Is the Tide Turning On Patents?

Glyn Moody writes "The FSF has funded a new video, 'Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system,' freely available (of course) in Ogg Theora format (what else?). It comes at a time when a lot is happening in the world of patents. Recent work from leading academics has called into question their basis: 'The work in this paper, and that of many others, suggests that this traditionally-struck "devil's bargain" may not be beneficial.' We recently discussed how a judge struck down Myriad Genetics's patents on two genes because they involved a law of Nature, and were thus 'improperly granted.' Meanwhile, the imminent Supreme Court ruling In re Bilski is widely expected to have negative knock-on effects for business method and software patents. Is the tide beginning to turn?"

Comments

I'm not as optimistic about Bilski

[Man On Pink Corner]

I see a lot of parallels between Bilski and Eldred v. Ashcroft. They are both IP cases where the Court was asked to step in and do Congress's job for it. In Eldred they refused to issue any opinion whatsoever as to what would constitute an unreasonable extension of copyright terms. I see no Constitutional basis for them to hand down any other opinion in Bilski. IMHO the majority will refuse to state anything definitive on the issue, and mumble something about it being Congress's prerogative to interpret the "progress of science and the useful arts" clause in any way they see fit.

At that point lobbyists will descend on Congress with checkbooks in hand, and we'll all end up worse off than we were before the case was ever brought.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is, if you were starting a business that provides a software solution, would you want to be able to protect your solution from the competition?

Patents protect small businesses and innovation from competition, including big companies that will do anything in their power to stomp little companies with disruptive technologies. Open source is great, no doubt about it. But if you invent something, even if it is software, it deserves protection. Patents are part of capitalism, so no, there's no tide turning.

Software patents can help certain industries

[rm999]

I'm a bit troubled by Slashdot's blanket reaction to software patents.

In the line of work I am in (broadly: statistical analytics), almost all innovation comes in the form of creating improved methods that are implemented in software. It takes a large amount of resources to come up with these improved methods (they are generally far from obvious), and they can easily be transferred across the industry. Most companies in my industry would refuse to pay for innovation if they knew people could join, learn every recent innovation in two months, and then leave to the highest competitor bidder, effectively destroying any competitive advantage. Non-compete agreements are legally useless in my state, and NDAs are tenuous and practically hard to enforce. Patents (or stealing IP) are really the primary methods companies in my industry survive.

tldr: software patents can and do vastly encourage innovation in several competitive and useful industries.

Re:Video codecs

[devent]

Is the formula to calculate the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter obvious? Neither is E=MC2 obvious, but no algorithm can be patented. Why should be an algorithm for video compression be patentable?

Only because you implement it in software and you run it on a general purpose computer, you argue it should be patentable. So you can implement the calculation of PI and E=MC2 in software and run it on a general purpose computer.

Software are mathematical algorithms, nothing more. It's just that you write the software in a so called "language" and you have multiple languages in which you can express the algorithm. But in the end is all goes down to the work of Turing and his Turing machines.