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UK High Court Allows Software Patent Claims
An anonymous reader tips us to a note up on the IPKat blog, written by one of the four law-professor types behind that venture. The British High Court has ruled on appeal that the UK Patent Office must not reject software patent applications out of hand, as it has been doing for some time now. "In a surprising (to this Kat at least) turn of events, the Honourable Mr Justice Kitchin has ruled today that the current UK Patent Office practice of flatly rejecting patent claims to computer program products is wrong... Kitchin J found that the appeals should be allowed. Each application concerned a computer related invention where the examiner had allowed claims to, in effect, a method performed by running a suitably programmed computer and to a computer programmed to carry out the method... The cases were remitted to the [UK Intellectual Property Office] for further consideration in light of the judgment."
This is NOT good news for software innovation in the UK at all.
Anyone claiming that there hasn't been any innovation in software over the last 10 years because of the lack of ability to patent it in the UK is clearly barking mad.
Yes, as someone that has worked on generating IP before I strongly believe that people should be paid for their work if they don't wish to donate it for free, but clearly a lack of patents hasn't prevented this either.
All this will bring eventually is the stifling of the software industry, oh, and more patent trolling, joy.
there goes the U.K. software industry. It's unfortunate that the people we most trust to protect our industry and our livelihoods are the most clueless about the very technology we must have in order to do that. The United States is no better in that regard, that's for damn sure. Too bad ... it looks like we're just going to roll over and leave whatever innovation is left in the software field to the Chinese and the Indians.
...old people were best suited to make very important decisions. After all, they had the most learning, the most experience, and the most wisdom.
Now, however, technology moves much faster than the human mind. A person may easily see two or three technological revolutions in his lifetime, each one forcing the rejection of old value systems and the embracing of new perspectives.
Unfortunately, the older a human mind gets, the less able it is to reject old value systems and embrace new perspectives.
So now, the decisions of the old-and-powerful wind up causing great harm to the young-and-visionary.
The thing that REALLY gets me is when young people...people who *should* know better...buy into this we-need-control-to-have-innovation crap.
If I could put smart in the water, I would.
"This will spur innovation in unprecedented ways in the coming years in the UK!"
I would be able to say that if, with this change, the patent system would be improved to further function as intended in... Uhh, 1474. Only more efficiently.
The period of protection was back then 10 years to protect the profit from new innovations, so inventors didn't get ripped off immediately, in turn keeping them interested in innovating. A great idea! Really, I think patents are in general a great idea, no sarcasm involved. They were then released after 10 years, fairly early at the time of technological evolution back then, so that it also didn't halt competition and innovations that were based on it. You also needed to have the product out. Because otherwise, there's not much to protect, you know? People back then didn't think mere ideas should be patentable.
Now, two main things seem to have changed. First, patents are now in effect for 20 years. And you can patent stuff before products are out and in use. Actually, you can patent without even planning to innovate anything! This of course has very harmful effects for innovation, and forms the breeding ground for businesses exploiting this as their business model, suing others for infringing on their oh-so-valuable patents.
As for the extended lifetime, it would still work out fairly well if this interesting graph just wasn't in effect. (note: that graph is logarithmic; it's actually an exponential rate) Unfortunately for our patent situation, but fortunately for us living in this interesting day and age, history itself has proven it is. We don't even need to speculate, because it's historical evidence, not about anything that may happen in the future. The facts here are that we know which key events have happened in history (we know if something is a key event or not by looking at what the product of the paradigm shift was) and when they did, and that's pretty much all we need to see patent lifetime extensions are the least we have needed.
So, what I think must be done to restore patents to a working state again would be two main things:
1. Once again, like a long time ago, we should only be able to patent what's released, or possibly (in fear of day 1 patent hijacking after insider leaks) some duration less than e.g. a year in advance, but then the company will immediately have the patent expire if this goal is not fulfilled, along with having a hefty penalty associated with it, possibly a percentage of a company's revenue for some duration X (for an example, how about X being the time in advance the patent was granted?). So the more a company would "guess" and just throw things out without being sure of themselves, the greater risk of real losses they would run. They would now be forced to weigh the risk against the benefit. If they definitely have something worked on and are sure of themselves, sure, they could then submit the application, no special risks involved. Because they would be using the system as intented. I'm not sure if a patent should be allowed to be cancelled with no penalty, because that could be used to stall competition. Maybe that a project might not bear fruit and getting abandoned would have to be a risk a company submitting quite early patents would simply have to take.
2. Second, we need to adjust patent lifetimes to the accelerating rate of paradigm shifts in order to not risk slowing them down. This risk should logically increase the further into the future we get. The doubled patent lifetime since 1474 should probably instead have been halved by now. The adjustment was made in the opposite direction as demaned by society and rate of innovations. The lifetime may also need to be adapted to various business needs. For example, computer software is often considered old in 5 years. Within that timeframe, even Microsoft will have had time to develop Windows Vista, including the project reboot in between PDC 2003 and Beta 1, so that's not saying little.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!