Slashdot Mirror
IBM Adopts Open Patent Policy
Andy Updegrove writes to mention a New York Times article about IBM's bold new move to reform patent practices. The nation's largest patent holder will adopt several new policies intended to clear up the veil of secrecy and wall of lawsuits that plague the patent process. From the article: "The policy, being announced today, includes standards like clearly identifying the corporate ownership of patents, to avoid filings that cloak authorship under the name of an individual or dummy company. It also asserts that so-called business methods alone -- broad descriptions of ideas, without technical specifics -- should not be patentable. The move by I.B.M. does carry business risks. Patents typically take three or four years after filing to be approved by the patent office. Companies often try to keep patent applications private for as long as possible, to try to hide their technical intentions from rivals."
I believe what you are refering to is a COPYRIGHT. That is an exclusive right to produce a specific written/drawn/taped/otherwise recorded production for a scope of time as the creator of that content. It is fundamentally different from a patent in that it does not control production of a thing, but publication of an idea.
Patents provide a broader degree of protection for a more limited time, and for a more limited set of works.
That is, until some fsking asshat came up with patenting business models, which as written works that can't be physically created, should be copyrighted, not patented.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
Can you honestly tell me with an electron scope you could figure out how the circuit was made
Maybe not, but I can with the following assets:
FIB (Forced Ion Beam)
E-Beam
SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope)
AFM (Atomic Force Microscope)
Industrial espionage
Hiring some of your key staff
Bribing your FAB &&|| Foundry (especially if in APAC)
Bribing your customers (they often have datasheets not publicly available)
(honestly I don't need all of this, various subsets can accomplish the same end results in varying ammounts of time (days, weeks, monts. Always < 1year)).
Ask me how I know (Hint, my company has both been on the receiving end and giving end of this. The giving end was to prove/disprove whether they stole our design. They did.)
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I was not familiar with exactly how LZW worked, but I am familiar with basic information theory. To test this, I sat down for a minute (actually, I was already sitting) and considered how I would go about creating a universal stream compressor. I then checked the Wikipedia page for LZW. Reading around that, it seems that LZW is very similar to the algorithm that I came up with in a short time (different symbol lengths, slightly different encoding, but comparable. I'd have to implement them both to see which was better, but a quick information theoretical examination shows that they should be relatively close). Of course, these days there there are much better algorithms available; I would claim to be able to come up with something better than, or even equivalent to, the algorithms used in bzip2, for example.
About the only thing LZW had going for it was its ubiquity; the fact that the UNIX compress tool and the GIF file format used it. Designing an algorithm better than LZW is not hard, as is shown by the plethora of better compression algorithms that exist. I would expect that anyone with a degree in Computer Science or Mathematics could come up with one at least close to LZW (and if they couldn't, I'd like to know what institution awarded their degree). The difficult thing is generating a better decompression algorithm that still lets you view your GIF images.
Another good example of a software patent is the Marching Cubes algorithm. This is the standard way of generating an isosurface of a volume. Or, rather, it would be. Since it was patented, the community responded by developing the Marching Tetrahedra algorithm. Anyone with any experience working with volume graphics will tell you that both are trivial to derive from first principles (i.e. obvious), being little more than extensions into three dimensions of flood-fill algorithms (a slight oversimplification, but not a huge one). Similarly, LZW is obvious to anyone with a background in information theory.
By the way, both of these patents were filed within a year of each other. This means that both of them are expiring about now. The only positive benefit that either has had is to force implementers to come up with better algorithms (almost the opposite of the stated aim of patents) as a work-around. This is fine (although smacks of re-inventing the wheel in a lot of cases) for the most part, but in cases like LZW it is a huge impediment to the industry since it requires the abandonment and replacement of an established file format.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The problem with trade secret law is that your technology is a secret. The point of patents isn't really to protect inventors -- in many cases they can do that themselves with trade secrets. The point is to encourage further innovation by making knowledge public. Nobody would make their mouse trap building process public because everyone would steal it... so they are awarded a patent in exchange for making their invention and specifics on how to duplicate it, public. The patent guarantees them a monopoly on it for a set period of time in exchange for sharing that knowledge.
Under the current patent system, it is possible to patent an algorithm if it is "complicated enough". So, at what point does my non-patentable (but nonetheless copyrightable) addition algorithm become patentable? It's not quite clear, but apparently adding "on the Internet" is a valid criteria.
So what is the point of software patents? The only one I can see is: to limit competition; which is neither good for the advancement of the field nor for those dependent on its products. However, it's great at lining the pockets of software patent holders.
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.