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Red Hat Urges USPTO To Deny Most Software Patents
Julie188 writes "The United States Patent and Trademark Office asked for public input on how it should use the Supreme Court's Bilski decision to guide it when granting new patents. Not surprisingly, Red Hat took them up on it. The USPTO should use Bilski and the fact that the machine transformation test is 'important' to Just Say No to most software patents, it advised. Rob Tiller, Red Hat's Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, IP, is hopeful that the patent office will listen and put an end to the crazy software patent situation that has turned patents into weapons that hinder innovation."
So why should authors of software have different rules than authors of (for example) film plots?
Why shouldn't we allow patents of film plots including (for example) a teleportation device as found in Star Trek?
)9TSS
Interestingly enough, the way patents work nowadays amongst large companies is "We won't tell if you don't"
Which means that Xerox won't sue apple because they'll counter-sue on X other patents.
Which also means that pa-and-ma's software development house can't raise its head high enough to avoid getting sued into oblivion.
And this is good for innovation :)
Patents lock down ideas.
This is the problem, the patent system does not lock down ideas, it locks down implementations of ideas, or at least is meant to. The problem is that with software they are patenting the ideas themselves.
If I design a program to sort a list in the most effective way to date, then I don't believe anyone should use it without my permission
Your individual program of course not, that would be limited by copyright. But the method you used to sort?? By patenting it you would essentially be patenting the mathematics behind your algorithm, which is obviously a stupid idea from the get-go and there are reasons math is not allowed to be patented.
In conclusion, the actual instance of software is already protected enough by laws, we don't need patents to block entire segments of the market by patenting the "Idea".
Close, but I think what you mean to say is, specific implementations of algorithms in source/binary are already protected by copyright. People should be unable to patent different mathematical ways of doing the same thing, as well as the general idea.