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An Insider's View of Software Patents
An anonymous reader writes "Ross Gittins at the Sydney Morning Herald has published an interesting insider view of software patents. This kind of thing is starting to be a hot issue down here with the US-Australia Free Trade deal about to be ratified and bring our intellectual property laws in line with Micros^D^D^D^D^D^D^D America's."
IANAL, but one way to improve the patent situation (and the IP situation too, for that matter), which I didn't see mentioned in the article, would be to impose a statute of limitation on infringement suits. This is how they do things in China.
China?! Yes, that's right. Some of their laws are better than ours...
This would prevent asshats like Unisys (and, if applied to IP, asshats like SCO) from suing for infringement WELL after they became aware of the issue. A statute of limitaion would ensure that underhanded tactics such as allowing the public to become addicted to GIFs, and then suing years and years later, would no longer be effective.
This wouldn't solve all of the problems with software patents, but I think it's a step in the right direction!
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
I think the core of the article implies that the company with most 'spendable' money will win by default in any case.
Patent Office will grant any plausible applications because "The feeling is that anything contentious can be sorted out in the courts."
And what happens in the courts? Small guys are burdened with legal fees, which is related to the time spent on preparation, which big guys can just throw a lot to you. If you don't hire enough lawyers to read each and every line properly, you might get caught even if you are the rightful owner of a patent.
So with or without a patent, big company will eventually monopolize the market by (1) holding a patent and scare everybody off or, (2) taking the patent-holding company to court or, (3) buy out small guys.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This would avoid the common scenario where the defendant is sued out of existance even though the case has no merit!
AC comments get piped to
1.) The argument that software patents are bad because most software patents are frivolous is a strawman. Most non-software patents are also frivolous. This is not unique to software, people here only notice software patents because they work in software. If you don't like the frivolousness of patents granted then deal with the general frivolousness of the patent system, because "software" patents and "frivolous" patents only intersect and neither contains the other in its entirety.
2.) Software is hardware is software. If you can't patent software, then you shouldn't be able patent hardware either. This was settled the better part of a century ago, in case anyone was paying attention. Pretending that software is a special case that is different from hardware creates a distinction where none exists.
3.) A minority of software patents, just like a minority of normal hardware patents, cover inventions that took substantial research and development effort that no one could reasonable claim to be "obvious". This would seem to be precisely what is supposed to be protected by patents under ideal circumstances and I can't see a reasonable argument that says these inventions should be treated differently than all other patents. Otherwise we would be in the position of allowing frivolous non-software patents and disallowing heavy-duty substantive "software" patents.
That said, it seems to me that the biggest reason a lot of geeks don't like software patents is that it is inconvenient for them. Every rationalization that disallows "software" patents but allows other types of patents has been uniformly weak and inconsistent. If you think patents are bad, then ALL patents are bad, not just the ones you wish you didn't have to abide by.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
... until they are tested in court. So says the lawer at the company I work for, and who is involved in patent (not software) battles on our behalf in a few countries.
Essentially, he says, the granting of a patent means that you were able to convince some guy in an office that your idea was new, un-obvious etc. etc. So the patent is granted.
The fun starts when your product hits the market and someone else tries to do the same thing. Then it goes to court, and only then is the validity of your patent tested.
Applying game theory to long term software industry market, for both open and proprietary vendors, based on software patents...
1) Small software developers are unlikely to benefit from the overall balance of payments from licensing of their own and other vendors software patent portfolios, since other software vendors are just as likely to hold other software patents that the developer uses in his own products.
2) Larger software vendors are unlikely to benefit from payments from licensing of their software patent portfolio, as per above small sofware developers plus the software vendor is likely to hold the lion's share of the sofware target market, profit from software patent licensing will be much smaller in proportion to the overall sales of the vendors own products.
3) Third party intellectual property "holding companies", that do not actively participate in selling actual software, are the only class of organization that can benefit from licensing of their software patent portfolios. In most cases these entities have a very tenuous relationship to the ongoing development of the software methords patented
See Patents bad but also pushing interesting trend
This kind of thing is starting to be a hot issue down here with the US-Australia Free Trade deal about to be ratified and bring our intellectual property laws in line with Micros^D^D^D^D^D^D^D America's
Boy, do you have this one all wrong.
Microsoft made one of the worst lists in America to get, the list of the top 100 verdicts for last year, three times, as a losing defendant. Microsoft has been on the business end of more 8 and 9 digit patent infringement verdicts than any other enterprise in recent times.