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Paul Graham on Patents

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stuff-to-read dept.

volts writes "The always interesting Paul Graham has a new essay, 'Are Software Patents Evil?'. "A few weeks ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted four patents. This was all the more surprising because I'd only applied for three...""

2 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. More interesting than Paul Graham by gowen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Graham has engineers disease: he believes that being an accomplished engineer makes him qualified to speak authoritatively on art, law, science, film... He probably caught it from ESR.

    Anyway, I heartily recommend you read this fine demolition of Graham's opinions on painting before giving this dilletante blowhard any of your copious free time.

    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
  2. Actually, there is a difference: Copyright by Jerf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually, there is a good distinction you can draw between software patents and conventional patents that is strong enough that you can't automatically infer that being against software patents means you are against all patents: Software patents are the only things I know of where the patented objects are also covered under copyright law.

    I go more into depth about this elsewhere, but the short answer is that we shouldn't be surprised that patents, balanced for one type of use, and copyrights, balanced for another, make no sense when both are covering the same thing, since they were never designed to do that.

    Obviousness is a real problem too, of course, but that's more a practical problem, one that could be corrected by more aggressive denials by the PTO. This is a fundamental conflict.