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End Software Patents Project Comes Out Swinging
Linux.com is reporting that the End Software Patents project is launching several new initiatives to help drive support for their cause. Among the new methods are a web site, a report on the state of patents in the US, and a scholarship contest promising to award $10,000 "for the best paper on the effects of the patentability of software and business methods under US law." "The project is being launched with initial funding of a quarter million dollars, supplied primarily by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Under the directorship of Ben Klemens, a long-time advocate of software patent abolition best-known for the book Math You Can't Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software, the project is being supported by the FSF, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). One of ESP's goals is to enlist support from academics, software developers, legal experts, and business executives. Its initial supporters show that the project is already well on its way to building such a coalition."
No, the basic arguments aren't just that but they are so general its hard not to avoid them. Think about a patent of a method of making a vacuum cleaner, its a new idea it should be patented, thats fine, but how about a "machine that uses suction to clean" as a patent with little evidence that you even have one made, the second one represents most software patents of say "a method to download songs onto a hard disk to be played back at a later date" where there are very few "true" software patents that aren't held by patent trolls or monopolies.
In short, I can get a patent for making a vacuum cleaner (minus prior art and such) but most software patents try to patent "a cleaning device using suction" and many of them decide to then go for "a *insert adjective* device using suction" and "a cleaning device using *insert word here*". And that is what makes software patents different.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
We live in the only period of history where it is possible to get a patent on something you discovered without claiming you invented it. If I found a piece of farming equipment that did some novel thing and I went and applied for a patent on it, I would be asked to declare that I invented it and it is not the work of someone else - to satisfy the no-prior-art test. If, however, I am pulling apart a bacterium or some other living creature, the patent office will happily grand me a patent on its genes - they won't even ask me if I invented these genes because it is assumed that I am just patenting a discovery.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There's a 3D shader technique called Phong shading. If Phong shading was patented then Blinn-Phong would never have be discovered which is a change in math. Blinn-Phong is faster and provides more accurate results.
All software is a form of math, one technique can have completely different looking math but produces the same results such as the prior example. You can not patent math because you didn't invent anything, you just discovered the formula which was already there.
Well fuck me with a shovel, those folks are serious.
No, that's not the argument.
The argument used to justify any patents is that they promote progress. Our experience with patents in the specific case of software is that they actually hinder progress. Therefore, in order to promote progress, software patents should be abolished.
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In fact, I'd go so far as to say that all of the major innovations in the field of computer software were created prior to the U.S. allowing patents, including:
When you get right down to it, my computer still basically works the same way as System 1.0 Mac, just with color graphics, a lot more general UI polish, and a lot more features. The basic overall feel, however, is still pretty much the same, only faster. Under the hood, most operating systems still work basically the same way as UNIX did in the 1970s. Computer hardware has gotten much faster and smaller, which has allowed lots of things to be possible that weren't feasible at the time, but even most of the things we think of as "new" like digital video editing date all the way back to the early 1970s, albeit on specialized computer hardware that would fill your entire garage. The only giant leaps since the 80s have been in hardware designs. and, to a limited degree, in the software necessary to support advancement in the hardware.
Where, then, are the huge leaps that software patent proponents promised? Why did those leaps basically dry up as software patents became entrenched in the U.S.? Outside of a few specialized areas like computer graphics and voice recognition, the computer industry basically has been stagnant since software patents became legal. Worse, most of the "revolutionary" ideas since then have either been evolutionary dead ends like NUMA and ccNUMA or have taken absurdly long to catch on like touch screens, which first appeared commercially in the early 80s, but outside of POS systems and PDAs/smartphones, are still almost nonexistent in the marketplace.
If you need proof that patents don't inherently result in increased innovation (at least in computers), the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Would the innovation slowdown have occurred in the same way if we didn't have patents? Maybe, but I can tell you that there is a lot less pure research being done in major tech companies now than at any time in the past couple of decades. If patents are supposed to encourage research spending, they are sure doing a lousy job of it.
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