art (copyright), if in the long run these monopolies enrich the lives of its citizens.

Open competition is usually the best way to achieve the general welfare goal I list above, but not always, and more importantly is not itself a goal. Various states have decided that certain services and products (common examples are electricity and water) are not open to competition.

This is all theory, of course. Democracies are regularly subverted by capitalist interests, but certainly a state should not exist to serve capitalism.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[miles_thatsme]

It's a peculiarly hypocritical kind of libertarian or laissez-faire capitalist who argues that the free market demands state-enforced monopolies.

It's double the contradiction when you argue that someone should be able to have a patent to the "engine" of capitalism (business models) and insist on state-protected monopolies under them. It's not capitalism you're endorsing, it's mercantilism.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[chickenwing]

Instead of being free market, laisez-faire capitalists, we (by which I mean you, I don't subscribe to this) have turned into whiny littly communists.

Patents are a a right granted by the government. In a laisez-faire market, it seems that the government would not be able to grant/restrict businesses from using certain ideas. In a purly free market, if one business saw another's idea, and wanted to compete, they would be free to do so.

Patents give inventors an insentive to spend the effort and investment to work on new ideas, because they will have a period of time where they can profit, without having to worry about competing with copy-cats.

If you took an economics class, your professor would shade in an area on his supply and demand curve and note that it represents a loss to the economy, he would also say that such a loss is tolerated because it creates innovations that might not take place otherwise.

So no, it is not inconsistant for free market types to believe that it is not fair that some limitations be placed on the government granted patent rights.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[dimonic]

The way to make money has always been to implement a sound method and improve it over time. The point being made is that it has never proven neccesary or useful in the past to allow folks to have exclusive access to a method for decades in order for people to benefit from new ideas. Fortunately for the USA, Henry Ford did not patent the assembly line. Additionally, it could be argued that housewives and farmers had been using assembly line techniques in day to day chores for millenia. That is one of the key problems with many business patents today: prior art almost always exists, it is just too damned expensive to fight it. One click purchasing indeed. Fume Fume. That sounds to me like patenting a goal, not a method, and a universal goal at that.

Re:Business patents and time to railroad

[omynous]

Instead of being free market, laisez-faire capitalists

Laisez-faire capitalism isn't about government intervention producing a monopoly. Patents are.

Shannon Mann

Greed != Good anymore.

[Trigun]

Previously, there were checks and balances placed in society to prevent the atrocities of the Industrial Revolution from happening again. And life was good.

As more and more people forgot about the conditions of labor which were impressed upon the workforce, these checks and balances were overlooked and neglected, and big business took over. Like a kid in a candy store, these entities destroyed the system which fostered competition, and made it a tool to oppress the people. Big Business became Government, and further cemented the position as our overlords.

The current patent system is just a tool used for this purpose.

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[Surak]

I, for one, welcome our corporate overlords!

Hail the mighty Gates! Glory to Oppenheim! DISNEY IS MY GOD!!!

Oh wait...wrong movie...

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[TopShelf]

Yeesh, what tripe! I'll bite on this troll...

Big Business became Government??? I think we had extensive government long before Big Business became such a major force in modern life. And I certainly don't see any signs of the "atrocities of the Industrial Revolution" around. Sure, unemployment's up around 6%, but historically that's a figure to be envied.

And lest you think the current patent system is a tool to "oppress the people" (whatever the hell that means), recall that many of these bogus patents are placed by individuals who are pestering big companies (i.e. eBay).

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[e40]

You have correctly identified republican philosophy: corporations can do no wrong, government should be a small fraction of the size it is today and profit is the almighty.

OK, you right-wing nuts out there, jump on me. Go ahead. You can't refute the facts... like, Bush, et al would like to get rid of the EPA (and the republicans almost succeeded in gutting their budget a few years ago). Why? Too much government interference in corporate profits. Damn those toxic waste dumping rules!! They could make so much money if they didn't have to cart that crap off to Mexico...

Regarding dramatically smaller government, read this. It's written by a life-long republican, lest you nuts raise the spector of the "liberal media".

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[Trigun]

50% Troll, 50% Tripe, 50% opinion.

for the atrocities of the Industrial Revolution, take a look at British History. London was a soot-covered town where people worked long hours for little pay. The standard of life was poor, if not abysmal. Children were forced to work in coal mines to fuel the revolution. Other children worked in textile factories, because they were cheaper to hire than adults, took up less space, and could be pushed around easier.

The divide between the poor and the middle class became a matter of semantics while the divide between the middle class and the wealthy expanded.
These conditions lead to the creation of Karl Marx' Communist Manifesto, as well as populated Australia with 'criminals' who couldn't pay their taxes.

Once the industrial revolution subsided, labor laws were enacted to prevent the exploitation of the worker, until balance was achieved. Arguably the 1950's Americana was the golden age of this. Cars were cheap, housing was affordable, and families had disposable income.

Things kind of went downhill from there...

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[Bull999999]

And you are a moron if you think that the alternatives are any better. Democrats are for pro greedy trial lawyers. why do you think that Trial Lawyers association endorses Democrats? If you want proof, do a research on the battle between the doctors group and trial laywers group regarding the malpractice insurance issue.

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[e40]

There are an infinite number of alternatives, in theory. In practice, we have to choose among many evils. You are a moron if you think democrats are more evil than republicans.

For example, Clinton provided moderates for the federal court nominee process. They were given a hell ride in the Senate. Bush, of the other hand, has nominated extreme right wingers. I call that far more evil a legacy that what Clinton did, because these judges are appointed for life. Thankfully, the dems have been able to stop the most extreme nominees from entering confirmation hearings.

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I could read it. The article has an associated charge with it, however.

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[Dirk Pitt]

'Kind of a circular argument, isn't it? The Republican is bad because he nominated Republicans to the courts. This is bad because Republicans are bad because they nominate Republicans to the courts. My head spins. I'm sure you can come up with a better example of the evils of the GOP.

Your assumption (which I disagree with) is that Federal judges should all be moderates. Personally, I would say that Clinton's wishy-washy, moderate stance on so many important issues (like Federal court nominations) made him far more evil a choice than the alternatives. He was way too afraid to take any stance that went off-center.

You ought to take it easy with the name calling and hyper-aggressive criticism. People will more readily listen to you if you keep from discussing matters of polity with the ferocity of a sports fanatic.

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[Zork the Almighty]

50% Troll, 50% Tripe, 50% opinion.
100% slashdot math.

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[e40]

huh? registration is free.

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[e40]

Not circular at all. I'm surprised to see this counter-argument. Bush isn't just nominating republicans, he is nominating republicans that are making people like Orin Hatch nervous. Now that scares me.

As for your second counter-argument, let's see, moderates are bad. Hmmmm. I would guess the average person would agree with that? NO!

Name calling? Read the parent to which I first used the word "moron".

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[rushmobius]

I have personally never met anyone who completely subscribed to the opinions of a single individual let alone a political party.

That said, I also understand that most debates make statements that speak in generalities. Even so, to assume that an entire political party believes 'corporations can do no wrong' is a tad presumptious.

I consider myself Republican on a number of issues(death penalty, abortion, less government, tax cuts), but also hold disdain for most politicians regardless of party due to one simple fact:

When a politician makes decisions based upon the 'loudest voice' I feel they have betrayed their on beliefs. Our beliefs and actions define us, and to have them tossed asside so precipitously leads one to think they believe in nothing(except being re-elected that is).

Those rare individuals(typically not politicians) who stand by their beliefs, are typically labeled as extreme (left/right) wing. In a society that espouses more 'acceptance and openness', I am amazed to this day that they fail to accept that their acceptance might be wrong.

Re:Greed != Good anymore.

[Bull999999]

And when did I say democrats are more evil than republicans? Republicans are pro big business, democrats are pro trial lawyers. Heck, I supported Sen. McCain during the last election as I find him to be more moderate than Bush or Gore.

Software?

[phorm]

I think to a certain degree software should be patentable. If you go out and develop new, innovative, and suddenly popular software - you should have a time when you don't have to worry about being deluged with copycats. That being said, a more intelligent idea might be to have time limits with variance per the item being copyrighted.

Software (methodology) patents could be what, a few years, and business methods perhaps one. It allows the creator to enjoy the fruits of his/her labour for awhile, while still allowing competition to foster and innovation to flourish in later years.

Oh yes, and you should not be allowed to patent something that already exists in a previous medium (online XYZ based on real XYZ).

Re:Software?

[eddy]

You have time automatically, software doesn't just suddenly "appear" -- it takes time to write, lot's of time, even if you're trying to copy the workings of someone else -- especially so if how the software works is very novel. If someone could just clone it in a year or two then its implementation wasn't very special after all.

You're talking about implementation, right? Patenting "concepts" is just to scary for me to think about.

Whatever happened to simply being the best and levering being the first one to be on the top?

Re:Software?

[Joey Vegetables]

You can't stop people from copying. Trying to is like trying to outlaw gravity. And enforcing "laws" against copying would require constant surveillance of every human activity, contrary to even the flimsiest notions of basic privacy rights.

I don't think true reform of the IP system (including patents, copyright, trade secret law, etc.) can really move forward until this is recognized.

Software, like music, art, etc., can be reduced to a bunch of 1s and 0s . . or (equivalently) a very large integer.

If you don't want your work to be copied, you really have only two choices. Either don't disclose it without strict NDAs, contracts, etc. (i.e., make it a trade secret). Or do work that does not consist of a very large and easily copyable integer.

The days of profit owing solely to artificial scarcity are over, and no amount of wishing or legislating to the contrary is going to change that.

If you want to make a living, then produce products or services (not just large integers) that people are willing to pay for.

Re:Software?

[pyros]

1. 9e1908123471290384012734172394871923874
2. PROFIT!!!!

Re:Software?

[Chris_Jefferson]

If you don't want your work to be copied, you really have only two choices. Either don't disclose it without strict NDAs, contracts, etc. (i.e., make it a trade secret). Or do work that does not consist of a very large and easily copyable integer.

The problem is making good versions of those "large integers" requires a lot of skill, dedication and time, often with huge teams of people.

The days of profit owing solely to artificial scarcity are over, and no amount of wishing or legislating to the contrary is going to change that.

Surely the advantage of "large integers" is that there isn't a scarcity, I can always make another copy. If what you mean is "I think I deserve all software and music for free, because I find that copying it doesn't take much effort" then I think you have to think a bit more about what you are saying...

Just because a crime is easy to get away with doesn't make it any more right. I've just finished playing Zelda:The Wind Waker. I thought it was an excellant game. I'm sure it took a large number of people a long time to write. In the future everything is going to be "a big integer", so if anything it is more important we get the ideas of how to protect them down correctly. We don't want to go overboard, but we have to protect people who work hard on these things too.

Re:Software?

[tassii]

I think to a certain degree software should be patentable. If you go out and develop new, innovative, and suddenly popular software - you should have a time when you don't have to worry about being deluged with copycats. That being said, a more intelligent idea might be to have time limits with variance per the item being copyrighted.

Basic mistake here.. a patent is not a copyright.. they are two separate things.

Software should be copyrightable.. not patentable.

Re:Software?

[dirtyboot]

I would like to patent the concept of "patenting."

Early retirement, here I come.

Re:Software?

[PhilHibbs]

He's not talking about direct ripoff copies, but of someone hiring a hundred Indian graduates to churn out a workalike in three months. In some ways, there's very little difference between software and a physical device.

Re:Software?

[GrouchoMarx]

I think to a certain degree software should be patentable. If you go out and develop new, innovative, and suddenly popular software - you should have a time when you don't have to worry about being deluged with copycats. That being said, a more intelligent idea might be to have time limits with variance per the item being copyrighted.

Notice what you just said there? "... certain software should be patentable... variance per the item being copyrighted." That is precisely the problem.

Patents and Copyrights are NOT the same thing! One is for an invention. One is for a creative work. They strike a different balance between protection and allowing copycats for very specific, good reasons. The confusing of the two is precisely why we have such a problem in the copyright world right now; the PTB have convinced people that copyright should be treated with the same exclusivity as patents, whichis nonsense.

Please don't bow to the pressure from the media and confuse the two. It only hurts you, me, and us.

Re:Software?

[phorm]

Patenting "implementation" good, concept bad. While a short concept copyright wouldn't be too bad, allowing people to sit on them is completely idiotic. There should be a short time-span and/or "concept-to-action" phase for the person to actually try and implement on the bright ideas.

Re:Software?

[phorm]

This guy had it right. Patents could still apply to software, just in a fashion that is limited to prevent the current idiocy of everything-under-the-sun patententing

Re:Software?

[spirality]

However, algorithms should be patentable. For example mp3 encoding or the gif format. Algorithms and file formats can be specified very stringently. Business models, and some of the other vague notions that get patented are just that, vague, and they shouldn't be patentable.

Re:Software?

[cait56]

With modern hardware there is no difference. A "hardware" implementation performs a sequence of logical operations that have been arranged in an innovative way to produce a valuable result. A software implementation does the same thing.

In either case, the essential innovation of having researched a method of sequencing and controlling the individual steps can be easily stolen and given a totally new representation. Copyright is clearly not suitable protection.

The emphasis has to be on ensuring that it is the innovative cominbation that is being patented, not the valuable result, and that it is indeed innovative.

Removing the need to prove true innovation makes the patent game a race to file a claim.

And as any /. reader should know, the "first post" seldom contributes to the process.

Re:Software?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? They have COPYRIGHTS on them already, no?

First Post

[Lew Pitcher]

Patent pending, 2003, All rights reserved

Re:First Post

[druske]

Sorry friend, somebody just demonstrated prior art... :)

Re:First Post

[mblase]

Patent pending, 2003, All rights reserved

You can't patent the method of First Post! After all, I've already patented the method of Second Post, making your method a clearly derivative work.

Re:First Post

[ShawnDoc]

You *CAN* patent a derivative work. All you have to do is add some "unique" twist to it, and patent it as your own. Patents are very picky about the wording and the order by which things get done. All it takes is a slight modification of those listed in the patent, and you've got a new patent all to yourself.

Re:First Post

[doorbot.com]

Patent pending, 2003, All rights reserved

I think you meant to say, "Your rights reserved, but available for licensing."

onward through the fog...

[Anonymous Coward]

The author of the article makes all the right points, I'd say. Is there any point in further regulating our society and simultaneously enriching the legal profession? Discuss...

I support business process patents

[Nick of NSTime]

I think it makes sense to patent business processes, to a certain extent. If I have a company that manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I have a competitor who manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I devise a business process that streamlines my manufacturing to eke out more profits, I won't want my competitor to have that business process.

At the same time, I think there are pitfalls. Take Netflix for example: the idea of renting DVDs over the Internet does not seem unique to me. As a matter of fact, I thought of the very same thing in 1997 but couldn't get capital.

The more I reply to these topics, the more I realize that there is no clear answer, so I begin to wonder why I reply at all.

Re:I support business process patents

[rhfrommn]

One big problem I see with patenting business products is how do you ever prove you came up with it? In a competitive industry all the businesses will constantly be looking for ways to streamline their procedures to lower expenses. So what gives you the right to patent something everybody in your industry is working on at the same time? Who gets the patent - the guy who first thought of it, the manager who first approved it, or the company who first implemented it? And if my company has written the procedures and plans to implement them next Monday, can you get a patent because you did it first on Friday?

It is too messy. With a physical invention you can make the object, construct diagrams of it, and prove you are the first to invent it. In business processes it is way too "mushy" to define when a process is invented and when it is just a idea in somebody's head.

Re:I support business process patents

[rhfrommn]

Oops, obviously in the first line the should say "One big problem I see with patenting business PROCESSES" . . . not "products".

Sorry. And I even used preview! Amazing how you can miss simple errors like that in reviewing your own writing but they are obvious a few minutes later.

Re:I support business process patents

[khallow]

I think it makes sense to patent business processes, to a certain extent. If I have a company that manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I have a competitor who manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I devise a business process that streamlines my manufacturing to eke out more profits, I won't want my competitor to have that business process.

But what happens if you're a widget maker who has been using the business process in question for years, and suddenly finds that the process has been patented? Or a customer who suddenly finds that widgets cost more because your widget maker has to pay licensing fees on the business process. Business patents don't look so good in those cases.

I think there's a couple good reasons not to patent business processes. First, if the process is better, then it'll save the company money. Ie, there's plenty of existing incentives to create business processes. Second, business processes are relatively easy to copy (ie, discover what the competition is doing and copy it), hence there's no real concerns that the information won't make it into the public domain (ie, a worker can bring the knowledge with him to another company). Ie, the reason for patents doesn't exist here. There's no need to provide incentives to innovate nor to bring the information into the public domain.

Re:I support business process patents

[Creep73]

So what you are saying is that Ford is the only company that should be allowed to use the production line? I am sorry but these are things that need to be shared in order for capitalism to thrive. This promotes competition by bringing companies on equal footing. If everything had a price one company with the money would end up owning everything.

Re:I support business process patents

[Dan Berlin]

"and I devise a business process that streamlines my manufacturing to eke out more profits," This sounds much more like a process patent than a *business* process patent. Like a new manufacturing process that is cheaper. These have been patentable as long as the patent system has been around, unlike business patents.

Re:I support business process patents

[Trigun]

If everything had a price one company with the money would end up owning everything.

Until one bright boy made a successful guess at the next step said business would need to make, stifling their growth and giving the next guy a monopoly. Kind of like Kings usurping Kings.

Ain't the system wonderful?

Re:I support business process patents

[Anonymous Coward]

"I devise a business process that streamlines my manufacturing to eke out more profits, I won't want my competitor to have that business process."

This is such a ridiculous argument and it's almost a cliche around here.

Are you going to be happy going out of business because a competitor "invents" a new business process that you cannot compete against? I'm sure you will point out how trivial and obvious it is and complain that it shouldn't be patented.

How about as a customer. Would you like to see all competition removed in the supply of some good that you purchase? Sure it may be cheaper at first, but as soon as the competition is shut down due to a patent monopoly you are left with a single source supplier. Take a look at how single source suppliers treat their customers.

Everyone always thinks it's going to be themselves that benefit from patents and copyrights. Wake up call! It most likely won't be.

Re:I support business process patents

[Anonymous Coward]

So in the end, there's always ONE big company that's in charge of everything. Yeah.. great system... No thanks.

Re: I support business process patents

[Black Parrot]

> I think it makes sense to patent business processes, to a certain extent. If I have a company that manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I have a competitor who manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I devise a business process that streamlines my manufacturing to eke out more profits, I won't want my competitor to have that business process.

In the USA the justification for patents is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". It's not clear to me that such raw protectionism promotes such progress.

Now if a patent encourages a business to license some procedure that would otherwise remain a trade secret with little chance of anyone else ever thinking of it, then that's good - it promotes progress in the useful arts. But shite like a patent on one-click shopping is no more than a letter of marque for boarding and plundering the competition.

Unfortunately the ruling class in the USA has developed a notion that ideas are like plots of land, and each should have a clearly defined "owner" with exclusive exploitation rights. That's going to stiffle progress in the useful arts rather than promote it.

Re:I support business process patents

[TrekkieGod]

If I have a company that manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I have a competitor who manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I devise a business process that streamlines my manufacturing to eke out more profits, I won't want my competitor to have that business process.

Of course you don't. That's the point though. Everybody wants to get patents, it protects them. I remember the good old days when companies had to worry about industrial espionage to protect their production methods which were better than the competiton. Those days, you kept your better widget production method secret, and you stay ahead of the competition until they figure out how to better their system on their own. What you want is an unfair business practice that gives you the advantage...that's what everyone wants for themselves.

Of course, patents are still necessary. If you create an invention, and then a big company with lots of capital copies your idea, and sells the same thing for much cheaper than you possibly could, that's not competition, that's hanging you and using your own idea as the rope. The line must be drawn between patenting a product and an idea though, just like it used to be. There must also be a *short* limit on the time you're allowed to sell your invention without any competition, basically enough time to let you be established in the business, so that by the time the other companies can join in, you can hold your own. I'll leave it to people more intelligent than I to figure out what's a reasonable time, but I'll go ahead and say that this time should definitely be different depending on what it is you're patenting...it should be decided in an individual basis.

Re: I support business process patents

[Poeir]

Isn't a new business process its own reward? You're only going to use it if that makes you more money than it does before. The first one to use it will be the only one to be able to use it for a period of time, not because of a government-sanctioned monopoly, but because it takes time to add a new procedure. In the meantime, your new, better process (because why would you use a worse process?) is increasing your profitability.

This does not apply to traditional patents, where a new type of object is created. In this case, building it costs money, rather than saving it, so without that monopoly you're likely to make less money (possibly for a net negative profit) when someone else copies it; assuming that you're selling the object and not using it in your brand new business process.

Re:I support business process patents

[AnotherBlackHat]

If I have a company that manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I have a competitor who manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I devise a business process that streamlines my manufacturing to eke out more profits, I won't want my competitor to have that business process.

Bad example IMO.
If you think it up, you have a strong incentive to implement even without a patent (it saves you money).
Your competition has an incentive to copy you (it save's them money too) and the end result is lower prices for everybody.

Better example:
You think of a way someone else can improve the manufacture of widgets.
Without a patent, you have no incentive to tell them about it.

The question is, how likely is it that the idea would have been thought of independantly if you hadn't done it.
And the key failing of software patents and business method patents,
is that for most of them the answer is "very likely".

-- this is not a .sig

Re:I support business process patents

[gblues]

If I have a company that manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I have a competitor who manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I devise a business process that streamlines my manufacturing to eke out more profits, I won't want my competitor to have that business process.

That's why you make it a trade secret. Patenting it makes it public, but rewards you by granting you a limited monopoly. So sure, others can use your idea, but they have to pay you to use it.

The example you gave isn't even a business method patent. A business method patent would be, for example, patenting the idea of leaving the newspaper at your door and then suing the New York Times for infringing on your patent.

Nathan

Re:I support business process patents

[rossifer]

If I have a company that manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I have a competitor who manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I devise a business process that streamlines my manufacturing to eke out more profits, I won't want my competitor to have that business process.

Well of course you don't want your competitor to have that ability. However, the real question is "should you be able to stop him?" The answer *should* go back to the net benefit to society and the economy.

Are you not likely to use your new process if your competitor can steal it? Probably, because until he does figure out what you're doing and copies it, you can make a larger profit. Also, if you don't reveal it and he figures it out on his own, you've lost the marginal gain of taking advantage of the process in the first place. Now you have to employ the process just to get back to even with the other guy. The fact that your business is so competitive means that you're driven to improve your business processes anyway, even without patent protection.

In either case, your industry adds more money to the economy if the new process gets used and there is no disincentive to not seek out new processes to gain momentary advantages over one's competitors. Again, patenting the process simply doesn't encourage anyone to do anything they weren't already doing.

Patent law is based on the supposition that the grant of a temporary monopoly will encourage more inventions than would occur without it and that those additional inventions are more valuable to an economy in the long run than the short term loss to the economy of granting the temporary monopoly. For business processes, the model fails because there is still a strong incentive to develop and use new business processes, even if your competitors can also use them. The "additional" business processes generated by granting patents is zero.

So make your widgets to make as much profit as you can and quit yer whining about the competition. That's what it should mean to do business.

Regards,
Ross

Case Law

[petronivs]

But in July, 1998, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit did away with that principle.

I wonder if this case (or a similar one) ever made its way to the Supreme Court. It might help matters, and it would be much more likely than waiting for Congress to do something about the situation. Any action in Congress limiting these kinds of patents would certainly be opposed by entrenched corporations (which might not control Congress yet, but do have substantial influence in it).

Re:Case Law

[finallyHasANickname]

DESCRIPTION OF APPARATUS:

Internet-connected computer

DESCRIPTION OF ALGORITHM:

1. User desires law.
2. User clicks once on "Legislate" button.
3. Personal computer sends emails to K Street extortionist and to all previously purchased politicians as per previous business process patent.
4. Guy visits politicians, violin case in hand.
5. Money flows to me--ahem--and amazon.com. Dangit! Make that TWO clicks. Yeah. Definitely definitely two clicks.

Now everyone wants a turn...

[TWX]

"As Benjamin Day, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton might attest, American corporations have thrived on innovative ideas and new business methods, without owning them, for two centuries."

Yes, and now every idiot who went through business school wants to get in a piece of the action, despite frequent majoring in "Business" is more like highschool++ rather than serious post-secondary education for many. I'd have a lot more respect for "businessmen" if several of the small businesses that I've worked for didn't ignore their employees when it came time to make technical decisions, and would consider long term effects. These people even have a financial stake in what they're doing, compared to those that control other peoples' money, and they still are screwups. I don't see why we should let any company or business person patent a business plan, when they think that one good idea without heavy technical implementation should be something that they can solely profit on.

Besides, most of the actually successful business people that I have met don't feel a need to patent business ideas or processes. Of course, these generally are people who liked working in a field and started their own companies because of that, and knew the tech and work, not simply how a spreadsheet worked.

Re:Now everyone wants a turn...

[Bull999999]

How about this? Since business majors are like highschool++ get yourself a business degree in 1 or 2 years (shouldn't be hard for you if idiots can do it in 4 or 5 years), and you can be the one who gets to control other people's money.

Re:Now everyone wants a turn...

[Zirnike]

"get yourself a business degree in 1 or 2 years"

Some of us have morals.

What's really scary is where I went to, if you failed out of engineering, you could probably switch over to business. The business school honor roll was filled with people who couldn't hack engineering (at least 15 in the rolls). It's like politics: Anyone who would want to go into the feild should be barred from it.

Re:Now everyone wants a turn...

[Bull999999]

I guess engineers are so intelligent that they enjoy working for businesses run by idiots for less pay.

Re:Now everyone wants a turn...

[Bull999999]

"Some of us have morals."

Then can you tell me why engineerers in the defense industroy don't have problems with developing weapons of mass distruction for paycheck?

Re:Now everyone wants a turn...

[Anonymous Coward]

Like driving your can into a crowd of people and blaming the manufacture.

Your either and idiot or guilty, likely both.

Fuck off

Gets a 2, sheesh.

Re:Now everyone wants a turn...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good one.

Re:Now everyone wants a turn...

[Zirnike]

Not really.

My ideal job would be weapons design. As it happens, I have a very simple, quite moral reason for supporting this: People are demonstrably violent, and a minority (but a significant one) will attack those who are weaker.

Or, to put it into a cliché, peace through superior firepower. Humans aren't built for peace any other way.

Re:Now everyone wants a turn...

[Bull999999]

"I have a very simple, quite moral reason for supporting this: People are demonstrably violent, and a minority (but a significant one) will attack those who are weaker." And you call business majors amoral... And since when did U.S. become weaker than Al Quaeda?

You like weapons design? I guess you are out of luck as idiot managers (as they were too stupid to become engineers) will deny funding to your brillent idea as they'll never be bright enough to see the value of it.

Re:Now everyone wants a turn...

[finallyHasANickname]

What are the characteristics of success then? I think I know. I read about it in excerpts from Joseph Schumpeter and a top notch book called The Work of Nations by Robert Reich, who was a Harvard economics professor at the time of the writing. Before I spill those beans, let's think some more about academic competition and how it fits into everything else.

When I was at a heighty tighty university, there was a common expression among the highly motivated and cognitively elite students: "Don't take geography because it's easy. It's easy for everyone else and graded on a curve like everything else. That makes it so easy it's hard." Imagine a bell curve about a thousand feet tall. The last inch separates curve wreckers from washouts. If someone takes an "easy" course of study, the odds are pretty good that the proverbial Real World will do to that person what the GPA-fluffing tactic would do to the person contemplating taking easy/hard geography "for the easy A."

In the long run, there are two measures of personality that correlate most of all with what we would consider elite status in most (superficial?) measures. They are as Joseph Schumpeter said they would be: intelligence and strength of will. Consider three huge winners in recent history: Ross Perot, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. All are stubborn but not equally. One is head-and-shoulders above the others in cognitive sophistication. The other two make up (made up) for it by sticking with the program once it is in place. ./ of all crowds should know that Perot "making" a huge computer company isn't quite the same thing as the label would indicate, but that's beside the point.

The point is minding--literally minding--a person's business. A mind is not just the "math"; it is the desire also.

I guess I'll leave you with a digression. In Reich's book, he "promised" all drooling greedy people with intellectual properties that the stuff would amortize/rot/depreciate lickety split. You want a company destined for glory over time? Get talented people in fields of sophisticated symbolic analysis first of all to pledge allegiance and second of all to work in ways that leverage recently developed skill. The "expensive" payroll will be more lucrative than traditional capital assets and even more lucrative than the intellectual properties per se.

There is always this American-styled Fort Knox Key mindset that provokes us to spend money on patent fees ten times more often than doing so can pay for itself. "If I could just get that one little thing working right, then money will flow to me as if from a burst dam," people secretly think to themselves while dialing the patent lawyer's phone number. In reality, if you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path somewhere, perhaps paving right over you, perhaps enriching you, perhaps impoverishing you.

9 of 10 patents are financial duds, and 9 of 10 business ventures fail within two years. Risk/reward looks pretty similar, which is why it is intensely ironic that tempers flare so much on the left and right in all of this stuff.

Ahem.

I thought we were too smart for all that. ;-)

Re:Now everyone wants a turn...

[Zirnike]

"And since when did U.S. become weaker than Al Quaeda?"

According to them? We don't have allah on our side, so we are weaker.

And look at how they attack. They don't go after groups where they'd be evenly matched, like a militia group. They go after unarmed civilians (people in airplanes, etc.). They do attack those who are weaker.

As for managers not seeing the value of brilliant designs, I run into that in what I'm doing now. I made a change that took me a week. Requires a few months of testing... But it will end up saving better than $40k/year just in manufacturing, never mind ease of service (my primary reason for the design). But it keeps getting pushed off, for reasons that aren't reasonable.

YOU FAIL IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

J00 FAIL IT!

... oh ... wait ... :(

It's all in the perspective

[Jack Wagner]

As an independent consultant if I don't have the ability to patent my work then I lose my ability to compete in the workplace. There is no way for me to go up against all these major corporations unless I can patent my innovations and leverage that patent in a court of law.

I've devised many algorithms that could save companies many man hours by speeding up their applications by Olog(n) however I refuse to use them unless I can be certain that they won't simply take the algorithm and use it elsewhere. I'm not talking about reverse engineering code mind you, I'm talking about the actual ideas that go into the code. For instance lets say, hypothetically, that I devise a sort routine that works anywhere from 35 - 40% faster than the quick sort in with all datasets. I would have to be a fool to just give this away after spending months of research on it when my time and my intelligence are the only things I have that I can charge for.

I think the patent system is pure capitalism at it's best and may the best and brightest and first to market be the guy who wins. Patents are as American as Apple Pie and Baseball as far as I'm concerned.

Re:It's all in the perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

What if this was the case years ago, and hence every sorting algorithm other than bubble-sort was patented. Yeah, that would be fantastic.

Re:It's all in the perspective

[ip_vjl]

That's what contracts between you and that company are for. You specify in the contract what rights they have with the work you provide, anything outside of that and they can be sued for damages.

In your example, if another person independently came up with the same method went to use it on his jobs (without even knowing about you) he'd be infringing on your patent and could be sued. That example has NOTHING to do with you protecting your work from companies with which you do business.

Sounds like you're looking for the goverment to protect you from your own poorly-written contracts.

Re:It's all in the perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

If you spent those months of research on this thing in the pay of a client, then you have been paid for it already, in the wages they paid you. If you want to keep something algorithmic proprietary, make it s Trade Secret. Otherwise, it's like addition - a simple mathematical fact in the Universe, and unpatentable.

Re:It's all in the perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

But if I come up with an algorithm identicle to yours and have no knowledge of you or your patent, why should you have any more rights than me? We both spent the same amount of time to find a solution to our problems. Nobody has invented anything here, we just solved a problem because that's what engineers do!

Now suppose everybody starts patenting, time it takes you to find a new algorithm becomes prohibitive and you need to cross-license 50% of your algorithms. Now hows your business model looking when paying for algs that are OBVIOUS to anybody who looks hard enough?

Re:It's all in the perspective

[cmdr_beeftaco]

This is blantant playa hatin. Don't bitch about patents unless you have the balls and the intelligence to research an idea and secure a patent of your own.

Until then you are an uninformed bystander with nothing to add. The parent poster has vastly more crediablity in my book. He has gone through the process and understands how to run a company that profits from intellectual property.

Re:It's all in the perspective

[westyvw]

Nah, your wrong. I am a consultant too.

Seems to me you get what you have sown.

The time you spent reasearching is where you make the money. The client is paying for you to develop the sort routine. You wouldnt even own the rights to it, unless the client allowed that in writing. This is a very sticky area; if the client is paying for you to develop a routine and you then sell that routine to someone else your client has every right to sue YOU.

Re:It's all in the perspective

[cmdr_beeftaco]

Contracts are targetted legal instruments used to protect yourself from a specific set of adverse actions from a known party.

Patents on the other hand provide broad protections that protect ideas from unintended uses on a global scale (thanks to many IP related treaties).

I would think that someone whodevelops something as important and unique as an efficent sorting algorithm ought to do the upmost to protect that intellectual property.

An efficent sorting algorithm could provide a massive benifit to society. Think cancer research and other genetic inquries. Think Homeland Security making planes safer with TIA. Think efficent code checkers to look for stolen code over 100,000's lines of code. The possibilities are endless...

Re:It's all in the perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

Contracts are targetted legal instruments used to protect yourself from a specific set of adverse actions from a known party.

That's exactly what the grandparent to your post was talking about.

I refuse to use them unless I can be certain that they won't simply take the algorithm and use it elsewhere

So, your point was?

Re:It's all in the perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

Patents are as American as Apple Pie and Baseball as far as I'm concerned.

Actually, patents are as British as spotted dick and cricket. ;)

I'm an American too, but you have to lay credit (or blame) where it is due.

Re:It's all in the perspective

[cmdr_beeftaco]

Don't start bring grandparents into this.

Re:It's all in the perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't bitch about patents unless you have the balls and the intelligence to research an idea and secure a patent of your own."


By this logic I can't argue that murder is wrong until I've gone out and shot someone in the head.

Re:It's all in the perspective

[GlassHeart]

As an independent consultant if I don't have the ability to patent my work then I lose my ability to compete in the workplace.

Nobody disputes that you should be paid for your work. The question is, as cruel as it may seem, not how much money you deserve for any given invention, but how little legal protection the society can give you while still retaining you as a professional consultant. If possible, we won't pay you one dollar more.

Understand that every copyright or patent we (the people) grant an individual is a lost freedom. We lose the freedom, however little, of writing a novel whose hero is named Harry Potter. We lose the freedom to use certain algorithms (for free), whether or not we independently re-developed that algorithm.

This is why patents expire. You are free to exploit your invention with the protection of the law, but after a while we gain the rights to your invention. It's not about you. You have no inherent right to compete successfully against "all these major corporations". Society has an interest in promoting competition, so patents are a device that can help the smaller party retain the fruits of its labor, but your livelihood per se is not the core consideration. Patents expire because we want you to invent more (rather than live the rest of your life off one great idea), and because we want to use your old invention for free after a while.

I think the patent system is pure capitalism at it's best and may the best and brightest and first to market be the guy who wins.

The first to market does have an inherent advantage, in case you haven't noticed. The question about patents is that it can prevent a second or third to market, including people who might actually provide a better service or product than the guy with the good idea. When patents stifle competition rather than promote it, it will rightfully be curtailed, for our benefit.

Have I mentioned that it's not about you? :)

Re:It's all in the perspective

[chickenwing]

As an independent consultant if I don't have the ability to patent my work then I lose my ability to compete in the workplace. There is no way for me to go up against all these major corporations unless I can patent my innovations and leverage that patent in a court of law.

Yeah, but wouldn't it suck not to be able to work as an independent consultant because a few large corporations owned a bunch of patents covering methods required to complete the job. Maybe some company patents the method for interacting with their hardware/software. Then, I guess, only people who work for the company, or granted licence by the company would be able to do consulting work for those products.

I hereby patent...

[GillBates0]

The office says on its Web site that its role is "to grant patents," but surely its role should be to distinguish between innovations that are worth patenting and those that are not.

I hereby patent the idea of granting patents and distinguising between innovations that are worth patenting and those that are not.

I'm torn

[tbase]

This is such a tough issue for me. On the one hand, this post makes a very valid point - businesses with new methods have thrived without the help of patents. But these days, there are so many more businesses where the business model essentially is the product, so why not have some sort of protection? Look at NetFlix. Nobody (including them) could make a go of online rentals, until they came up with a new method. Now if they have no protection, they can be wiped out in a matter of months by a corporate behemoth that has the resources to basically take their business out from under them once they're sure it will work.

Before you slam me for defending business model patents, understand that I'm just voicing the other side of the coin - and I don't mean that big companies should be protected - this can protect the little guy that can only become big with at least some temporary protection. I agree that there are massive abuses in all areas of patent law, but I don't think wiping out certain types or all of them is the answer. While big corporations may have perverted the patent system into being its bitch, if it's obliterated completely, then only the largest companies with the most resources will profit from innovation, and when that happens, there will be far fewer innovators.

Re:I'm torn

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a fact of business, that the small guy can almost always be outgunned by the big guy. Look at Dell and the local computer shops - who can get better prices on the new stuff? the one who makes millions of sales, not the one who makes dozens. I find it difficult to justify business method patents on your argument.

Besides, who will have more BM patents? The little guy, who cannot afford many of the $5K fees, or the corporate behemoth, who can patent nearly everything they do without blinking?

Re:I'm torn

[CrackHappy]

This line:
"While big corporations may have perverted the patent system into being its bitch," just killed me!

I'm wiping tears from my eyes... the picture of this big woman wearing leather pants, leather jacket with a whip standing over a cowering little man with a dog collar on...

And in case you're wondering, yes I am twisted and weird.

Re:I'm torn

[mblase]

Look at NetFlix. Nobody (including them) could make a go of online rentals, until they came up with a new method.

What "new method"? They charge a monthly subscription and let you keep a limited number of movies indefinitely, instead of a per-movie fee and letting you keep an indefinite number of movies for a limited time. Subscriptions are hardly novel or patent-worthy.

If NetFlix wants to remain in the lead, it should do so by (a) pushing its first-mover advantage and name recognition, (b) providing superior selection and customer service, and (c) keeping their website fast, responsive and easy to use. This is how businesses have remained ahead of their imitators for decades, and there's no reason it should fail now. The patent is essentially NetFlix saying, "We got here first, so no one else should be able to copy us." Hogwash.

Re:I'm torn

[wetshoe]

Read _The Innovator's Dilemma_. "At the heart of The Innovator's Dilemma is how a successful company with established products keeps from being pushed aside by newer, cheaper products that will, over time, get better and become a serious threat. Christensen writes that even the best-managed companies, in spite of their attention to customers and continual investment in new technology, are susceptible to failure no matter what the industry, be it hard drives or consumer retailing."

The author takes on this exact question and describes how large companies take time to change, so even if a new idea comes out, it doesn't meen the little guy will get swallowed up before s/he has a chance to succeed (and become the next big guy; remember, even Wal-Mart started out as a little country grocier; I don't think they were the first or largest store, and look at them now).

Re:I'm torn

[franimal]

Yes. There is a lot to be said for the innovater that moves quickly and makes good business decisions. There is also much to be said for competition.

Re:I'm torn

[Anonymous Coward]

Netflix is a great example. What is new and non-obvious about what they do? Seriously, transfering media over a network hasn't been a new idea since before 300 baud modems were standard. The only thing required was the bandwidth to make it practical. Why should they be guaranteed profit from such an idea. In fact, there are no examples of patented business methods that I have seen that are new or non-obvious at all. Doing X on the internet shouldn't make it patentable.

Re:I'm torn

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if they have no protection, they can be wiped out in a matter of months by a corporate behemoth that has the resources to basically take their business out from under them once they're sure it will work.

You mean like Sotheby's crushed eBay or Barnes & Noble crushed Amazon?

There are tremendous advantages to being the first mover and a real business model executed by someone other than coke heads burning VC money like Southern Baptists with Metallica records can really leverage them.

Re:I'm torn

[tbase]

This is where I have a different view than most, I guess. To me, the little guy could be a million dollar company. I'm not talking about my buddy that builds 8 or 10 PC's a month out of his house, I'm talking about small business - the #1 employer in the U.S. - maybe they have 3 employees or maybe they have 500. Most of the small businesses I'm talking about would not have a problem with wisely investing $5k to buy a few years of protection for a good idea that they believe in. If it's going to be stolen right at the moment that they start turning a profit, you're looking at a lot of businesses getting squeezed out - the businesses that employ most of us.

Re:I'm torn

[tbase]

Subscriptions for rentals - something you have to return is very novel, IMHO. And no amount of customer service or speedy website is going to allow them to compete with a corporation with virtually unlimited resources that isn't even in the same industry - they're only moving into it because it's a good idea they can steal.

Yes, you're right- you're method has worked for decades, but there is a reason it will fail now. The reason can be seen by looking at the loosening of media ownership rules. Or looking at how WorldComm can totally fuck us, and still get some of the biggest government contracts in history. The corporations are bigger than ever, and more and more they can do whatever they want. That sort of negates a, b and c.

Re:I'm torn

[tbase]

Nothing is non-obvious once someone has done it. It's not transferring media over a network - it's subscription based DVD rentals. Flat fee for unlimited movies. If it was so old and obvious, why did so many try to rent movies online and fail?

Re:I'm torn

[tbase]

"...real business model executed by someone other than coke heads burning VC money like Southern Baptists with Metallica records"

ROTFLMAO

Good point. But Amazon had the one-click patent :-)

Re:I'm torn

[RedHat Rocky]

Wait, so your justification for patents of BUSINESS processes is that big BUSINESS is too big? And that little BUSINESS needs protection so it can grow up to be big BUSINESS?

Oooookay!

Re:I'm torn

[tbase]

LOL No, I just think that if someone has a unique and innovative idea, they should be afforded at least some temporary protection. The fact that big business is too big is just the reason that it may be needed now, whereas before a company like Wal-Mart would stick to it's core business, and not "steal" an idea and venture into what is essentially unrelated to their current business focus. And please remember my original subject and message - I'm torn - I agree with most of the replies, and see plenty of reasons to not add to the fubar'd patent system. I only took this side because I didn't figure many people would. I love a good debate :-)

Re:I'm torn

[RedHat Rocky]

I don't see how they deserve anything. They're already ahead by being bright enough to be first.

I really don't think Walmart is going to crush Netflix, have you been to a Walmart lately? I've never seen more dreary place labeled "Customer Service". As long as Netflix keeps their customer service where it should be, they'll be just fine. Heck, how much have they made already?

Re:I'm torn

[Rich0]

I think the key word is temporary.

I wonder if a patent system with a revenue cap would work? Have patents expire in x years or until the patented idea earns 1 billion dollars in revenue (not earnings - otherwise you'll have the killer product which never made a dime after "expenses").

Certainly a billion dollars has to be a fair income for most inventions. And yet this cap would eliminate quite a few patents.

Then again, a cap acts like a leveler. Why come up with a cure for AIDS when it won't make any more money than a new allergy pill but is likely to cost an arm and a leg? In some industries like areospace there might not be incentive to improve an engine design since you'd surpass a billion dollars in revenue after selling a dozen units, even though the profit margins on jumbo jets is not high.

Persuasively?

[dpille]

Makes the argument persuasively.

I'm not so sure there's anything persuasive in the article. All it really asks you to do is agree that patentability of fast food is ludicrous.

You can make a short persuasive analysis and reach the same conclusion, just by hitting those same sort of historic ideals: a patent system was created to 'promote the useful arts' with (among others) limited monopoly justified by getting ideas clearly into the public domain sooner and allowing for further innovation. The first steam engines were patented, from there you get internal combustion.

A patent for selling auction items at a fixed price, or many of the business method patents we see, however, are dead ends. (Oooh, I know, I'll sell fixed price items at a fixed price!!) By failing to promote further steps on a technological ladder, business method patents don't give back to the public what the patent system was created to do.

Re:Persuasively?

[franimal]

Very interesting. The really neat bit is that to keep pace with the eponential rate of technology innovation -- the patent term would have to be lowered.

More specifically, to build on your anecdote of the combustion enginer following the steam engine, why should an inventor wait 20 years to invent the combustion engine when they could do it in a month? And if they can do it in a month and do -- what does that do to the steam engine manufacturer?

Of course, as the pace of innovation increases, so does complexity. Which will win? Will mountains be moved in seconds? Or will it always take 10 years to make something new?

Maybe this is way [they weren't patented before]

[Nom du Keyboard]

The mail-order catalogue, the moving assembly line, the decentralized corporation, the frequent-flier mile, the category-killer store--none of these radical ideas were patented.

Perhaps in the beginning such radical ideas weren't even considered for patenting because they were so radical who ever thought they'd work out so well.

And afterwards it was too late.

Most people trying to make a radical idea work are usually too busy to think about patents.

Turned right back at you, "Einstien"

[Anonymous Coward]

A business model patent patents only a business model, not a product. So there's no danger of monopoly.

Re:Turned right back at you, "Einstien"

[Anonymous Coward]

no? amazon have a monopoly on one-click ordering don't they? Netflix have a... why bother?

Constituency problem

[ccmann]

In a way, the litigation mentioned in the article is a good thing. A big problem for patent reform is that there is a small group of highly motivated people who benefit from these overbroad patents and a much larger but much more diffuse group of people who are hurt by them. The former exert continual pressure on the system and the latter don't pay much attention -- you see this in firearms politics, where for better or worse a large majority of the country thinks more legislation is needed but the majority will is thwarted (again for better or worse) by a relatively small group of dedicated opponents. (I am ignoring the constitutional arguments here, of course.) The best way to get some money and motivation behind reform is for these patents to start burning enough business interests to create the same kind of interest in this issue on the other side. If eBay, Viacom, Amazon and the like start getting hurt, maybe we'll see some action.

Re:Constituency problem

[notpasteurized]

It has been alleged that these patents are overly broad but I'm not sure there is evidence to support such assertions. Have you seen this paper, by chance, on the Social Science Research Network? Title: Have Business Method Patents Gotten A Bum Rap? Some Empirical Evidence. http://ssrn.com/abstract=424081

So where do you draw the line?

[beavis88]

Using your example, if you've implemented your new process properly, you should have a BIG leg up on the competition -- even if they do copy your innovation. While you're selling your cheaper-to-produce widget (either undercutting your competition, or reaping higher margins), they are scrambling to work the new business process into their existing assembly lines, figuring out how to pay for it, etc.

You say that "the idea of renting DVDs over the Internet does not seem unique to me" -- to which I say, a streamlines manufacturing process to produce widgets does not seem unique to me. You're still producing the exact same widget as your competitor, albeit at a lower cost.

I could see patenting a method of creating a widget with the same functionality, but using different components. But I'd have to drink an awful lot to be convinced of the merits of patents on business processes.

Black and white solutions rarely work as well as was intended, but this is one place where I think a gray area may be a killer.

Re:an elegant solution [US Constitution]

[fkittred]

If you are speaking of the United States, then it is going to be real hard to abolish patents, as they have been a fundamental basis of our law
for well over 200 years. Abolishing them would be very, very messy, not elegant at all.

The US Constitution is an example of an elegant solution. It is concise, yet includes the specific legislative power to set up a patent office:

"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;"

I am not a constitutional lawyer and don't know if it would require a constitutional admentment to outlaw patents. I am sure that the legislature could pass laws limiting what can be patented and the length of the patent...

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent post wasn't about copyright laws...so what are you talking about?

Excuse Me, But Prior Art

[Nom du Keyboard]

the frequent-flier mile

Wouldn't this have been subject to prior art considerations from S&H Green Stamps. A bonus system for customer loyality rewarding the customer with valuable and/or useful items.

Re:Excuse Me, But Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget though, that you can look up how many miles you have on the "internet" so clearly this is a radical new business bonanza and should be protected imediately.

Re:Excuse Me, But Prior Art

[lizrd]

And a one click shopping patent ought to have prior art from keeping your customer's billing and shipping information in a rolodex, but that doesn't make it so.

i want links

[Thinkit3]

I've been tagging abolish copyright/patent posts. Like this. But they are fedw and far between.

Re:i want links

[aborchers]

It's not entirely clear to me that the poster you cited is actually advocating abolition of such protections, but predicting their radical transformation in the near future. If they are transformed as described, it will be reactionary, just as I complained.

The posts I see seem to be mostly of the form "the system is open to abuse, so the system should be disposed of" without any commentary on what negative economic and cultural repercussions there might be.

Can you give me an actual argument for abolishing patents? If you would advocate the same for copyrights, please comment on those as well.

Fast Food ...

[Tranvisor]

For all you people who think that McD's came up with everything, remember that the first fast food place to come up with the drive-thru window was Wendy's. May seem obvious now, but back then it was huge that you could get your food in less then 10 minutes.

Who knows how long we wouldn't have the drive-thru had McD's stifled all the Wendy's and Burger Kings out there from making their own innovations.

Re:Fast Food ...

[Anonymous Coward]

May seem obvious now, but back then it was huge that you could get your food in less then 10 minutes.

Thankfully I can now get my 1400 calorie cheeseburgers without even taking the effort to haul my fat ass out of the car these days. Woohoo! Way to go Wendys. I'll take a biggie size triple cheeseburger and fries please!

Re:Fast Food ...

[red floyd]

I thought it was Jack-in-the-Box?

Re:Fast Food ...

[Lelon]

-1, wrong.

Wendy's wasn't even remotely close to being the first drive-thru restauraunt. Sorry.

Patenting ideas as business methods

[Alomex]

The biggest problem is that business patents essentially open up patenting ideas, which you are not supposed to be able to. Over a hundred years ago, you actually needed to build one of your gadgets and bring it to the patent office to be able to patent it. This became unpractical and the USPTO allowed diagrams instead. But now I can walk up to the patent office and patent the idea of using computers for selling sex services over the internet and it would get a green light as a 'business method' patent.

In reality the hard part of selling sex over the net is coming up with the actual mechanical interface (ick!). That is what is worthy of patent protection.

Ditto for one-click purchase. This is trivial. What is not trivial is coming and should be patentable is a specific method for tracking state using a cookie with enough security features to make it fool proof.

Ridiculous

[geekmetal]

Those were the days. Now the first thing someone with a good notion does is press the government to protect it. Priceline patented its reverse-auction method for selling cut-rate airline tickets. I.B.M. patented a method for keeping track of people waiting in line for the bathroom. Last month, Netflix, a company that runs an online DVD-rental subscription service, got a patent covering, among other things, the way its customers request titles and the way it sends out DVDs. And eBay is now in court appealing a verdict that it infringed on a Virginia man's patent. The crime? Selling auctioned items at a fixed price. What gall.

A few years back a company in the US tried to patent the medical use of turmeric, which is prevalent in India.
The mind is boggled by the complication brought in by the patents on simple and prevelant ideas, is it not possible that two people can think of a simple idea at the same time and it certainly is preposterous to claim an existing an idea. The patenting process surely should be limited to ideas and products which have been through a considerable research process, just a thought.

Re:Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

As need arises innovation is encouraged. Globally, similar problems can occur within nano seconds and with "simple is best" methodology the likelyhood of a solution being created is very high.

Superficial patents are a huge problem.

the individual inventor is purely apocryphal

[abe ferlman]

There are no individual inventors tinkering in their garages without corporate sponsorship anymore, except maybe Dean Kamen.

The vast majority of patents are held by coroporations. The inventions of individual inventors are owned by corporations because of an employment agreement or are sold to a corporation for a pittance for fear that the corporation will win any legal battle owing to their superior financial resources, regardless of the merit of their claims.

Individual inventors already are out of business. Make patents non-transferrable and make ip agreements that assign ownership invention to corporations illegal and they'll be back in business.

Re:the individual inventor is purely apocryphal

[zabieru]

I don't know about that. I think they just sell the patent to a corporation, rather than trying to produce it themselves. Judging by the number of ads for legal services targetted at inventors I used to see in Popular Science, they're still out there.

Re:the individual inventor is purely apocryphal

[Jerf]

The vast majority of patents are held by coroporations. The inventions of individual inventors are owned by corporations because of an employment agreement or are sold to a corporation for a pittance for fear that the corporation will win any legal battle owing to their superior financial resources, regardless of the merit of their claims.

There's an important lesson here that I wish all Slashbots would learn: Anything you give to the little guy is also given to corporations.

You think you can just "give" patents to the little guy and suddenly he can compete? Nope, a big corporation still has thousands of man hours vs. the little guy. You can't give the little guy anything that isn't multiplied by thousands in the hands of a large corporation.

The only way to give the little guy even a fighting chance is to take things away, or protect things for everybody. In this context, "taking things away" means no software patents for anyone, and ....

Make patents non-transferrable and make ip agreements that assign ownership invention to corporations illegal and they'll be back in business.

is an instance of protecting everybody equally, because the non-transferability means that corporations can't get an advantage. (Although you'll find a difficult way to make this stick and I'm not proposing it as a good idea; personally I go more for no software patents at all.)

Similar arguments arise in other domains, but they would not be on topic. It's a general principle, though.

Re:the individual inventor is purely apocryphal

[Java Pimp]

There are no individual inventors tinkering in their garages without corporate sponsorship anymore, except maybe Dean Kamen.

I thought we all did that. Except we skip the part about making money from our invention and instead, protect it from corporate abuse with the GPL... at least on the software side of things :)

The vast majority of patents are held by coroporations. The inventions of individual inventors are owned by corporations because of an employment agreement

Unfortunately, this is very true. People (I'm guilty as well) forget that you don't "have" to sign that contract with your employer. You can negotiate, and if they want you bad enough, you can get whatever you like put in or taken out of that contract.

or are sold to a corporation for a pittance for fear that the corporation will win any legal battle owing to their superior financial resources, regardless of the merit of their claims.

True and justified fear that IMHO stems from the lack of technical expertise in the USPTO and Justice system.

Individual inventors already are out of business. Make patents non-transferrable and make ip agreements that assign ownership invention to corporations illegal and they'll be back in business.

I wouldn't say make that illegal. Just watch what you sign. Don't sign away your IP before you even invent it. Perhaps there should be some sort of prenuptual agreement made with your employer before you take a job. :-)

Re:the individual inventor is purely apocryphal

[miles_thatsme]

"Make patents non-transferable and make IP agreements that assign ownership invention to corporations illegal"... nice idea, but I hate to point out the "P" in your "IP" stands for "property". Intellectual property is nothing other than a legal fiction that grants the ability to dispose of an intangible in the same manner as rights associated with things.

Bit like saying we need aircraft regulations that prevent planes from leaving the ground.

Common law copyright regimes have a strange beast called "moral rights" in a work, but even those do not go nearly as far as you're proposing...

Re:the individual inventor is purely apocryphal

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, only a large corporation with hundreds of millions of dollars in backing could think of the idea of, "renting DVD's via internet."

Re:the individual inventor is purely apocryphal

[profaneone]

There are no individual inventors tinkering in their garages without corporate sponsorship anymore, except maybe Dean Kamen

Dean Kamen is rich because he owns a few patents himself...like the one that allowed dialysis machines to be shrunk to suitcase size from minicomputer size or one that allows helicopters to fly with less turbulence. :)

Re:the individual inventor is purely apocryphal

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, Dean Kamen has a huge R&D staff at his disposal.

slavery/intellectual property

[Thinkit3]

How funny the similarities are. DMCA=helping possible runaways. One involves owning a sentient being, the other owning an idea. Both highly illogical. And then there's the compromisers. No more slave imports! Lower copyright length! And both apparently will require an amendment to the constitution.

then... VOTE

[*weasel]

call your representatives, amass a constituency who is educated on the issue and bring it up. VOTE out people who aren't responsive and VOTE in people who are.

heck, run for office and get the thing on the agenda.

you can't complain about litigation if you don't get involved in the process.

odds are a staggering percentage of people who read /. don't even vote. i mean, what's great vote turnout anymore? 40%?

(those who participate are exempted from my rant).

Re:then... VOTE

[CrackHappy]

You have a good point. If you don't like the system, find a way to change it. That takes active participation. Bitching about the political system in an online forum does NOTHING to change it. Getting off your lazy ass and getting down to the voting booth, or working for a political party takes guts, but it gets YOUR agenda taken into account.

Regardless of what I think of the people running for office, I STILL VOTE, even if it's for NONE OF THE ABOVE.

Re:then... VOTE

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry buddy, but now that:
(a) Touchscreen voting is coming, and
(b) In a fair election, Gore would be president.
*It really no longer matters.*
Just submit to your overlord dictators. It will be a lot less painful that way.

Re:then... VOTE

[Bull999999]

Most people won't do it because it's easier to bitch about it and hope that someone else do it for them.

I did volunteer work for a state rep when I was majoring in CS. The state rep would ask me about technology related issues and I had great influence on how he votes on technology related issues/bills. He also took me to technology related meetings and conferences and I was able to better understand how things worked in government.

There are plenty of people on /. who gripe about how government is crooked, and how more things need to be done to help the poor, yet most of them will spend their time and money on gaming, drinking, smoking pot, etc than volunteering or donating.

Re:then... VOTE

[Fjord]

i'm exempt from voting because I'm not a citizen, but I do have to ask the question: who do you vote for? What party or even candiate is against business process patents. This stuff just isn't talked about in primaries and debates.

And even if there were a candiate that does opposed business proces patents, what do you do if their other issues conflict with your ideas.

I personally thing low voter turnout is because the two main candiates are so close that it doesn't matter, and no candiate bats 100% on agreeable opinions.

Re:then... VOTE

[realdpk]

Yes, you're right. I'm going to go out RIGHT NOW and vote against business process patents. Yes, because we're a democracy after all!!

Wait a sec, we're not?

You mean we can't vote against business process patents?

Someone on /. grossly oversimplified the solution to the "business process patent" problem?

Say it isn't so!

Re:then... VOTE

[SeattleGameboy]

There is a very simple way to do this TODAY! Create a Website where anyone (registered voters) who is interested in this issue can pledge their votes to any candidate who public declares support for it. Once we create a simple, direct position statement (i.e. Business Method Patents should be abolished), we can start collecting signatures. If we can gain enough signatures (~100k), we can go to presidential candidates and ask for their positions on this issue. Any candidate whose position is closest to the position statement would get the votes of the group. Collecting ~100k signature would not be that hard if someone like /. would get behind it!!!

Bent -- not wrong.

[cait56]

The article clearly points out that the problem is in patenting business procedures, rather than true inventions.

If you review the history, there were two changes in the recent interpretation of patent law.

• A presumption was created that an invention was innovative, and that it was almost up to the examiner to prove that it was not. Before the 80s patents were rejected on the sole grounds that while the applicant may have been the first to develop the technique, anybody researching such a product would have done the same thing. We need to get back to that interpretation.
• Software patents were allowed. More precisely the artificial preference for solutions realized in hardware was removed.

The problems are related to granting patents for things that are a) not specific solutions, merely statement of problems, and b) obvious.

So I believe we need to restore the orignal presumption that a proposed patent is not sufficiently innovative. The other thing that has changed since when the patent system was mostly considered to be working is that the world has sped up. A 17 year period may have made sense in the 19th century, it is way too long for the 21st.

But none of those are arguments against the inherent ideas of patents. Citing the current abuses of the patent system as an arguments against patents in general is like citing Windows 95 as an argument against having an OS.

Re:Bent -- not wrong.

[SquarePants]

As a patent lawyer, I have absolutely no idea what you mean by:

Before the 80s patents were rejected on the sole grounds that while the applicant may have been the first to develop the technique, anybody researching such a product would have done the same thing. We need to get back to that interpretation.

You are referring to the non-obviousness reqiurement which is alive and kicking. By far, the overwhelming majority of rejections I see on patent applications are on the basis of obviouness. What "history" are you talking about which has done away with the requirement that an invention be non-obvious in order to be patentable?

BTW, I thought the article was excellent and agree with many points made by the author

Re:Bent -- not wrong.

[cait56]

I'm mostly going on what various patent lawyers had told me on the need to beef up claims, based on the theory and actual wording of patent laws. I can recall them citing some patents that the company had rejected in the 70s that would have clearly been accepted currently.

Most importantly, I can read the patents that are issued. None of them would pass the criteria I was given on what he had to establish in order to file a patent. Alacritech, for example was granted a claim that would seem to apply to any method of placing a TCP engine on a co-processor card. Now Alacritech has indeed come up with innovative specific methods for doing this, but the *desirability* of doing this was painfully obvious to anyone.

Anyone can see that a car that got 500 MPG would be neet. And you should be able to patent your solution for doing so. But all too many of these patents include a first claim to the effect of "A method by which an automative vehicle is equipped to obtain milage in excess of 500 miles per gallon."

Re:Bent -- not wrong.

[SquarePants]

Then the problem is not that the laws have changed (they haven't) but rather that the quality of examinations has (which is absolutely the case). The problem is that the government has no incentive to improve the quality of patents and therefore has neglected the Patent Office fiancially. This, coupled with the sudden explosion of filings in areas where experienced examiners are hard to find, has put us on the disaster course we are now.

Re:Bent -- not wrong.

[cait56]

Agreed. It's the implementation of the patent process that is flawed. Not the concept, or even necessarily the laws as currently written.

ban patents?

[Thinkit3]

I'm one of the few saying to ban patents/copyrights. Hmm, maybe people think I patented the idea to ban patents. Or copyrighted the words "abolish copyright" (c).

No Easy Answers

[rward]

Congress is where the change has to come from because our court system normally avoids deciding cases based on broad public policy concerns where narrower issues can decide matters. Also, the Court of Appeals defers to their precendents and is rarely inclined to overturn them.

Unfortunately, the patent system is based more on who gets there first with an application for an idea rather than who invents first - although that still is an important factor. As a result, while a method idea may be applicable in many different areas, i.e. algorithms can be used to model financial transactions as well as used in code, he who files first wins. And applications are filed with claims designed to provide as broad protection as possible.

Patent applications are published after 18 months from the filing date or on the date they are granted, whichever comes first. With a publication before the grant, a party can file an interference with the PTO but they have to KNOW about the filing. Most small concerns do not have time or the money to do this.

Furthermore, with the way that Congress has extended the terms for copyrights in the last 10 or 15 years something tells me that enacting such legislation would be an uphill fight.

Alas, if you have what you believe is a novel method or process, write it down, date it, have it notarized, and protect it as soon as you can.

MOD PARENT UP!

[intermodal]

insightful, informative, interesting, anything!

The End of File Sharing

[Nom du Keyboard]

And if someone had managed to patent connecting two computers together over the internet to exchange data, would that have been considered a good idea?

Or how about the idea of digitally compressing music using a computer program to result in much smaller file sizes with minimal loss of quality, and then refused to license the patent for use. (Note: Macrovision has done something similiar when they patented all the ways they could think of to beat their system, and refuse to permit their use.)

I believe no one should be allowed to patent something in order to prevent its use. Compulsary licensing under fair terms should be enforced, or we all will be worse -- not better -- off from this system intended to foster inovation.

Re:The End of File Sharing

[Anonymous Coward]

You've hit the nail on the head. Patents should not be administered by the patent holder. They should all be available for non-discriminatory and compulsory licensing. The patent holder still benefits by recieving the proceeds but we all benefit because no "invention" can have its use prevented.

Re:The End of File Sharing

[Xeth]

Compulsary licensing under fair terms should be enforced

The problem with that is who decides what fair terms are. The judiciary? I'm certainly not in favor of increasing their already-abused power.

No Empty Comments? You must be new here

[Trigun]

Alright then: Frist Psot !

[mechant_evil]

Frist Psot, Patent pending, 2003, All rights reserved

I'm sure i'm gonna be able to fool a bunch of customers with something similar to First Post.

Re:Maybe this is way [they weren't patented before

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that the main idea is being missed.

The idea is that Patents are being used to destroy the advancement of technology. Many of the patents that are being created now are not perserving a specific business product, but are protecting methods of use.

I am all for a patent on your new widget, or your new super code, but what should not be protected is your idea on getting an old widget to market, or a patent on a method of producing an old widget.

If you are allowed to create a patent for the production of clocks by winding them with 4 key turn to the left, you are stiffling competition. There is not reason for such a patent, as there is no reason to patenting the number of clicks to reach the checkout section of the shopping cart.

If you come up with a new clock, or a new shopping cart, by all means pattent the clock and pattent the shopping cart, but don't patent a method used in the production or the delivery.

It is the patents in the production and the delivery that are stifling competition, not those the patent a product.

Persuasive? We'll see...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Makes the argument persuasively"

Sure, since you almost certainly already believed that business process patents were bad, it was persuasive to you. The real test will be if it convinces anyone who currently does not think that way. Then it can be correctly described as persuasive.

Re:an elegant solution - NOT

[Nom du Keyboard]

The total lack of patents would put the indivual inventor out of business, because he/she would never be able to compete with large corporations.

How many individual inventors actually produce their products? Most sell out to those large corprorations at the first good opportunity.

And this is not necessarily bad. Consider a small inventor with something wonderful. A big corporation is much more situated to mass produce such items and get them into your hands faster. You could have to wait years otherwise.

Why torn?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US we have had and successfully applied anti-trust laws for over 100 years. When enforced, they prevent large companies from owning an industry. The arguable effect of their application has been to encourage competition by allowing everyone except the biggest guys to complete.

What we have introduce with process patents however, is the effect that no one will compete. Only one company will own the idea. Many rational people are failing to see the good in this.

Re:Why torn?

[tbase]

NetFlix is a good example again - they're not trying to control an industry (movie rentals), only a very specific method and niche in that industry. Ok, they'd love to control the industry, but you see my point. This is why I'm torn - you make a good point, but shouldn't they get at least a couple years of profit, instead of just developing the idea and proving it works, only to have it taken over by Wal-Mart before they make a dime? Look at mini-dish satellite TV service. They were protected from competition for a few years because they made the investment in launching the satellite.

Re:Why torn?

[Bagheera]

Only one company will own the idea. Many rational people are failing to see the good in this.

Would you please elaborate? What good is there in a system that allows only one company (person, corporation, etc.) to do business in a certain way? I consider myself rational and yes, I fail to see the good in it. Some expansion would be appreciated.

Anti-trust laws aren't there to keep the biggest guys from competing. They are there to keep the biggest guys from becoming a monopoly and ending all competition. You say yourself they've been used successfully to keep one company from owning an industry and, with the possible exception of Microsoft who's blatantly flaunted the rulings against it, the anti-trust laws work.

The original poster commented about the "Business model being the business." If that's the case, they don't have much of a business. Imagine where we'd be if somone had patented the "business model" of selling computers. Or providing dialup service to the internet. Those are both business models, not technologies - and patenting them would have been horrible for consumers and competition.

Patents were intended to protect not ideas, but inventions. You patent "The spring loaded mouse whacker." NOT the "idea" of trapping mice.

Re:Why torn?

[RedHat Rocky]

Why do you presume that Netflix DESERVES protection?
Seems to me they have to EARN their survival. You think Walmart can pull off the same level of service as Netflix? Have you been in a Walmart checkout lane recently?

Netflix deserves nothing, they've already earned a bunch by being first and can continue by doing it right.

Case Law and Congress's answer

[Dan Berlin]

Cert. was denied in State Street Bank in 1999.
That's why it's still good law.
The Supreme Court has smacked down CAFC on quite a few occasions when they produce completely strange opinions.
This happens because CAFC seems to have a bunch of judges who think patents are god's gift, and that everything should be patentable under the sun, and a bunch of judges who think that patents should be strictly limited and enforced.
I find myself agreeing with about half the decisions, and vehemently hating the other half.

In this case, however, you are correct, and the Supreme Court thought Congress should do something about it.

Which they did.
They passed the "Intellectual Property and Communications Omnibus Reform Act of 1999".

It contains the so-called "First Inventor Defense." This defense provides a first inventor (or "prior user") with a complete defense in patent infringement lawsuits, whenever an inventor of a business method (or prior user) uses the invention but does not patent it.

Getting rid of lawyers really fosters business

[Trigun]

Especially if you're in the bullet manufacturing business, or you make rope for a living.

Morticians should also benefit, as well as grave-diggers. It's the trickle-down effect.

No contradiction here

[Rares Marian]

DEF NewEconomy Control-- (less control)

Communism capitalism fascism - all the same thing. Fascism is the union of the two preceeding.
How is protecting the first guy laisez faire (leave it alone)? Protecting the first guy means interfering with everyone else.

MP3: Profits were not eroded. Plenty of research sucpports this. Control was eroded. RIAA claimed profits because they didn't want to admit loss of control.

Patents: New control. Therefore they are against the NewEconomy.

Re:Bent -- too bent to fix.

[Anonymous Coward]

The other change that has broken the system was dropping the requirement for a working model. Without the working model requirement, it's too easy to attempt to patent inventions that aren't clearly thought out or clearly described. That opens the door to the submarine patent problem that Lemulson exploited so profitably.

Sure, an ideal patent system works very well, and a thousand flowers of innovation bloom. But that isn't what we have, not any more. People used to think an ideal communist system would work well, too -- but the real-world examples we had (and have) to live with were (are) pretty awful. We should throw out the current patent system, it has gotten as rotten as an old communist regime. We're never going to restore the 'ideal' system that used to exist; there are too many moneyed interests that like the power the current system gives them.

Pipe Dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

My huble opinions is that patent rules should be black and white. As soon as you allow for the gray regions, as you propose, inevitably you'll have some shmuck one day twisting words/ideas around to suite his/her argument(s) and you end up where we are today--a circus!! The least complicated rule is to allow all patents or none.

Implementing vs. Owning

[Anonymous Coward]

The product, method, or buisiness plan is only the beginning. I feel like the patent process almost makes this the goal. There are a slew of other things that need to happen to implement a product/method/plan and make it successful. If you create something unique, great. Now do something with it. Owners shouldn't be the only ones who are able to do/make it if they suck at doing/making it.

The argument against software patents

[heironymouscoward]

(Sumamrized from a lecture by Richard M. Stallman).

The argument against software patents is made on three grounds:

1. the products of the software industry are so large and complex (because of the lack of physical constraints) that the scale of 'invention' is hundreds times greater than in the physical world.

2. patents are expensive (10k Euro in Europe) and rarely can small businesses or individuals afford to aquire them.

3. even when people overcome point 2, they find that the large patent portfolios of large companies render their patents useless.

Conclusion: large companies purchase patents in order to protect not their inventions, but their competitive advantage. Since innovation comes from smaller teams, patents thus work against innovation.

Software patents exaggerate what is a manageable problem with physical patents, and turn it into a serious problem for smaller designers. Basically patents allow large businesses to collaborate with burocracy to create barriers against the entrance of smaller groups.

This is bad, corrupt, and economically stupid.

End of argument.

I get it now

[Anonymous Coward]

Patent Number #1,422,432
Granted to Bill Gates.

1. Apparatus and method of monopoly business practices in the software industry...

Please read my q: how can i make my rep read this?

[Anonymous Coward]

how can i get my local representative (senator, representative, whoever) to read this and make him know that the article also expresses how i feel? what can i do to make the government know that i agree with the article?

Software on drugs...

[vbprisoner]

I'm not saying this is a good idea...

How's about using a Pharmaceutical model in the sotware, where a 'patent' lasts 2 or 5 years? After that it's a free for all.

Benefits:
Fast moving/imaginative developers get to protect their code for a while at least.
Long term benefit for public good.

Not-so-Beneficial:
More opportunities for the pigs to take over (see 'Pharmaceutical model' above)

These patents will go before the Supreme Court...

[alispguru]

... right after someone patents a legal procedure as a business method. As it is right now, lawyers have a vested interest in more stuff being patentable - more patents means more searches, more filing fees, and more lawsuits, hence more money for lawyers.

When lawyers have to have their documents scanned for patent violations before filing them, they'll begin to get a taste of what the rest of us have to put up with, and maybe they'll work to prune it back a bit.

I would like to patent...

[jitenpai]

... the way I turn on the light using my finger at specific angle on the switch.

Whoohoo I'm rich... why is it so dark in here?

FYI History of Patents

[Anonymous Coward]

The first written evidence of a patent was probably around Aristotle's time (Aristotle's Politics). Here, Hippodamus calls for a system that rewards people who discover useful things for the STATE (whic Aristotle condemns, saying that law should not change so quickly). Honor the creator of a useful thing and we will recieve more usefull things.

The first "real" patent system probably came about in Venice in the 1400's for corn mill designs, and to Brunelleschi for a marble transportation barge.

The Venetian law reduces to writing the basics of the modern patent law:

1. Devices
2. Registered with and agency
3. new and useful
4. not previously made
5. reduced to perfection
6. 10 year term

However, it did give Venetian rebublic the rights to use any invention without paying the inventor.

Flint Knapping

[jafac]

If someone had patented the process of Flint Knapping, we, as a species, would never have made it INTO the Stone Age. Let alone, to the Information Age. It's all about the Information - and if it remains free, we progress. If it's contained, we, as a species are contained.

Re:Flint Knapping

[the eric conspiracy]

If someone had patented the process of Flint Knapping, we, as a species, would never have made it INTO the Stone Age.

Interersting theory, but I don't buy it. Patents have publication requirements and a limited lifetime. After 20 years any old caveman could have gone down to the patent office and looked up the best method of Flint Knapping, saving him the time and money to develop his own technique. Betcha this would have accelerated the adoption of stone tools.

Re:Flint Knapping

[jafac]

No, because the guy who had the patent would've cloven his skull with a flint axe.

Business methods <> new technology

[Atario]

Now technology has struck again--people are inventing new ways to make money.

How is a business method a new technology? Come to that, how is any algorithm a new technology?

In fact, lawmakers have proposed bills that would make things even worse, such as allowing sports "techniques" to be patented. Imagine pitchers paying a royalty every time they threw a forkball.

If an algorithm is patentable, then the forkball, logically, must be patentable, as must every conceivable dance, as must every way of playing a musical instrument, as must hanging toilet paper overhanded, as must touch-typing, as must anything you or anyone else ever does.

whiny littly communists. "It's too hard to make money when the other guy has a shiny new business model. Mommy, make him share!" Bah.

Ah, a troll. Never mind. For a second, I thought you actually believed what you were saying.

Basic Problem

[Jerf]

I think the basic problem is the patent system is not designed to handle software or business method patents. It was set up from day one to handle physical objects and processes, and it does that tolerably well. It's possible to look at two processes or objects and make a reasonable determination whether they are the same. The equivalent is not really possible for software or business method patents.

Remember one of the purposes of patents was not to lock up entire ideas, but lock up one implementation, encouraging others to create other implementations to stimulate market competition. Since the patent system is fundamentally unsound in this domain, and has no reasonable way to determine if two things are the same, the patent system has "defaulted" to the broadest possible interpretation of "same" (as opposed to the narrowest possible, in which case it would be virtually impossible to violate a patent, patents would be nearly worthless, and by extension, the Patent Office would be nearly worthless and powerless, which is the Number One Anathema to a beauracracy). As a result it's not possible to create alternate implementations without automatically infringing.

Patents do not belong in this domain, they are downright oxymoronic.

Re:Basic Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the basic problem is the patent system is not designed to handle software patents.

BS, It was set up to handle significant technology innovation.

Significant innovation can be achieved in the form of software, hardware, software/hardware , etc.

The form of the innovation is irrelevant in because the system is set up to increase the acceptable risk that will be undertaken in order to achieve this innovation. (An economy based upon innovative industries can compete on a worldwide basis, otherwise not).

Thus in concept investment in greater software innovation should occur from awarding of software patents.

This concept would work well if the PTO could learn to reject trash software patents (based upon trivial coding techniques).

It was set up from day one to handle physical objects and processes, and it does that tolerably well.

It does that more than tolerably well, what is the alternative? An economy based a lesser amount of investment in innovation where the emphasis is placed upon more efficient existing internal processes (more akin to trade secret related innovation) instead of true "new idea" innovation.

It's possible to look at two processes or objects and make a reasonable determination whether they are the same. The equivalent is not really possible for software or business method patents.

Tell that to the folks that attempt to reverse engineer silicon for infringement analysis purposes.

Remember one of the purposes of patents was not to lock up entire ideas, but lock up one implementation,

Also BS. Pioneer patents can, by their nature, claim a broad swath of subject matter. This is part of the risk/reward element of the innovation spectrum. You risk a lot to achieve a truly notable technological advance, then you get to claim a lot.

SW patent policy should be directed at encouraging true, "notable" innovation, not protecting companies that are the first to apply for a clever javascript lookup list. Get rid of the trash SW patents and in doing so legitimize the remainder that are the result of true investment in R&D.

"First Strike" patents

[PhantomHarlock]

n addition to what's in the article, I have my own observation: the default action now for companies is to run out and get a business method patent - not because they believe it will make them money, but to prevent others from getting the same frivolous patent and suing them. It's become necessary as a means of survival under the current interpretation of the laws. My guess is that's why netflix.com got their patent on DVD rentals. They saw what was happening to Ebay, etc, and didn't want to get buried under that kind of litigation. Pretty sad. I think the law is broken and that ruling needs to be overturned or superceded.

Hab

[CausticWindow]

Thank god it's a non technical article, since you're posting it to Slashdot.

Steam not a good example for you

[Anonymous Coward]

The first steam engines were patented, from there you get internal combustion.


There is evidence that vigorous enforcement of steam engine patents actually delayed the industrial revolution by at least 15 years. Practical Combustion engines came on the scene over 100 years later. Would inovation have moved more slowly if steam engines had not been patented?

Re:an elegant solution [US Constitution]

[Anonymous Coward]

To answer whether the constitution needs to be amended:
In a supreme court decision (covered here), the Congress sets the time
for the length of patents. If the Supreme court declares
there must be a patent decision, Congress could set the length
of patents to one day. In essence, this would kill any
advantage to patents.

It's about ideas, not software

[anagama]

There are lots of comments about software patents, but that is really a seperate issue. The issue here is with patenting "ideas". Imagine you want to create a service that uses Apache and MySQL to serve some sort of content based on user form input. I'll bet you a quarter you'll find patents describing this process, granted to people who had nothing to do with either software program. Could it be more insane to grant a patent to someone who describes a way to use software? We're not talking about the developer, we're talking about using the software - in essence, these patent whores inhibit the adoption of existing works that they did not create. That's BS.

And say all you want about prior art invalidating the patent. That's only valid if the small-business person can afford the fight.

Re:It's about ideas, not software

[Tablizer]

The issue here is with patenting "ideas".

I don't think "ideas" is the right word. It is more that they are now allowing the patenting of *goals*, where before only specific solutions were allowed.

Decades?

[jmkaza]

and (c) keeping their website fast, responsive and easy to use. This is how businesses have remained ahead of their imitators for decades

There's a joke in there somewhere, I'm just not funny enough to figure it out.

Re:Decades?

[Kintanon]

What? You don't remember logging on to the corner drugstore in 1965 to order a milkshake delivered right to your door?

You must have been living out in the boonies somewhere!

Kintanon

Patent Please!

[stewwy]

I'd like to patent the idea/process that all business models should make a profit, now can everone please send me my royalties. and Microsoft your royalties will be 99.9 %

patent apple pie

[Gandalf1957]

A perfect illustration - Apple Pie is British and the US didn't have apples until the Pilgrim Fathers brought seeds over ! How happy would you be if the British did a SCO over Apple Pie ?

Bandy philosophical arguments around until doomsday but the truth is it's been leaped upon as yet another tool in the arsenal of weapons for making money whilst doing as little as possible. Either in the "lets establish a monopoly so we can grossly overcharge" category or worse still in the "why work at all when you can sue" category.

How can anyone trying to retroactively apply any kind of property rights be ensuring they reap fair rewards before the rest catch up ?

Hey my dick hangs to the left - think I'll patent it, retire to the Bahamas and leave the rest to the lawyers !

Re:Patenting parenthesis

[tomhudson]

Your sig contains a coding error (if you thought that it shouldn't return zero):

Arithmetic according to C: float x = 3.14159; float y = 1/2 * x; Value of y? zero.

The result of (1/2) is zero (since they're both integers, the result is an integer. 0.5 becomes 0).

You might want to try this instead:

#include
int main() {

float x, y;

x=3.14159;

y=((float)(1))/2*x; /* makes sure that 1/2 returns 0.5 */

printf("y=%1.20f\n", y);

return 0L;

}
The result is 1.57079505920410156250, not zero.

So now I'm going to patent the process of proper use of parenthesis :-)

Not until laws are patented?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, look in the slashdot archives and you will find patented laws. Search for building codes.

Patents need implementation sunsets

[swb]

Patents should have an implementation sunset built into them that requires the idea to show substantial implementation within, say, 5 years, or the patent becomes invalid and the idea part of the public domain. With substantial implementation, the sunset period would be the normal period of expiration.

It would allow inventors and businesses time to sell or implement their big ideas, but more importantly it would prevent "defensive" patents (those ideas patented but never implemented or licensed) as well as substantially hindering if not eliminating "sneak attack" patents where people come back years later and demand royalties from coincidental ideas.

Some people I've discussed this thinks it overly hinders the small inventor, since they're much less likely to be able to implement complex ideas, but I think that drawback is outweighed by the need to keep the patent system focused on productive ideas brought to market rather than hindrances to competition.

Time to learn from history

[jbn-o]

Don't forget that without strong intellectual property laws, the GPL would not exist, and it would be in nobody's interest to share code or ideas for fear that they would get stolen.

The GNU General Public License depends on copyright law, not "intellectual property" laws (whatever those are). Intellectual property consists of not one cohesive set of laws but a diverse and sometimes conflicting set of disparate laws that cannot be properly understood if you refer to them as a whole.

As for being in nobody's interest to share--before the GNU Project existed virtually everyone shared code and ideas freely. Richard Stallman talked about this community (which he was a part of) because it highlights the jarring change that drove him to start the GNU Project. You should listen to his talks on the subject.

Software patents (as they have come to be known) were unnecessary for most of the time people have been writing computer software. Thus we can show by existence that people do not need these patents in the field of software to innovate. I don't know about other fields of endeavor, but in computer software they are generally unwanted and they actually serve to retard innovation.

Games!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what the gaming industry would be like if Id software patented fps, or blizzard developed the ui and math game of warcraft.

The present patent environment wasn't around when these companies made their games. It's be interesting if a judge would hear the case.

Stop software patents, copyright is just fine.

[jbn-o]

Fast moving/imaginative developers get to protect their code for a while at least.

First, I would need to see why this is necessary at all. I understand businesses and some individuals desire it and are now getting used to having software patents, but history shows most of the history of computer software development went along without these patents (or without them being exploited, depending on the timeframe). To me that says we don't really need them. Also, there are instances of organizations not being able to provide computer users with a lively competitive arena for computer software (including through cross-licensing which kills the competition-exclusion nature of patents). To me this says they are not victimless.

I want to encourage a lot of individuals, organizations, and small businesses to make and distribute software. And I want them to be able to compete with larger firms like IBM, HP, and Microsoft (each holds a lot of patents and licenses to deal in other patents). So I favor completely ceasing issuing or renewing any more software patents and letting all current ones expire (I'm not aware of any being renewed, but I wouldn't want to let any organization think they can continue to keep old software patents in force). Thus businesses will be minimally disrupted for the software patents they've acquired, and the field of software development can return to the time where there was fierce competition on features.

Furthermore, I think it's fine to depend on copyright law (with a reasonable term of copyright, but that's a different discussion).

Re:Stop software patents, copyright is just fine.

[the eric conspiracy]

And I want them to be able to compete with larger firms like IBM, HP, and Microsoft (each holds a lot of patents and licenses to deal in other patents).

How do you reconclie this theory in light of how Microsoft drove Stacker out of business?

Re:Stop software patents, copyright is just fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

MS bought stacker after Stacker won its patent infringement case and MS appealed. MS then settled with stacker for 80 mil in cash and stock before the appeals court opined on the case.

SO..

how to reconcile that you keep posting this BS in light of being previously corrected on it?

Re:Stop software patents, copyright is just fine.

[the eric conspiracy]

how to reconcile that you keep posting this BS in light of being previously corrected on it?

And exactly what would have happened to Stacker if they did not have a software patent? Microsoft would have driven them out of business without Stacker having any redress whatsoever.

The fact is that patents protect small companies just as well as they do large companies. The idea that only industrial giants benefit from patent rights is baloney.

Issue is too complex for voters

[swb]

This issue is too complex for voters to get excited about -- it doesn't have the sex appeal that killing Muslims, cutting taxes or health care have.

Furthermore, the current legislative processes are too dominated by corporate interests with a stake in maintaining the status quo on intellectual property. Even if people were generally excited about it, it's far too easy for corporate lobbyists and their lackeys in congress to kill any meaningful patent reform.

The best hope it might have would be to align it with a sexy issue (prescription drugs?) that had broad support, and convince people that patent reform would result in the sexy issue getting fixed as well. It's important, though, that the issues remain closely coupled so that you can't derail the reform by "fixing" the more well-understood popular side of the issue. Even then, you still face the gauntlet of lobbyists and special interests bent on keeping things as they are.

Re:*swish* right over the head (+5 Interesting)

[Mod Me God Too]

Does Mao wind you up like his bitch?

the karma danger

[Thinkit3]

I'm one of the few that argues against patents/copyrights. Look, it was modded down and all the arguments for continuing the patent system (in a non-elegant half-ass kinda way) are modded up. The best argument I can give is a philisophical one. Any idea can be independently discovered, so nobody can own an idea. Now that's the exact same argument against copyright.

Don't like 'em

[the eric conspiracy]

Basically I don't like the idea of business process patents. The patent system was devised in order to promote the advancement of technologies; this seems to be a poor fit to the fundamental idea and is bound to damage the patent system by dragging it into inappropriate applications.

On the other hand I could see a big advantage to the concept of a business process patent - the end of the management fad. If companies patent their processes we won't have pointy-haired bosses coming back from hunting trips with their peers full of jackass ideas based on copying what the other company is doing (neglecting that the other company is totally different). I think that maybe the world would be a much better place if this turns out to be the result of the business process patent. And this isn't as far-fetched as you might think - several years ago I heard a senior manager actually state that business processes spread so rapidly precisely because of the fact that they cannot be patented (which was true at the time).

Rapid desemination of GOOD ideas is a good thing. The question is how many of these business processes are actually good ideas and can stand the test of time in the marketplace before they are proven and deserve wide adoption?

Nothing has changed in 500 years

[Moderation abuser]

http://www.patent.gov.uk/patent/history/fivehundre d/tudors.htm

Netflix, Re:I'm torn

[phliar]

Look at NetFlix. Nobody (including them) could make a go of online rentals, until they came up with a new method.

You have very little faith in the market, apparently. Just because the entrants so far have been nincompoops doesn't mean we should help some schmoe with a feeble idea make megabucks. Ok, that's just hyperbole. What I'm getting at is: the Netflix idea is not one that's good enough to allow the "inventor" to compete with an established behemoth like Blockbuster. So? The "inventor" should go to Blockbuster and get hired, saying "look at this cool idea I had -- hire me and I'll think of more." Remember that being first to market is a huge incentive for any business. Any competitors will need months or years to tool up and start production; that's when you make a killing. Then later when all the competitors are up and running, you'll have to go back to competing with them. There's a built-in benefit; we don't need government intervention in something the market already handles.

This model does not apply to software, of course. You might say that it's because the "time to re-tool" advantage of being first to market is gone. No, in fact it's because software is just math made concrete, and math, like other "laws of nature," cannot be patented. (You can copyright your expression of the law or theorem, but not the law or theorem itself. No RSA patent, no LZW patent; no MP3 patent. No one can copy your code without your permission, but they can derive their own expressions of the law or theorem, i.e. write an MP3 encoder and a GIF reader.) Megabucks are only made by building a better widget, and/or by providing a service that other people want.

Re:Netflix, Re:I'm torn

[tbase]

What I'm getting at is: the Netflix idea is not one that's good enough to allow the "inventor" to compete with an established behemoth like Blockbuster. So? The "inventor" should go to Blockbuster and get hired, saying "look at this cool idea I had -- hire me and I'll think of more."

You can't be serious. The "inventor" should go get a job at Blockbuster for $50,000/year if he's lucky, and turn over his idea for the priviledge of an at-will emplyyment agreeement, meaning he can be fired at any time? You are aware that Netflix has been successful enough to raise over $80 million in their IPO? They're a publicly traded company. Sure, Blockbuster has 10x the customer base (last year's numbers, sorry), but look at their overhead. And I don't think they're renting online even now.

And Blockbuster wouldn't hire him anyhow - they'll just try to steal the idea like all the other uninspired, unoriginal followers.

Oh, and megabucks are also made with inside information, cooking the books, ripping off investors, or even once and a while by Cletus who can't afford shoes for his kids, but manages to come up with $40 a month than buy lotto tickets. Praise be.

Re:Netflix, Re:I'm torn

[phliar]

Yes, I'm serious. Yes, Blockbuster and others are evil bastards who will steal your idea rather than piss in your ear if your head was on fire (paraphrasing Jim Hightower). Life really sucks if Big Company Inc. wants to squash you, and patents will be no help to you, since they'll bury you with their own massive patent portfolio.

Making patents individually held may be a solution, but my view is that (in spite of a few heart-warming anecdotes) patents hurt the little guy.

Spouting Netflix IPO numbers is meaningless -- that just means some people with money (who may or may not be idiots) were willing to drive the stock price up for some lucky sods.

Yes, in fact some ideas are only worth an "at will" job paying $50,000 p.a. These are simple ideas that competent marketers and developers are expected to come up with. In fact, that is my job: I come up with a couple of these little ideas every year, and my employer pays me well. Yes, they can fire me at any time; but I can quit any time too. (Occasionally the lawyer comes by to try and convince me to file a patent for something; I refuse politely, claiming prior art and/or the "competent practitioner" clause.) Financially, it's a much better life than an independent inventor could reasonably hope for. On my own time I can be a true hacker: come up with half-brained ideas, some of which take shape in free software, others in little doohickeys to latch canopies in radio-controlled sailplanes.

Re:Netflix, Re:I'm torn

[tbase]

Actually, turns out the co-founders were doing pretty ok before Netflix. Particularly Marc Randolph, who founded or cofounded MacUser Magazine and Micro Warehouse, apparently. This would explain the difference between them and us - they had the $$$ and connections to actually take that simple idea and make it a reality. And the more I think about it, they really don't need their patent. They're doing a pretty good job from what I hear, and if they were idiots, it would be a shame to make the idea unavailable to someone who might make it a success.

I'm feeling less and less torn the more I debate with my fellow /.'ers. :-)

Re:Netflix, Re:I'm torn

[phliar]

They're doing a pretty good job from what I hear, and if they were idiots, it would be a shame to make the idea unavailable to someone who might make it a success.

I think that's an excellent characterization. Not that I'm a laissez-faire capitalist, but I do sympathise with that view, and I feel patents hurt the market (or society, depending on your beliefs) much more than they benefit it.

Software Patents

[Javagator]

The purpose of a patent is not to enrich individuals or corporations, but to allow them to recoup research and development costs. The classic example is a drug company that spends millions of dollars developing a pill that only costs pennies to produce. The drug company is given a legal monopoly for a period of time so that they can sell the pill with large profit margins to regain their investment. For a patent to serve its purpose, the following criteria need to be met:

1. The formula for the pill was not obvious to anyone.

2. The R&D effort was considerable.

3. Without the prospect of a patent, the drug company would not have developed the pill.

Software is altogether different. Software developers recoup their investment by selling their software. Being first to market is a huge competitive advantage. Copycat developers are still going to have to spend a comparable amount of time and money to produce a competing product. The software industry is going to thrive without patents. They are not necessary and only reduce competition.

Why?

[MickLinux]

You say that you should have time not to worry about being deluged with copycats. Can you say exactly why you think this? In the contrary position, let me point out:

(1) Copycats will still be copycats; people who aren't already tied to one of the copycaterers will tend to prefer your solution
(2) You will already have time not to worry about copycats: the development time that it takes the copycaterers to figure out your software.
(3) You already enjoy the fruits of your labor. If Microsoft, Oracle, and SCO are copycatering your work and your new sales are hurting, your obvious solution at that point is to sell out to one of them [that is, they get all your customers, but also have to work the merging of the two formats for the next version]. That way, you get your profit without further responsibility.
(4) If you think that there is some specific amount of time you should not have to worry about copycats, what exactly is that specific amount of time, and why exactly that amount? Why not a year more? Why not a year less?
(5) Patents are still not free market, and do damage the economy. They also most often make it difficult to enter the business, which keeps new jobs to a minimum.

Used to see,,,,, but ain't no more.

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging by the number of ads for legal services targetted at inventors I used to see in Popular Science

"Used to see" indeed. The individual inventor is a relic of the past. Done. Gone. Finito.

Even before the quashing by corporate Amerika, the individual inventor had been under assault by law enforcement for years. Buy any chemistry supplies or equipment and you are automatically guilty of making illegal drugs. Buy any electronic parts, and you are automatically guilty of being a spy or a bomb-making terrorist or both. Buy any metalworking equipment and you are automatically guilty of intent to manufacture illegal firearms.

Re:Used to see,,,,, but ain't no more.

[zabieru]

Could be, but if so this has happened in the last year or so, since I let my subscription lapse.

Re:an elegant solution [US Constitution]

[ichimunki]

The section of the Constitution you quoted begins "The Congress shall have Power..." This is not a command that Congress has to follow any more than their power "To declare War" requires them to constantly find a war to declare. Other than that, the common person thinks patents and copyrights are necessary. Indeed, they take on faith the same anti-free-market attitude the Founders took when they included that clause-- that without government regulation nothing would get written, invented, or whatever.

But that's a postulation that hasn't been proven. And without the proper balance of the public's right against the right of authors and inventors, what we seem to be seeing is actually an environment in which authoring and inventing are risky behaviors because of the possibility of infringement.

Already done

[MickLinux]

The quicksort is not the fastest. You want the heap sort (as described on www.nr.com), which at worst case gives you the Olog(N), and often does better.

There's another algorithm which does it as well --

Go through your cards by 2s, and compare and swap to put the low card on top. Then go through by 4s (1st 2 on the left, 2nd 2 on the right), compare top of left stack to top of right stack, and take low card. Again compare top of left to top of right, and take low card. If you use up a stack (left or right) stack remaining cards on bottom and continue.

Then go through by 8s, 16s, etc. Any leftovers just get stacked to the bottom.

This method, like the heap sort, has a worst case of Olog(n) compares, but is conceptually a tad easier, and you can test it out with a deck of cards.

I, too, really get into Olog(N) stuff. But I've found that the incremental value of this is minimal. If you want to publish it, I suggest doing it Don Lancaster style. Write some articles; once you have about 10 of them, get them published in a magazine, one per month, or maybe one every other month. Make it generate continuous income. Once you have 20 or so articles, republish them as a book, and so on.

Re:Already done

[Anonymous Coward]

If I recognize your description correctly, that's merge sort. It's also really great to use in tight memory conditions since you don't have to store the whole set in memory at any given time. In fact, from what I understand, it was the one mainly used for monster database sorting when RAM was about 4k and everything was written out to tape.

It also multithreads very well for a more modern usage since only the final merge has to take place in a single thread as all sets prior to that are independent.

If you do have an interest in sorting, take a look at shell sort (also called comb sort), it's not fast, but it has some interesting properties.

Jason

Outstanding

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. That's one for the record books. Execellent work. The quality of posts has really climbed here on /. what with K5 being down today and all. Whoo-hoo!

Now you've just gotta get a trollerizing question into an interview, and you'll be in the Trollerizing Hall-o-Fame along with Bob-a-Yoo-Hooey.

Re:Outstanding

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, he got one into the Shatner interview. IIRC, he had negative karma at the time, so he had tps12 post it for him. The judges have agreed to count it anyway, so PG is still in the running for the 2003 Troller of the Year Award.

Re:Patenting parenthesis

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

The way I figure it is that if I have to use that many parens to get a C program to work properly, then I might as well give in and use Lisp, instead. :)

So which is worse?

[sbest]

The author says I can patent a business method, to "outlaw my competition". Well, sorta. The
"legal monoply" of a patent can be argued in court (expensive for individuals, trivial for
Fortune-500) or it can be waited out for 20 years (boring)...but, okay, it makes a fine
assertive closing.

Makes me wonder, though: are business method patents more unhealthy for an industry than the
opposite situation? That is, in the author's analogy, if the novel business methods of Benjamin
Day of New York Sun fame were *immediately* copied by his competition...would there be any New York
Sun fame?

Put another way...I'm willing to bet that more entreprenaurs have been screwed by competitors
copying their novel ideas and methods, than competitors have been screwed by entreprenaurs
obtaining business method patents.

Don't miss the forest for one tree.

[jbn-o]

How do you reconclie this theory in light of how Microsoft drove Stacker out of business?

I don't let one instance make a case to stand against a system that historically was not needed. If software patents did not exist both Stacker and Microsoft could have had similar compression schemes on the market (perhaps with others as well, maybe a free software competitor too) allowing users the chance to choose amongst them. Perhaps Microsoft's would have been the most commonly used scheme simply because of their dominance (which was largely achieved through unsavory means), but others could have come about without being squashed before they were born.

Re:Patenting parenthesis

[tomhudson]

The idea is that when you divide 2 integers, you want an integer value back, so that you can, for example, do comparisons that don't fail because 0.99999999999 isn't the same as 1.

It also executes much faster. In assembler, it's just a shr to divide integers by 2, shl to multiply by 2. In a lot of cases, you don't need the fractional part anyway, so why bother with the overhead :-)

But I bet a lot of coders looked at it, ran it, and couldn't figure out why they were getting 0.

Re:These patents will go before the Supreme Court.

[SquarePants]

There are lots of patents concerning legal procedures. Your point is not borne by the facts.

But, of course, "blame the lawyers" is always a popular position so you are sure to be modded up (Insightful). I love /.

Thanks for the m4d pr0ps

[Anonymous Coward]

I see AC people.

Good grief, patents are ANTI-capitalistic

[dmeranda]

I think you are looking for a proof of your political convictions where none exists. WTF does the size of government or the viability of the EPA have to do with patents?

Perpetual copyright and the absurd patent system in particular exactly IS the government interferring with corporations and the free market. Patents are not capitalistic, in fact they are the exact opposite. They do nothing but prevent fair competition, and they are all about the government inhibiting companies or even individuals from competing. So despite your flawed argument I very much would like to see less government interference in at least one respect--I don't want the government telling me I can't do something because somebody else vaguely had the same thought. Now, what is your argument again?

So list the parade of horribles . . .

[werdna]

Exactly how many seminal ideas have truly been removed from the public domain? In particular, identify the business that could, but didn't because of a business process patent idea of the kind that the Fords and Waltons (both of whom own many patents, by the way) built their world upon?

patent me not

[dimmerLight]

I am not against the patent system per se, but against what it may become when it grows up. It is an abstraction that has been given a real number, I would say a collection of abstractions that have been given too much legitimacy. Soon enough we'll be tossing only abstractions at each other and the 3rd world from the sun is going to make all our t-shirts. By any chance happen to own locally grown t-shirt? i mean 'made', not 'designed'. I bet the chance is bigger that you own a patent.

Any-hways, I wonder if patents have any precedent in history...any ideas? I know the Chinese guarded the silk "method", but I also know that all contemporary accounting and international trade balancing is owed to the Great Pirates, according to Buckminster Fuller. The Great Pirates invented money. Well, now, 95 percent of worlds' money is abstraction owed to banks with interest. Thats why there is always pressure for growth: the economy must repay virtually all money to the banks with interest.

I liked what the guy way above my head said that patents are as american as apple pie and baseball and I would only mention that only 200 years ago it was very american thing to chase bison on the Planes.

Right, ho!

Okay, so what do we do?

[serutan]

I've read enough raving by pundits and columnists about the stupidity of granting patents on business methods, and personally I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately I don't work for the patent office, and I don't know how all this discussion is going to change their behavior. As pointed out in the article, they think their mission is to grant patents, and since they deal more with patent seekers than with anyone else they are more sympathetic to patent seekers' needs than to the general public. Okay, well, so how do we stick the patent office's nose in the coffee and make them inhale?

Re:These patents will go before the Supreme Court.

[alispguru]

There are lots of patents concerning legal procedures.

Really? I've heard rumors that these patents exist, but haven't yet heard one attached to a patent number. If you know of any, please post them.

The closest I've come to confirmation of this was private email from an IP lawyer/hacker, who said he had heard at the 2002 New York State Bar Association annual meeting that "a Patent had been issued on a Method for Preparing Patents - in essence, the practice of law itself may be patentable!" And even he didn't have a hard reference to the patent.

Re:These patents will go before the Supreme Court.

[SquarePants]

Have you ever done a search? Or are you just waiting for others to provide "confirmation"?

Here are some results from a 15 second search:

6,574,645-Machine for drafting a patent application and process for doing same
6,502,081-System and method for classifying legal concepts using legal topic scheme
6,501,421-Method and system for providing a location-based legal information service
5,774,833-Method for syntactic and semantic analysis of patent text and drawings

What's that? You want hyperlinks too?

Re:Patenting parenthesis

[Scooby Snacks]

Better yet, just use "1.0/2", or "1/2.0", or "1.0/2.0" rather than explicitly casting to float.