Slashdot Mirror
UK Judge: Who needs software patents?
Glyn Moody writes "C|Net has a surprising story about a seminar given by a top judge at the U.K.'s Court of Appeal who specializes in intellectual-property law. According to the article, he has "questioned whether software patents should be granted, and has criticized the U.S. for allowing "anything under the sun" to be patented." Is the tide turning?"
While this judge's message may seem absurd, remember to pay royalties when you code a progress bar in your application.
... I should e-mail Mr. Andreas and Mr. Foster--the Catholic Church has got deep pockets!
That's right, a whole lot of people owe William S. Andreas and Jeffery P. Foster of IBM a whole lot of money.
Oh, and this was filed in the U.S. but approved by a European patent office so I don't think it's fair for this judge to bash only us Yanks.
My church had a fundraiser once and I believe they used a progress bar on a website to track their earnings
Say, have any of you Java swing programmers ever typed
JProgressBar myJPB = new JProgressBar();
? Because I was thinking of starting a patent lawyer career, I just need you to reply with your name, contact information and the application you used it on and distributed.
My work here is dung.
Is the tide turning?
No. Judges aren't The Borg. One judge's opinion (and that's little-o opinion, not an opinion handed down) is hardly a watershed event.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
When the patent process actually changes, THEN you can say the tide is turning. Until then, the tide is just growing, like it has been for a long time ...
just so you can see how retarded the US patent system is, see this santa hat patent
it seems to me that the purpose of the USPTO is not to grant patents but to make money from applications etc
i could probably patent my ass if i tried to
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
I agree you should be able to patent a process. However the US system defines no logical limits on such a definition. The RIM Blackberry versus NTP is only one good example. NTP patended the process of sending communication to a device from a server, this is basically the concept of all TCP/IP traffic, however since NTP was successfull in making certain claims they OWN this process, and others must pay royalties to use it, regardless of how obivous it is.
--------------
www.kybe.com
^its an adult text and image search engine i'm working on.
It doesn't seem to me that the patent process is inherently ill-suited to software. In fact, it's a far better fit than copyright because of the nature of the resultant work. The patent system requires full disclosure of the invetion (the copyright laws do not) and the term is definite (20 years v at least 70 years for copyright). With the copyright system (the only system left for protection if patents are withdrawn), there is no disclosure, so you end up with DRM to protect access to copyrighted elements even though not all the elements are copyrightable. However, circumventing the DRM to discover non-copyrightable elements is either a violation of the law or it is a violation of the EULA that you agreed to. If the software could only be patented, the applicant would be required to disclose the entirety of the invention and thereby promoting science. It would, by definition, only allow those elements that are protectable to be protected and the patent would clearly disclose what those are. Copyright laws only act to obfuscate the promotion of science.
The problem with software patents is not that patenting is ill-suited but rather that discovery of prior art and laziness by the PTO have resulted in questionable patents being issued. Even this isn't a problem, because when challenged and scrutinized those patents that are bad are discarded and those that are good are upheld. The problem lies in the cost to litigate this - essentially ensuring that the "little guy" must bow to the pressures of the multi-national corporation.
Instead, maybe the PTO should adopt a cheap ex-parte reconsideration procedure (to my knowledge only the applicant can request reconsideration for a patent that is denied) that lasts for the lifetime of a patent where the challenger only needs to present some evidence of a patent-destroying issue. This would eliminate the huge costs of trying the patent in a court of law and make the process a little more fair. If there is evidence of non-obviousness or prior use for a "progress bar" the patent will destroyed, otherwise, why shouldn't the patentee be rewarded for his new and novel invention (it should be to his benefit that such an invention is widely used!)
I had a choice between modding this down and replying, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here. Anything can be described as a mathematical model based on a set of axioms, from which operations on elements can be performed. That's right, your toaster has many underyling mathematical principles, so does your microwave, and any other device. There really isn't a whole lot you can't use some mathematical model to explain. So given your reasoning, there ought to be no patents. Even such ideas as relational databases can be explained quite well using Tuple Calculus. Complex operations within relational databases can be derived from broad mathematical definitions. It's a property of emergence, and in the future I don't see many, if any, fields not represented by some subset of mathematics.
To put it succinctly, if you don't like patents, simply say so. If you're going to be grabbing for excuses not to like certain kinds of patents, you're not helping the problem.
The difference between a toaster (which would be patentable if it was a new invention) and software is that the toaster isn't implementing a mathematical algorithm. The resulting actions of the toaster can be explained by physics and chemistry, but isn't the result of pure manipulation of numbers. RSA is just a way of manipulating numbers. A toaster, or any other physical invention should do more than manipulate numbers. unless it's a computer, and it's purpose is manipulating numbers. I have no idea why nobody ever patented the computer. Basically it should work like this. If you can't patent something without adding "software","a computer", or "the Internet" to it, you shouldn't be able to patent something simply by adding "software","a computer", or "the Internet" to it. If you could patent RSA you wouldn't need to patent software that implements it, because that would be covered by the existing patent. Since you can't patent RSA, you can't patent a piece of software that implements it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
In every discussion like this there is always somebody who don't know the difference between patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets.
Addressing your actual point, up till now the development of computer algorithms has progressed very nicely without much patent protection. It's a bit like saying, "without patent protection, where's the incentive to develop new physics?"