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Groklaw Rants On Software Patents
LMCBoy writes "Groklaw has the story of Kodak v. Sun (mentioned on Slashdot already), which PJ calls 'Exhibit A' in the case against software patents. Her analysis of Kodak v. Sun, and the larger issue of software patents, is excellent. Bottom line: the software patent 'cold war' provides no benefits to anyone, and will inevitably make the game of software development impossible for anyone to play."
Read the groklaw article, and indeed, given that
/.ed by enough absurd (but interesting) cases? (or is that terrorism?)
Sun give java away free, the only people kodak
ought to be going after are the customers *using*
java. Whoops. Does this start to look familiar?
This nonsense will finally end when someone pushes
the absurdity *deliberately* to the limit. Are you
listening IBM? (If they went after everyone who
infringed their patents, we'd all be in court..).
Which raises the interesting question. Could the
legal system be
You have no idea about what you are talking. The problem with software patents is not that they are not special, it's that it's nearly impossible to determine novelty or nonobviousness. In a closed source world, the only way to determine what, exactly, a piece of software does and how it does it is through a patent. You could break out the hex editor and attempt a reverse-compilation, but you would have to do that with every piece of software before determining whether some new piece of software was either new or nonobvious. If every piece of software were open source, it would be easier to determine whether something was actually novel or nonobvious.
I also doubt you fully appreciate the three requirements of a patent -- that it be new, useful, and nonobvious. It has to be new -- that is it can't currently exist. It has to be useful -- meaning it has to solve a problem or convey some benefit to the user or practitioner. It has to be nonobvious to an expert in the field. If you come across a new problem, or are working on an old one, and come up with a novel solution to it that would not be obvious to an expert in the field, then society has an interest in learning your solution. To be absurd for a moment, how would you feel if some doctor got HIV (or cancer, or whatever), devised a cure, cured himself, and then told no one about it? What if you had HIV, or cancer? The patent system is how society pays for such secrets. Perhaps you think the USPTO grants patents for inventions that are overly obvious, and with software patents that is occasionally the case. There are reasons (above) for this, though, and it is the aggressive pursuit of software patents that will, through disclosing these methods, eventually reign in the "software patent monster" by increasing the availability of prior art.
It took roughly 7 million years (6.8, IIRC) for those tree apes that became men to develop the (modern) steam engine. It took approximately 200 years from the development of the modern steam engine for man to land on the moon. Innovation during the latter interval was protected by an effective patent system while innovation in the former interval was not. Attitudes such as yours towards innovation will soon see us back in the trees, though, and as I have no affinity for small, biting insects I would prefer for that not to happen.