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English Court Allows Patents For "Complex" Software
jonbryce writes "The court of appeal in England has ruled that companies should be granted patents for 'complex' software products. In this particular case, Symbian had written something that makes mobile phones run faster. The court case has received very little attention because of the bank crisis, but it can be appealed to the House of Lords and then the European Court of Justice."
I'm not sure how this ruling makes sense, given that the article didn't actually say what the legal definition of "complex" was.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
seriously what patenting simple things is wrong while complex things are good
software patents are simply not right for the patent system
if you live in the UK (only if so)
write to your MP simply by using this service
http://www.writetothem.com/
regards
John Jones
What is the actual technique that the patent is being granted for. If this is something like a compressin algorithm or an application of compression to mobile phones, I call shenanigans on the Judge.
The article was very clear, no wait, extremely fucking clear that this is a UK matter:
Confusing England with the UK is like confusing California with the USA. It's especially unforgivable when the correct term is screaming at you from the page and you ignore it and write your own tripe instead. "UK" appears in that article nine times, England not once. Take the hint.
Amidst the fact that most of the world is going through a major crisis, who in world could think that what we need to do is give the corporations even more power while limiting competition? Wasn't the lesson we learned was that large corporations were bad and that you should give more power to the people? Apparently not.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Software Patents make writing software in a particular country a risky proposition. There are so many things the USPTO has let be patented, that I doubt you can write a single program without violating someone's patents. You have to wonder, if Software Patents existed in the US from the beginning, if the US Software Industry would have grown into what it is today? Easier to move to and write your software somewhere else (which now doesn't include Britain).
that's a poor way to grant patents. just because something has market value doesn't make it an innovation or an invention. anything that is useful has market value--especially if you're able to patent it and force others to pay you licensing/royalty fees to use it. the ultimate goal of the patent and copyright system is to promote public good and societal progress. public interest should always be placed above economic interest, not the other way around.
one of the inherent flaws with most patent systems is that once something is patented, even if someone else with no knowledge of the patent filing independently invents the same idea, they will either, be forced to pay royalties to the first inventor, or simply forbidden from using their own invention. it's a means of excluding others from the use of the patented idea, essentially giving the patent holder a monopoly. but why should someone be prevented from implementing an idea they invented independently just because they came up with the idea later? should being born 10 years earlier give a person the right to monopolize an obvious concept?
software patents exacerbate the problem when companies are allowed to patent mathematical algorithms or trivial/obvious functionality. things like UI interfaces, JavaScript popups, portable e-mail, etc. should not be patentable. these patents do not benefit society in any way, and they have hindered technological progress rather than promote it.
at the very least, non-commercial uses of patented ideas should not be prohibited. give the first inventor exclusive rights to commercial the idea, but if someone else comes along and re-invents the same concept for personal use, they should be free to do so. otherwise the patent system is just restricting free expression and stifling innovation.
that's a poor way to grant patents. just because something has market value doesn't make it an innovation or an invention.
Notice that my statement started with "...create an INNOVATIVE, MORE DESIRABLE method of..." The fact that it had market value came as a consequence, though I see that the end of the sentence makes it seem that market value gives causality to IP rights. What I did mean was that an innovative better process has merit and deserves some kind of recognition. Whether the system in place is the correct one is a different point altogether.
the ultimate goal of the patent and copyright system is to promote public good and societal progress
While I agree that should be the ultimate goal, it is simply not the way it plays out in a mostly capitalistic society. Truth is most people are motivated by self interest. For that reason independently of how we might agree societal systems should function, when it comes down to it people will use it for their own purposes.
one of the inherent flaws with most patent systems is that once something is patented, even if someone else with no knowledge of the patent filing independently invents the same idea, they will either, be forced to pay royalties to the first inventor, or simply forbidden from using their own invention.
While that is certainly a problem, there seems to be no clearly resolution for it, as far as commercial rights go. Either you forfeit or enforce the fact that the first person to register a product/process has rights to it.
software patents exacerbate the problem when companies are allowed to patent mathematical algorithms or trivial/obvious functionality. things like UI interfaces, JavaScript popups, portable e-mail, etc. should not be patentable. these patents do not benefit society in any way, and they have hindered technological progress rather than promote it.
The idea of a patent is to grant rights over non trivial/obvious things. I am not claiming the system works as it is intended to, but it is certainly is not meant to give rights over the obvious/trivial. The flaw here of course being the perception of what is/isn't obvious/trivial.
at the very least, non-commercial uses of patented ideas should not be prohibited. give the first inventor exclusive rights to commercial the idea, but if someone else comes along and re-invents the same concept for personal use, they should be free to do so. otherwise the patent system is just restricting free expression and stifling innovation.
I completely agree with you here. I believe that patents should concern themselves strictly with commercial use. Even independent of reinvention, I believe that if you have the means to implement anything strictly for personal use you should have the rights to.
Sometimes really simple ideas are the hardest to come up with.
What's wrong with patents is when they allow ideas that any competent person would come up with in a couple of minutes if they ever needed to do it, ie. the only reason nobody "invented" it yet is that nobody ever needed it.
Example: "Compact text encoding of latitude/longitude coordinates" - Patent 20050023524
(Guess who patented that one...)
Basically it's just base-64 encoding of lat/long coordinates.
It may be "new" (in the sense that it was never done before) but any competent programmer could have come up with it with a few seconds thought.
By this yardstick my current software should have at least 10,000 patents covering it.
No sig today...
First of all, you don't "patent" software - you patent portions of software. Patenting entire pieces of software would make no sense, as it would do nearly the same darned thing as copyrighting it. Second, what defines complex? All software ideas are complex. Is a BSP tree sufficiently complex? I imagine so, and a patent on that would have decimated the game industry early on.
If there's anyone I hate more than stupid people, it's intellectuals.
I took it as meaning "any program that cannot be expressed as an integer, by means of a Turing Machine, but requires an imaginary component".
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There's a difference between software and other industries, difference is in the way of infringement. In other industries most patent conflicts are about rip off of inventions, in the software industry, most patent cases are against people coming up with the same ideas and that's the problem.
In most other industries, the patent system means that if I invent a nice mouse trap I can get royalties from the guy with the mouse trap factory a.k.a. the producer.
In the software industry there is nothing to produce, there are no producers, only inventors a.k.a. programmers, and there are lots of them, which should mean lots of inventions. However the patent system used to the idea of lots of producers and few inventors, decides that whoever comes up with an idea and patents it first is "the" inventor, disregarding the fact that the same ideas are being produced concurrently elsewhere.
The patent system was not conceived to handle such a massive amount of inventors and inventions, to put it bluntly, the more you cherish the idea of an "IP" driven economy the more you should adapt to lots and lots of coincidental development. Software patents are just wrong.
But... the future refused to change.
Pity most ingenious software solutions are simple.
This just complicates things, most complex software is combination of widely known design patterns, which part of it will be patented?
Judges will have to be real code gurus to judge in these cases.
Not to mention that things like this will could only stifle progress if actively enforced.
A simple trip to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_law, 3rd paragraph) would save you a lot of embarrassment in the future.
English law is most definitely based on precedent. If fact, the reason that American law has precedent is because it is, in turn, based on English law, as are most of the legal systems of the former commonwealth.
This law might be ultimately decided in the Lords, but that is only if it is appealed. If it is not appealed at this point in time, it may be used a precedent in another case (at which point an possible appeal might also be made).
Genesis 1:32 And God typed