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Courts May Revisit Software Patents
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the courts may finally be gearing up to overturn the ruling that opened the floodgates for both software and business model patents. It's been nearly ten years since the US courts decided that business methods were patentable and that most software could be patentable — and we've all seen what's happened since then. With all the efforts to fix the patent system lately, it appears that the court that originally made that decision may be regretting it, and has agreed to hear a new case that could overturn that ruling and restore some sanity to the patent system."
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Consumers have everything to gain from this. Nowadays it's impossible to write a gui'd "hello world" without stepping through a minefield of patents. As a small business owner, it's unreasonable and likely impossible to expect me to research every patent and pay royalties/license fees for "a piece of software that beeps when it wants the user's attention", or other things. Only large companies can afford such things, and they use it stifle competition. (What do you think MS's sabre rattling over linux has been about?)
Any CS person will tell you that when it comes to software, there's more than one way to skin a cat - probably thousands. But software/business patents let you find one, and squash the rest.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
a new case that could overturn that ruling and restore some sanity to the patent system
No bets here, lawyers enjoy the complexity and confusion too much to make this any better. Congress just needs to change the law. In a business like computers which is evolving so quickly, say a 2 year patent then it expires. And you can only sue if you produce a competing product with it and have been harmed.
You need to stop patent trolls dead. Like RAID and bugs. Let innovation back into this business.
- A rethink to head off not only having their wrists smacked but having the USSC start reviewing their cases much more often (complete with reversals) or
- A chance to put together a really solid and detailed ruling to give the USSC a reason to agree with them.
We won't know which they pick until this summer.Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Interesting stuff.
in some places you can't patent drugs you can only patent the process of making them which makes much more sense.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
How about just relying on 'good old' copyright to protect your code, instead of software patents?
I know, copyright laws are also under fire, but still, I think that using patents to protect code is a cure worse than the disease. And it's too drastic and largely unnecessary.
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Let's say that my redneck republican self gets insanely lucky and bumbles into an algorithm that actually factors something in polynomial time, or even close enough to it so that RSA and the like are untenable. - let's say that I got that lucky and figure out that in fact P=NP. Oh-la-la. What I would do is create a private business around my solution, making money solving problems without giving out the details of the solution itself.
I bet lots of things in math can be done this way, you don't have to give out the details of your invention to be able to cash in on it.
Another example: let's say I come up with a way to totally remove HIV from a human's body somehow (let's say it takes 6 months to complete the treatment and let's say I do it by injecting the person with synthetic antibodies that are specific to HIV and swim in the bloodstream just collecting the virus until there is none left.)
All I have to do to cash in is open my own treatment center and anyone who comes in has to stay in for the entire period of time it takes to finish the treatment and then another month or so for the synthetic antibodies to leave the body altogether. I don't have to give out the details of what exactly I do and how exactly I do it to make money.
Of-course it is not as simple with 'inventions' that make most economical sense only when they are sold to the public in mass, but it is not always necessary to give up your 'invention' to the public to make money on it.
You can't handle the truth.
Courts, like all government, are so out of touch with the real world that they are essentially incapable of rendering rational decisions. Unfortunately, we Americans are too disposed to elect officials (including judges) based on appearance and rhetoric than on actual qualifications. In this age, any judicial nominee/candidate or other politician who cannot articulate what the internet is without referencing "tubes" or understand what an IP address and ISP are, is not qualified for office.
The patent fiasco and other nonsensical decisions clearly illustrate this.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
as jonathan schwarz said, if you build a server that can do twice as much work for half the cost you will end up making twice as much money with it and not half as much.
of course, sun isn't a monopoly and it's competing in a market without any real monopolies at the moment.
let's say that I got that lucky and figure out that in fact P=NP. Oh-la-la. What I would do is create a private business around my solution, making money solving problems without giving out the details of the solution itself.
I've thought about that. Let's say you did make an Active X control that could factor large numbers, calculate the most efficient route to travel a bunch of cities, solve gigantic systems of linear equations, and, by the way, plays a perfect game of minesweeper, I'd think somebody would figure out what you did before too long.
The only way you could keep it secret, at that point, would be to keep the code on your own web server so that your code wasn't actually distributed. However, even if you did that, research into NP-Completeness would taken on a huge new level. Right now, most people think that P!=NP and so really aren't pursuing it. If you went and actually did it, and declared it a corporate secret (after they realized you did it), you would be no doubt be infiltrated with corporate and government spies, or, some government might just kidnap you and torture you until you gave it up. it's just that big of a deal to not go public with it.
This is my sig.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent:
A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to an inventor or his assignee for a fixed period of time in exchange for a disclosure of an invention.
Patents, from the beginning, were a compromise so that people who would invest in new developments would disclose the work of those developments (for public good) while being able to turn a profit from them in the short term (a motivation for inventing) through an exclusive monopoly.
Vested interests do not write the law, for it is the individual who has the most vested interest in the government. I think you mean to say "sociopathic capitalists write the law".
For patents to benefit society, the term of the monopoly must be greater than that required to recoup investment expenses, but shorter than the portion of an invention's life span where it is valuable to the people. In a government that exists for the benefit of the people, the shortest patent term is the most desirable. That's how our government was set up -- unfortunately, the world is more and more getting exactly what it deserves, as a few have learned that people will sell their freedom for remarkably little.
People can't own their ideas because they were never wholly their ideas. All that we invent is the summation of all that has come before us, perhaps with something new thrown into the mix. Your ideas belong just as much to your teachers, your parents, your peers, and the generations that came before you, as they do to you. In the long term community ownership is the only system that makes sense for such a creation.
In the short term, a man's got to eat. In the long term, society as a whole must reap the rewards for what it has sown. Only a parasite keeps that from society, and like any parasite feasting on a host, society becomes sick when that happens.
The basic idea is that giving a patent-holder a limited time monopoly to profit from their inventions encourages invention. It does make sense, but the concept was formulated during an era of the solo inventor, and certainly not designed for the era of patent trolls. The system does not function terribly well now, and has encouraged a sort of arms race as large corporations build up arsenals of defensive patents, while patent trolls attempt to extort licensing fees, often based on highly questionable patents.
Governments and the courts have utterly failed in their duty to reign this behavior in, and if they don't start soon, we're going to see the ultimate meltdown. Arms races are fundamentally unstable propositions, and at some point someone who really counts, like Microsoft, is going to pull the trigger and the whole thing is going to explode in a terrible conflagaration. At that point governments will have to do something, but only after billions of dollars are tied up in ludicrous lawsuits and the consumer is screwed in the process.
The solutions aren't going to be easy for some, particularly those who have made a business plan out of extortion (SCO didn't invent this, after all). Patent terms need to be shortened, software and process patents need to be thrown out, and patent offices need more resources to identify bad patents and prior art.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It makes sense in a "pop psychology" sort of way, but I've never heard of or been pointed to a peer-reviewed study which showed that this "encourages invention"-effect could be shown, even in a highly-artificial academic "game theory"-based sort of market.
Until I can refer to a study like that (and assuming that the study has been properly controlled to resist researcher bias), it seems very counter-intuitive to me that a socialistic idea like "intellectual property" which limits competition is going to encourage innovation. (I refer to it as a socialistic idea since it is a government-enforced distortion of a free market motivated to create a social effect: the so-called encouragement of invention).
The rest of your description seems to me to be the natural end-game of "intellectual property", but I'd like to see a study which supports the idea that even the early stages of "intellectual property" actually has the type of effect that its proponents say it does.
I'm against software patents because many trivial and obvious things like caching a screen to speed display, maintaining data in an array, then in a linked list, having a "table of contents" to disk data, compressing redundant data are all patentable.
The net result is that until all those patents expire, the entire software industry is basically paralyzed and can be waylaid at any time for huge fees.
Software development has *always* relied on code reuse. The question is what amount of code needs to be written to implement the idea. Anything less than 5,000 bytes of assembly code should be unpatentable. (you can't use lines of code-- because you can write a language where a 50,000 line construct is a single opcode.)
While 1/10th of 1% of software does represent patentable ideas- the other 99.9% just isn't. So the tiny amount of patentable ideas are not worth the risk and additional cost to the rest of the industry.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I am not sure if its a good idea, but it could be an interesting idea, with a small refinement.
Just as you say, you can "blow up" the code to 50,000 lines, but you can also blow up machine code and surround it with NOPs, or just make it extremely inefficient.
If, however, you move the burden of proof to the challenger, and he can implement the essence of the patented idea in any general purpose language as a program smaller than some constant, the patent is invalidated.
The problem is, defining "implementation of a patented idea" is quite fuzzy. Should it include the interface components required to actually put it in use? Should it be on a claim-by-claim basis?
I personally think that all software patents should be abolished, but I do think that if they aren't - they should at least be invalidated when someone can come up with a really short program that implements them.