Ask Slashdot: Reducing Software Patent Life-Spans?

seattle_coder writes "Many have advocated for the elimination of software patents. The arguments generally are that software patents are handed out too easily, and that they're too difficult and expensive to fight. Some say that patents just plain don't make sense for software, which is such a dynamic technology. Given that the standard patent lifetime is 20 years, and software changes so rapidly, is the life-span the problem for software patents? Would reducing the software patent lifetime to 5 years or even less be the thing to do?"

Comments

This doesn't solve the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because the process to get a patent can easily stretch five years. Also that doesn't solve some of the other fundamental problems with software patents, such as software being math.

Re:This doesn't solve the problem

[Odinlake]

Would reducing the software patent lifetime to 5 years or even less be the thing to do?

I think that would solve the problem, say, in the same way that we could stop obesity by poisoning all refined sugars with arsenic.

Better to just abolish them altogether then.

I've filed two (fairly insignificant) software patents for my employer. Of course this is one way they fund their research and can afford having smart people (and some others like me) sitting around and coming up with fancy stuff. The process isn't inherently bad (imho). The problem both with patents in general but with software patents in particular is that it's so difficult to distinguish between good and bad patents. One thing I think is really bad is that it is so easy to patent the obvious solution to a problem that just hasn't been considered until now because (e.g.) some necessary technology hasn't been around. But how can we make a rule to disallow patenting of the obvious? 10 years from now anything could seem "obvious". Another "bad" thing is too general patents. But a flip side of that coin is that if your patent isn't general enough, someone might fine a tiny little thing to change and thereby circumvent it with hardly any effort at all.

So all in all I would probably be for abolishing software patents or at least making them far more restrictive until it becomes clearer how they can be well used. But this isn't because they are inherently bad, but because we haven't figured out how to define good boundaries yet. Within specific fields I think it might well be possible to have useful software patents.

Re:This doesn't solve the problem

[WaywardGeek]

Well said. I also have a number of software patents I feel forced into. I avoided them for years, and then a competitor patented a software algorithm I'd invented and used as a trade secret for years. Since then, I probably filed a dozen software patents, though every one reduces a coder's ability to innovate. Feel free to search for "William Cox" and "QuickLogic" for the first few. I have never seen a software inovator create new algorithms because of the draw of patents. I have only seen large companies use them to scare developers from using products like Android and Linux, while patent trolls use them to suck insane profits from large companies. These patents are bad for everyone.

Better to eliminate them altogether

[Anonymous Coward]

We shouldn't be able to patent software for the same reason we can't patent mathematics. Copyright protection is sufficient and suitable for software.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[betterunixthanunix]

Except when companies like Eharmony get to patent mathematics. Really, a software patent is a mathematics patent, with concrete and potentially meaningful names assigned to the variables. Software is mathematics (CL, Lambda calculus, mu-recursive functions, etc.) dressed up to look prettier and be more human-readable (and perhaps machine readable too). A patent on software, without a specific underlying machine (e.g. like the original software patent from which this entire mess is descended), is a patent on mathematics. A patent on software coupled with a specific underlying machine is about as far as patents should be allowed to go, and only because of the modern reality of industrial processes and control equipment.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[kvvbassboy]

I have a possibly naive question. When a company starts investing in hardcore R&D in computer science, they do it with some level of confidence that by the end of the research, they will get some patent-able results that they can use freely, and at the same time prevent other companies from outright copying them without the need for the huge initial investment.

Basically, in such a situation, you get copy-cat trolls instead of patent trolls. How would you propose to solve this problem, if patents are eliminated all together?

I am all for making patents hard to achieve and lowering their life-spans, but IMO removing them completely will hurt research more than help it.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[1u3hr]

prevent other companies from outright copying them without the need for the huge initial investment....ls. How would you propose to solve this problem, if patents are eliminated all together?

Because copyright still exists, so they can't "outright copy" your code. They have to reimplement it. And that's what uses the great amount of manhours needed to create working applications.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[the biologist]

that would be what copyright is for.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[blair1q]

You can't patent math, but you can patent a process that applies it.

In other words, if you come up with a theorem, you can't prevent me from coming up with a new theorem that uses or requires your theorem.

But you can patent any new process for converting matter or data into other matter or data that depends on the truth of that theorem. If my theorem includes your theorem (rather than just requiring it to be true to prove mine is true), then I would owe you royalties because any process derived from my theorem would have to include processes derived from your theorem.

The trick is to determine all the processes dependent on your theorem and claiming them before prior art undercuts you.

E.g., you can't patent 1+1=2, but you sure could patent the abacus, and everything that works like an abacus, if you'd been there.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[blair1q]

They didn't patent math. They patented a process for reducing the search set of a large database using a method involving a certain sort of fuzzy pattern matching. The fact that they can model that in math is irrelevant, except that it's the necessary to use that math to describe how it works in a patent application, though it's by no means sufficient to use only math to describe the entire invention.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Jane Q. Public]

"A patent on software coupled with a specific underlying machine is about as far as patents should be allowed to go, and only because of the modern reality of industrial processes and control equipment."

That argument was shot down over 100 years ago, in court cases regarding to player piano rolls that controlled machines... the pianos.

The courts ruled (quite properly) that the "software" -- the rolls that controlled the pianos -- were simply expressions of written music, and therefore the appropriate law for protecting them was copyright law, not patent law. They reasoned that a written work is a written work, no matter what physical form it may take, and regardless of whether it controlled a machine... a piece of punched paper telling a machine what to play did not fundamentally differ from a printed piece of paper telling a human musician what to play. It was exactly the same music, only the physical form had changed.

Recent years have brought nothing new to the table. There is no real difference between a piece of software (which is ultimately written by human beings) telling a computer what to do, than an English translation of the software telling a bunch of people with pencils and paper what to do. The only real difference is speed... nothing fundamental has changed at all.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[CastrTroy]

I have no problem with software patents so long as they want to divulge full source code as part of the patent, so that we don't have to redo their discovery when the patent expires. It's seems a little odd that they can get a patent, and then not release the source code in order to make the patent useful. There is no reason that the same piece of source code should get patent, copyright, and trade secret protections.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[currently_awake]

No, it's not. De-compiling to source then re-compiling using a different compiler will result in different (machine) code, the copyright won't match. The only way to protect software is with short term patents, and that patent needs to include both source code and the algorithm- or sufficient info to allow it to be implemented. Some people suggest software isn't deserving of protection, but if you just spent 5 years full time building a mission critical embedded RTOS for a commodity router you'd want to be paid for it.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Odinlake]

We shouldn't be able to patent software for the same reason we can't patent mathematics. Copyright protection is sufficient and suitable for software.

That's oversimplifying. A piece of software can be seen as a component of a physical machine - which it in fact is whenever it would be used in practice (electrons arranged so-and-so in transistors etc.). There is no clear boundary between software and hardware because pretty much any interesting piece of hardware you look at today has some amount of software built in to it.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[bunratty]

Patents are granted for ideas. You can have an idea for building a machine or an idea for building a program. Those ideas can be patented. If you implement the idea in software, that particular implementation is copyrightable. Patents and copyrights apply to different things, You're playing a semantic game by calling a program software and also an algorithm software, and trying to claim copyrights and patents apply to both.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[kvvbassboy]

Copying your code does not apply for closed source applications anyway, my question has has more to do with the working algorithms that you put money and man-hours into. These are rarely used directly in your final application. Without patents, there is little incentive to put money into research, why not just wait for someone else to build and test a working prototype of an algorithm, and then implement it for your own application. You would be saving a lot of money this way. In case, you manage to produce a shinier product with the same algorithm, you are going to make more money.

I am currently wary of a patent for an algorithm filed by a huge corporation just recently. It is certainly hampering progress in my application and it is a screwed up system on the whole, but I can understand why they would want to protect it. Everyone would just look at it, and go like "Oh this works, let me implement it".

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[robbak]

Yes there is. If you can knock on it, it's hardware, and can be patented. If you can't, it's software, and you can copyright it. Why is this hard?

"It can be seen" = we'll try to twist this until the fact becomes hidden. "It can be seen" != "is true".

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[1u3hr]

You would be saving a lot of money this way. In case, you manage to produce a shinier product with the same algorithm, you are going to make more money.

Tough for the inventor, good for the market.

It takes a lot of work to make a "shinier product". You can keep polishing your product and building market share and reputation and stay ahead. In any case, if a big company wants to copy your idea, they'll just do it and you have to try to prove they used your patented method. Can take a decade and cost millions.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Odinlake]

Yes there is. If you can knock on it, it's hardware, and can be patented. If you can't, it's software, and you can copyright it. Why is this hard?

"It can be seen" = we'll try to twist this until the fact becomes hidden. "It can be seen" != "is true".

Because I can formulated my bubble-sort patent like so: "A machine, that you can knock on, that represents integers as [10 pages to explain] and sorts them by doing [10 more pages to explain]". As soon as you program your computer to do bubble sort it becomes exactly the machine I just described, and you are infringing on my patent.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[brokeninside]

IANAL, but it seems to me that the case of decompiling a binary to source and then recompiling, copyright infringement would probably be trivially easy to prove.

Consider movies. Copyright infringement of a plot is devilishly hard to prove. But if a chain can be demonstrated where a producer starts with a script and alters it bit by bit into a different product, the author of the original script has a good chance at successfully suing the producer. (Such happened to Steve Spielberg IIRC.) Your decompile -> recompile scenario would exactly fit this sort of situation.

But a clean room reverse engineering project would not infringe copyright. It might, however, infringe a patent.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[westlake]

We shouldn't be able to patent software for the same reason we can't patent mathematics. Copyright protection is sufficient and suitable for software.

I am tempted to think that software is more than math, it is math and logic applied to a particular problem in the real world --- where the sucess or failure of your solution isn't defined by mathematical or logical rules.

But by how much it will cost to mplement. How quickly it can be brought to market. The pupose will it serve.

These aren't the kind of questions that define a man as a mathematician --- but they most certainly are the questions that define a man as an inventor.

Copyright gives an writer a potent weapon against derivative works, against the "reverse engineering." of his stories. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck... No one is obliged open up the hood to look inside.

The internal mechanisms described in a patent matter.

To do an old thing - or a new thing - in a clearly original and productive way is what a patent is all about.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[speedplane]

If you can knock on it, it's hardware, and can be patented. If you can't, it's software, and you can copyright it.

You really propose a "knock" test? Can you "knock" on a pharmaceutical drug or a manufacturing process? Guess those patents are out. It would be pretty hard to knock on anything smaller than a golf-ball, so I guess anything smaller than that are out too.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[retchdog]

this is in much the same sense, that any physical device is "math" because it obeys the laws of physics.

yes, you can say that the mathematical description of the physical device only approximates the real device. however, i analogously would dare you to fix a non-trivial encoding system & compute the Church-numbers for some meaningful programs... you can start with emacs and vi. :)

i'm against software patents (see sig), but this argument, although formally true in some sense, is just silly; no software is derived mathematically - the fact that there is a church numeral has nothing at all to do with how the software came to be. for one, two programs which are intuitively close (say, change for() to while()) may have no meaningful proximity under the mapping to |N.

rms has a better argument in that the "overlap" problem is too easy for software - it's so much easier to combine and adapt techniques in software, that one piece of software can easily and necessarily infringe a huge number of patents and thus be doomed. knuth for instance has said that he couldn't have written TeX today for this reason.

moving on, and conversely, a (strong imho) case could be made that patents are more appropriate than copyright for a lot of software design. apart from some poetic musings by emotional programmers, software is much more like engineering than it is like playwriting. of course i admit that copyright "works" for software, but it does so in a convoluted way. basically by prohibiting copying, it forces duplication of effort toward a well-defined goal and thus artificially increases the cost. that the effort is toward a well-defined goal makes it different from the application of copyright to "fine arts." yes, copyright "works" for software, but it's economically pretty incoherent.

i think the most sensible angle to take (and the only one which would be even remotely attainable) would be to scale patent terms back into line with what 17 years meant in the 1800s. in terms of technology lifecycles, seventeen years back then is equivalent to, what, maybe a few years? an entire generation of technology can pass over one patent term, and i think you could get wide agreement that that's just dumb.

the very best case among those possible i think might be to remove copyright protection and scale patents down drastically - as in on the scale of months, not years.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[robbak]

Seems like you've got my point :D

You can knock on a drug, if you have molecular knuckles. "Manufacturing process" seems to be how we slid down into this mess to start with.

Well, maybe I wasn't being completely serious, at least for a general patent rule. In IT, however, it applies.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[speedplane]

Okay, so now we have a far more reasonable knock + IT test. If it's in IT and you can knock on it, then you can patent it? There are no easy lines. Everything is a shade a gray.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Dwonis]

No, it's not. De-compiling to source then re-compiling using a different compiler will result in different (machine) code, the copyright won't match. The only way to protect software is with short term patents...

It doesn't work that way. As it turns out, judges are not stupid. Copyright law already applies to translations of a work, and for software, there's the abstraction-filtration-comparison test.

if you just spent 5 years full time building a mission critical embedded RTOS for a commodity router you'd want to be paid for it.

In my experience, if you're building anything of value, you have customers and/or investors lined up while you're building it. Patents really don't make much of a difference.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[plague911]

Any design is math Yes code is at least 1 step closer but a design for a really sweat engine can be just as well represented with '1's and '0's

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[dgatwood]

Basically, in such a situation, you get copy-cat trolls instead of patent trolls. How would you propose to solve this problem, if patents are eliminated all together?

You seem to be under the mistaken notion that this is something that someone needs to protect against.

Writing good software is not trivial. If somebody can knock off your "invention" in six weeks of coding, then your "invention" can't possibly be sufficiently non-obvious or non-trivial to be worthy of patent protection anyway. And if it takes them a couple of years, by that point, your software should be two years ahead, which means that it should not be possible for them to realistically catch up.

In short, as Bill Gates once said, "Innovate or Die." That's the software business. If you are resting on your laurels, you aren't contributing anything useful to society, and you should not be able to continue profiting from it for an extended period of time.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Chirs]

In many pieces of software the algorithms are obvious and straightforward, it's just tedius to implement them and make them interface vwith the rest of the system. I would say it's actually rare that the algorithms are particularly innovative.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[TheRaven64]

The real argument against software patents is that they provide nothing of value. The purpose of a patent (in theory) is to encourage disclosure, so that other people can implement the same idea without having to reinvent it independently. When was the last time you heard of a software developer wanting a solution to a problem and doing a patent search? Developers at big companies are explicitly told not to do this, because it increases the company's liability if they are caught infringing a patent.

Do software patents encourage innovation? There's little evidence for that. There are two sets of software patents that people often cite as evidence that they do: RSA and H.264. There was a sufficiently large market for secure communications that public key cryptography would have been developed by a company interested in selling products based on it sooner or later. Even if they hadn't, then after a few years the official secret in the UK would have expired and GCHQ would have published it (as did happen, although interestingly the fact that it had been invented decades earlier did not count as prior art).

H.264 is easier, simply compare it with OpenGL. On the implementer side, a lot of the players are the same. The difference is that OpenGL is developed as a royalty-free standard so you see cheaper hardware OpenGL implementations than hardware H.264 implementations. Take a look at the list of MPAA members. Then a list of BluRay manufacturers. Then a list of mobile SoC manufacturers. Then the (admittedly much smaller) list of browser makers. All of these have a financial interest in the existence of a useable, open, video standard. Do you really think none of these would have put any money into video CODEC R&D without software patents? Google was willing to spend $133M for a royalty-free video standard...

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[infalliable]

Companies do research because there is a problem (with a market) that needs solved. You never research purely with the goal of a patent. A patent w/o a product to apply it to is useless to a legitimate company.

You don't require patents. Other factors such as better implementation and first to market are huge bonuses for whoever invents a technology (software or not). Copiers will always be one step behind you.

The other thing with software patents is that the provide poor notice of what they actually cover. Because software is an abstract thing, describing the limits and details in a patent is hard. As a result, the boundaries of what is covered by a software patent tend to be very fuzzy. This is primarily why there is such a huge rise in software patent lawsuits. Even if one was very diligent in researching past patents, it's almost impossible to really know if you're in the clear.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[drinkypoo]

A programmable general purpose computer is a very different thing from a piano, and a piece of software is a very different thing from a piano roll, or for that matter, a MIDI file.

I don't disagree that software patents are ridiculous, but this ain't the reason.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Theaetetus]

There is no real difference between a piece of software (which is ultimately written by human beings) telling a computer what to do, than an English translation of the software telling a bunch of people with pencils and paper what to do. The only real difference is speed... nothing fundamental has changed at all.

That's entirely true, and it would be relevant if people were patenting just the software. But they're not - they patent various electronic components including processors and memory performing the steps of the software. There's a huge difference between that and a bunch of people with pencils and paper - no electronic processors in the latter. See In re Warmerdam - a patentable machine is patentable, even if performing unpatentable subject matter such as math.

And before you say that that difference is obvious, realize we're talking about patentable subject matter (35 USC 101), not obviousness (35 USC 103). Different requirements. A known machine that performs an entirely new and nonobvious process is patentable, regardless of the fact the machine was known.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Theaetetus]

prevent other companies from outright copying them without the need for the huge initial investment....ls. How would you propose to solve this problem, if patents are eliminated all together?

Because copyright still exists, so they can't "outright copy" your code. They have to reimplement it. And that's what uses the great amount of manhours needed to create working applications.

Yeah, copyright sure protected the makers of Crush the Castle- er, Angry Birds- er, City Destruction- etc.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[drinkypoo]

I don't see that they're different in their fundamental nature, however; frankly, I'm puzzled that you think they are.

Really? You don't see the difference between something designed to be meaningful when handed to a CPU vs. something designed to be meaningful when handed to a MIDI sequencer? You must have serious computing problems.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[drinkypoo]

When you hand a CPU a MIDI file it goes WTF. When you hand a CPU a piece of software it gives it purpose. Software plus hardware equals functioning computer. Hardware without software equals inert lump. I would argue that the line between the function of hardware and software is much thinner than that between software and a MIDI file. There is at least a logical argument for covering software with a patent, and copyright. Software does stuff. You do stuff with data files. Indeed, you do it with software, but you cannot use a data file to interpret software, though you may be able to use the pair of them to reverse engineer its purpose, and indeed the data file alone may tell you a great deal about the function and purpose of the program.

I would argue that in a system where any patents exist, software patents make as much sense as any. However, business method patents which are merely a resubmission of a prior patent with the words "on the internet" added should clearly fail an obviousness test, and the period of all patents is provably too long in the modern world in which change progresses much more rapidly than it did when patents were conceived. I'd prefer to eliminate all patents, because there are ways for smaller entities to profit under such a system and it eliminates the patent shuffle hullabaloo entirely.

I do suspect that if we're going to have software patents, possibly the only way to restore sanity is to shift the burden of proof of non-obviousness to the submitter. If you want a patent on some software you should have to prove that it is substantially different from existing software, in some fundamental way other than "I applied the obvious formula to this data" or "I applied the formula I was using over here to this data over here".

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[black soap]

so, they patented a service they perform? No competing company can perform similar calculation? That sounds like "business method" patents, which ought to be even more obviously stupid.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Jane Q. Public]

"A programmable general purpose computer is a very different thing from a piano..."

If you really believe that, then you don't understand how your computer works.

Ultimately, the computer takes a relatively small number of fixed instructions, which chained together make up a program. This scheme traces back at least as far as Charles Babbage's Difference Engine in 1822, and the Jacquard loom from 1801. Both were mechanical devices, but both operated on basically the same principles as the computer.

There is NOTHING fundamentally different about a computer. The only real difference (which is not a fundamental difference at all) is the speed and convenience of executing those instructions, nothing more. Heck, my first experience with a computer actually involved punch cards!

"I don't disagree that software patents are ridiculous, but this ain't the reason."

Yes, it is.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[marnues]

I must agree with the AC. This is a completely ridiculous argument as software does _not_ do stuff. Software tells a computer what to do just the same as a roll tells a player piano what to do. It is the hardware that is doing something. Software is nothing more than instructions for the hardware, an infinite resource of infinite combinations that are only limited by the actual physical machine and our imaginations. I'm really ashamed that not only does TFS not understand what's going on here, but so much of the general /. populace doesn't either. These are not novel or new arguments. Instructions, no matter how complex, should never have been allowed to be patented.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[marnues]

No one is disputing that the new machine is patentable. That's the point of the patent system. However, any parts about software or instructions should be removed. They should not have been patentable.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Jane Q. Public]

"Software plus hardware equals functioning computer. Hardware without software equals inert lump. I would argue that the line between the function of hardware and software is much thinner than that between software and a MIDI file."

You are drawing invisible lines in the sand. The MIDI file in question can also be processed by a computer... MIDI is all about computers, in fact. That's what MIDI is for. (Hint: the "D" in MIDI stands for "digital".) Further, if you are talking about a dedicated MIDI instrument, you still haven't shown a distinction because that is nothing but a computer that puts out analog sound. At the heart of most MIDI instruments is a general-purpose processor, though it may have dedicated firmware.

Further, let's say I take a multi-voice MIDI instrument, and build a gadget such that a simultaneous C note from two voices outputs the MIDI instruction for an E note, and any other input outputs a C note.

I have just built a NAND gate. String enough NAND gates together in the right sequence and you have yourself... a general-purpose computer! A particularly inefficient computer: most of the digital processing that takes place inside the MIDI instruments is going to waste... but a computer nevertheless.

I'm not saying that this makes a MIDI instrument a computer. On the contrary. A MIDI instrument is already a computer. My point is that you are simply drawing arbitrary lines in the sand that make no sense.

Any two-input inverting gate (such as NAND or NOR) can be the building blocks of a general-purpose computer. They can be constructed of wood, or water tanks with valves. They don't have to be electrical to form a computer. And a computer does not have to be that thing under your desk connected to an LCD screen. A Turing-complete ("general purpose") computer can be much simpler than you seem to think.

You may say that I am arguing semantics, but actually I'm not. You are. You are the one making artificial, meaningless distinctions.

Let me go back to my pencil-and-paper example: there is nothing a computer can do, that a group of people with pencils and paper can't do. The computer might display the results on an LCD screen. The people might display the results on a large reader board using pieces of paper. There is no fundamental difference. The computer uses software that has been translated into machine language. That very same software can be translated into English instructions that tell the people what to do, and how to display the answer. There really is no difference, other than scale (size and speed). Therefore, there should be no difference in the principles that are applied.

"I would argue that in a system where any patents exist, software patents make as much sense as any."

And that is where we -- and U.S. courts until very recently, under pressure from special interests -- disagree. Software is best served by copyrights. The patent system should avoid software like the plague. Other people have made the argument that patenting software is patenting math, which is improper. I would go further (as the courts have in the past), and say that patenting software is more akin to patenting certain sentences or paragraphs of the English language. It is nothing but a set of instructions (words) arranged in particular sequences (sentences) in order to have a specific effect. Which is all written language is.

Clearly, even if you write a paragraph that has never been written before by anyone, which has a specific effect (say, making people laugh and cry at the same time), that still doesn't justify it being patentable: it's still only a sequence of words. The combination may be interesting but if you patent it, you deprive everyone else of being able to use those words.

If you really think software should be patentable, for the reasons you state, then the same argument can be extended to novels, just as easily. Try patenting novels, and see what kind of mess that makes.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Theaetetus]

No one is disputing that the new machine is patentable. That's the point of the patent system. However, any parts about software or instructions should be removed. They should not have been patentable.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly disagreed. See In re Warmerdam and In re Beauregard.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[blair1q]

no, they patented a means for converting data from a non-profitable form to a profitable form. which is the whole point of protecting the idea.

pure math doesn't do that, ordinarily. i can't patent the concept of the venn diagram, but i can patent all means of using venn diagrams automatically in computation.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Jane Q. Public]

I should add one more thing to make my point clearer:

A primary reason that collections of words are not patentable is the principle regarding patents that a patent must be novel, and not just a combination of existing ideas. In other words, you can't embed a bottle opener into the head of a hammer and call it a new, patentable idea. Unless that combination also does something new and unique, like somehow also enable people to get rid of their dog's fleas forever. (This is in regard to what are often called "utility patents", of course, not design patents, which are a completely different animal and not relevant to this discussion.)

English sentences, and paragraphs, and chapters and books are not patentable for the same reason: they are mere collections of existing objects. One can put them in new and novel arrangements: a poem or short story or novel. But even though the sequence of words may have a particular effect (happiness, sadness, inspiration), they are still only constructions made of simpler, well-known items.

The very same is true of software. The underlying instructions are like words. They can be arranged into patters that are unique, and have particular effects... but ultimately they are still just collections of simple instructions, and therefore not patentable.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Jane Q. Public]

"That's entirely true, and it would be relevant if people were patenting just the software. But they're not - they patent various electronic components including processors and memory performing the steps of the software."

And THAT would be relevant, if it were true. But it's not. I mean certainly that does happen, but people (mostly corporations) are, and have been, patenting "just" software, and algorithms, without any associated hardware.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Jane Q. Public]

This entire discussion has been about "just" software, not software in conjunction with dedicated hardware. Except as used to illustrate a point.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[drinkypoo]

I must agree with the AC. This is a completely ridiculous argument as software does _not_ do stuff. Software tells a computer what to do just the same as a roll tells a player piano what to do.

Get back to me when you find a turing-complete player piano. Pretending that a dumb machine like a player piano is like a cpu plus code is inane at best and more accurately imbecilic or even moronic. And yet, we might reasonably compare a computer without code to a player piano without a power source (whether it runs on electricity, or compressed air, or a midget on an exercycle) in that it doesn't do anything.

The difference goes way beyond the piano being unable to write rolls. The piano only has one trick. The computer has an infinite number of tricks, and all of them based on software.

There are cases where the line is blurred, but in those cases portions can be segregated for the purpose of establishing legal rights and/or responsibilities. And it's clear that copyright applies to software whether patents do or not. But again, a computer is not a player piano and a piano roll is not software. It is media. The programmable computer is a wholly new thing even though you can build them with the oldest of technologies. Software is like a machine and it is like media and to suggest that it is not like either of those things is the folly when it is both.

If you want to argue that software patents are detrimental that's cool. I agree, which is why I had a cute little no s.patents microbanner on my webpage before the page it moved to went away and I couldn't find any pages I wanted to relink it to. But to suggest that there is no difference between software and any other bytestream is to disingenuously (or, I suppose, ignorantly) disregard technical reality. I personally hate it when politicians do that kind of crap, and I find it a bit baffling in supposed nerds. We live here in reality where operations and repercussions pertaining to different kinds of bytestreams differ. They have different purposes and different effects. It is not unreasonable for them to be governed or regulated by different bodies of law.

Let us abolish software patents! But let us use rational arguments in the attempt.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[Jane Q. Public]

"Get back to me when you find a turing-complete player piano. Pretending that a dumb machine like a player piano is like a cpu plus code is inane at best and more accurately imbecilic or even moronic."

I know you were replying to someone else, but let me try this one last time. If you don't get the point then, I won't be bothering anymore.

"The difference goes way beyond the piano being unable to write rolls. The piano only has one trick. The computer has an infinite number of tricks, and all of them based on software."

And that's where you are mistaken. Or rather, not mistaken per se, but that is where your perception is fooling you. Once again: a piano roll is nothing more than a set of instructions intended to control a machine.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we forget things like pedals, and just consider a piano note to be "on" or "off". So then, a player piano has 88 keys. That means at any given time, there are 2^88 possible combinations of notes that can be played by that player piano. That's more than 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations. Rather than playing notes, I could take those levers that drive those keys, and with a clever combination of levers and gears, redirect their output to do different things. Even (as Babbage proved), perform all the internal functions that an electronic computer performs. The difference between the piano and my new gadget would not be the capability of the arrangement, but simply what I choose to make it do.

So the size of the instruction set of my machine... my altered piano... is 2^88. In contrast, the instruction set of most modern computers is a hell of a lot smaller than the theoretical maximum of their processors, which would be only 2^64. That's means that my piano has the capability of doing at least 2^22, or more than 4 million times as many "different things" as your desktop computer can. Those instructions are then put into particular sequences... whether to play notes or to do other things, it doesn't matter. Because the operating principles are exactly the same.

A computer cannot do anything that I cannot do with pencil and paper, given enough time. A recipe, or other set of instructions, telling me what to do is no different in principle from a recipe, or set of instructions, telling a computer what to do. Just as taking written music, and translating it into paper rolls, to instruct a piano what to do, so is taking a written program, and translating it into instructions that a computer understands.

Still don't believe me? Well, I have a clue for you, dude. You know what Bill Gates' first successful software venture was? It was a BASIC interpreter, in the form of punched paper tape, for the Altair microcomputer. And if you are going to continue to tell me there is no similarity between a punched paper roll for controlling a player piano and a roll of punched paper for controlling a computer, then you are simply wrong. At least (as shown above) 4 million times wrong. (Actually, the old Altair was an 8-bit machine so it would be more like 1 x 10^24 times, whatever number that is.)

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[drinkypoo]

And that's where you are mistaken. Or rather, not mistaken per se, but that is where your perception is fooling you. Once again: a piano roll is nothing more than a set of instructions intended to control a machine.

Once again, a piano is a fundamentally different kind of machine than a computer.

And if you are going to continue to tell me there is no similarity between a punched paper roll for controlling a player piano and a roll of punched paper for controlling a computer, then you are simply wrong.

There is a superficial physical similarity. The tape is read in a different way and its contents are read into memory before they can be executed. The piano roll is never executed, simply acted upon. There is a dramatic difference because you can modify code in place but you can't modify a piano roll in place. Attempting to conflate the two is ridiculous. In the case of the piano roll the medium is the data.

my piano has the capability of doing at least 2^22, or more than 4 million times as many "different things" as your desktop computer can.

That is an incredibly stupid thing to say when my desktop computer can be a piano. You are still not getting this. The computer can modify its code and the piano can not. It is a fundamentally different kind of machine and it is reasonable to govern it by different rules. The data for it is therefore a fundamentally different kind of data. Further, there's way more than one way to play each note. You could probably describe the complexity of a piano in terms of bits, but you'd need a lot more bits. However, in order to describe the complexity of the computer you would still need far more bits; you have to consider every register, all of memory, and so on. The computer clearly has vastly more states than the piano. This is not the meat of my argument, but it does call into question yours. The piano is a simplistic toy compared to even a simple programmable computer, which can do things it will never do, as well as being able to do what it DOES do.

Your bringing up software on paper tape displays either dramatic ignorance or willful disingenuity.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[cjcela]

So... you are proposing to patent the instructions (software or piano roll) according to what the machine (piano or computer) can perform with them? I am sorry, I think you are not understanding what the issue is here. Both of them are essentially programmable machines, even if one is more complex than the other - because of that, their instructions/rolls/software should be handled equally under the law.

Re:Better to eliminate them altogether

[drinkypoo]

The piano has no memory, so it is not a computer. It is just a fancy music box.

a word of advice...

[Lead Butthead]

the one that's holding all the cards isn't going to ask for a new hand. the broken patent system serves the interests of large corporations, and they'll fight tooth and nail against any changes that is against their interest. in summary - dream on.

Re:a word of advice...

[sjames]

We'll just have to sink a few yachts...

8 years from filing date or 5 from product launch?

[perpenso]

Would reducing the software patent lifetime to 5 years or even less be the thing to do?

Sometimes the patent has to be filed during development, not when the product is being released. So that proposed five year time frame could include a couple of years of development. Perhaps five is too short, or perhaps that five years begins with product release. Maybe eight years from filing or five years from product launch, whichever occurs first?

NO PATENTS

[Runaway1956]

No patents for software, period. Copyright protection is the only proper protection for software. I cannot compromise on that position. And, yes, copyright protections should be limited for software, as well. There is really almost nothing in the world today more than 15 years old which NEEDS protecting! It's so obsolete that no one wants to use it. It should be publicly available, and in the public domain, for student's use, more than anything.

Re:NO PATENTS

[Jane Q. Public]

I agree 100%. That's what the courts ruled in the past, and only recently has that changed. And just look at what a mess those changes have made.

Re:NO PATENTS

[gronofer]

I'd like to see no patents, period. The situation isn't any better in other fields.

Re:NO PATENTS

[Theaetetus]

Copyright protection is the only proper protection for software. I cannot compromise on that position... There is really almost nothing in the world today more than 15 years old which NEEDS protecting!

Refusal to compromise plus an untenable, immature, and frankly naive position means that you'll never be able to persuade anyone.

Re:NO PATENTS

[marnues]

Except that any compromise here means we lose. Software patents in any form hurt society and progress. Why would we compromise, especially when software patents are a new idea, not a long held legal or social concept?

Re:NO PATENTS

[Jane Q. Public]

Why do you say it is an "untenable" position? The courts have held software-type works to be non-patentable for 100 years. It is only in recent years that has changed... and look at the mess that change has caused.

Not only is his position quite tenable, mature, and wise, it has been proven by history to be a better position than yours.

Maybe you ought to read up on a bit of that history.

Re:NO PATENTS

[Theaetetus]

Why do you say it is an "untenable" position?

Refusal to compromise is always an untenable position, particularly if you have no power, just loud whining.

The courts have held software-type works to be non-patentable for 100 years. It is only in recent years that has changed... and look at the mess that change has caused.

Actually, the courts see no difference in the position they have now. In fact, Bilski cited Diehr positively. So, what's changed, other than the arguments from the other side?

Not only is his position quite tenable, mature, and wise, it has been proven by history to be a better position than yours.

My position is the position of Congress and the courts for the past 220 years, affirmed just yesterday in Microsoft v. i4i. You didn't see anything in there about how software was unpatentable, did you? Nope, me neither... So what, exactly, has history proven to be right in his position? Maybe you ought to read up on a bit of that history.

Re:NO PATENTS

[Jane Q. Public]

"Actually, the courts see no difference in the position they have now. In fact, Bilski cited Diehr positively. So, what's changed, other than the arguments from the other side?"

What has changed is that the court ruled that certain software can be patented, which it had not ruled before. Duh.

"The courts" may not see it differently, but very obviously, to anybody who is involved in or watches the software market, things are very different now.

"You didn't see anything in there about how software was unpatentable, did you? Nope, me neither... So what, exactly, has history proven to be right in his position? Maybe you ought to read up on a bit of that history."

You are simply demonstrating either ignorance, or a gross misunderstanding of what I wrote. Obviously there was nothing about it in that case, because software is not considered un-patentable anymore. It's that little difference that you say you didn't notice, you see. And I have read up on that history. That's why I know things are different now, and you apparently don't.

Re:NO PATENTS

[Jane Q. Public]

By the way, your comment:

"Refusal to compromise is always an untenable position, particularly if you have no power, just loud whining."

is a real knee-slapper, since in effect you are saying that any absolute position is "always" untenable... which makes that sentence itself untenable. But even if it were not self-contradictory, it would still be wrong.

For example, I could say (hypothetically of course): "I will protect myself, my family, and my property, to the death if need be." That is an uncompromising position. But it is hardly untenable. And if you don't believe that, you might try threatening myself, my family, or my property, and finding out just how tenable it is. (And no, that is not an invitation.)

You're framing it wrong

[cultiv8]

is the life-span the problem for software patents?

No, the problem is that software is an algorithm and shouldn't be subject to patent law anyways. It's like trying to patent a mathematical formula.

Re:You're framing it wrong

[blair1q]

Software isn't an algorithm. It's a device for controlling a computer.

Re:You're framing it wrong

[icebraining]

By that logic, a cooking recipe is a device for controlling a human.

OMG, mind control is here!

Re:You're framing it wrong

[cultiv8]

Oh you lawyer you...

Re:You're framing it wrong

[kvvbassboy]

No, you can't patent a mathematical formula, but it should be "ethical" to patent an implementation of a mathematical formula (=algorithm) for a specific application. Why the hell would someone spend years of research creating an algorithm if it is going to be easy to implement it a week after his/her labor and associated costs?

Oh, and there is a world of difference between software and algorithm.

Re:You're framing it wrong

[SoulNibbler]

Maybe its because I'm doing scientific computing but I think you are lost on your time scales here. You say it takes years to develop an algorithm. I'd say I develope new algorithms every few weeks. Then I spend a long time figuring out which ones actually work well and how to compare them and choose the 'best' for my problem. I publish the resulting software which is protected by copyright and I don't give you the source. Now how are you supposed to have ANY idea how my algorithm works. Its a black box and you have to gain my experience to expand upon it. Therefore my work has value, if you want an expert on solving this sort of question you have to hire me. If you can solve what took me years and layers to develop into a working piece of software quickly, well then I look pretty dumb. In retrospect I've just convinced myself of an underthought advantage to patents. If I do alot of work and am convinced that I know some tricks to solving a problem and you convince me to sell them to you then a patent is a nice way to transfer those rights. Though now that I'm thinking a bit harder I think that a legally binding contract can be just as useful if I just want to share the punchline with you. If you share my punchline without permission or have it stolen then I go through the same (but maybe cleaner, since it is a contract) legal mess to sue you for damages. I do think that formal copyright on software should have source included, but for algorithms I think trade secrets are much better for business and society in the long run.

Re:You're framing it wrong

[blair1q]

By your logic, all patents are invalid because they can't control a court.

Re:You're framing it wrong

[marnues]

Your definition is filthy and so off base that it probably has the desired effect. Any one with a lick of understanding is completely dumbfounded by such buffoonery while the laypeople will agree. Software is a device, how silly!

Re:You're framing it wrong

[blair1q]

So you have no answer and decide to support the luddites. Wh'eva.

Re:You're framing it wrong

[marnues]

If it took you years to develop an algorithm but it only takes someone else weeks to re-implement it, then you are in the wrong industry. It should have taken you weeks to implement the first time. You are entitled to nothing more than copyright on your own works.

Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[telchine]

I dunno about patents so much. I think used properly they are useful. Unfortunately they are more often used to stifle innovation than they are to encourage it like they were intended to do!

My main worry is copyright. I think copyright law needs dramatic alteration! To me a Rudyard Kipling work that has been out-of-copyright for some time and bastardized by Disney to create "The Jungle Book" is more worthy of protection that a 20 year old computer game like "Tai-Chi Tortoise"

The first has a great deal of artistic merit, and will be recided in its original form for hundreds of years. The second will be in copyright for many years, despite the fact it has slipped from memory already!

There should be some distinction between a work that has potential monetary worth 75 years after its creation, and something that has no worth 5 years after creation.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[Lloyd_Bryant]

There should be some distinction between a work that has potential monetary worth 75 years after its creation, and something that has no worth 5 years after creation.

Not only no, but Hell No!

If you create *any* sort of differentiation, then it will be exploited so that the big corporations' work gets the max protection, and stuff by little guys gets the minimum, regardless of any artistic merit or monetary value. It won't start out that way, of course, but over time corporations *will* find a way to corrupt the system for their benefit.

Copyright would be just fine if the term was limited to something sane. After all, it exists for the sole purpose of encouraging the creation of new works. Rudyard Kipling won't be releasing any new works (unless he comes back as a zombie, that is), so there is no reason whatsoever to have any protection on his original works.

The sole determinant for whether a work should be in copyright is whether it will benefit the original creator for it to remain in copyright. Not a corporation that bought the rights. Not the creator's children (or grandchildren, or great-great-great-grandchildren). Just the original creator.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[robbak]

There should be some distinction between a work that has potential monetary worth 75 years after its creation, and something that has no worth 5 years after creation.

I have a different opinion. Any work that still has relevance 20 years after it's release has become an important piece of cultural property that _desperately_ needs to be in the public domain, and the property of all.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[airfoobar]

I strongly disagree with you. Framing the copyright issue only from an economic stand-point is what got us in this mess, and to be sure that's not what the creators of copyright intended. To understand how wrong your definition is, consider this: should published artistic works that will always have monetary value (such as Homer, Shakespeare and Kipling) always remain in copyright because there will always be people who'd spend money to acquire them? Or, should those works eventually enter the "commons" where no single person has economic control over them, they are integrated into our culture and everyone can access and derive from them? Also, who decides which art is better to hand out custom copyright terms?

Copyright is a time and scope-limited monopoly on copying, it's not a license to print money. All works deserve the same amount of monopoly, if any, regardless of their quality, because all creators deserve an equal opportunity to control and profit from their work. How much each creator profits in the limited time they hold the monopoly is up to them and depends heavily on the quality of their art. Really, who would make more money from his art in a 10-year copyright term, Kipling or "Tai-Chi Tortoise"?

Moreover, why should Kipling be worthy of protection TODAY for something he published over 110 years ago? The monopoly of copyright was only intended as an incentive to publish works that will soon fall into the commons, and surely, he isn't going to publish any more books. His work is in the commons as it should be; it has become everyone's culture, just like the works of countless other storytellers throughout history, and everyone should be able to read it and even change it without restriction.

Is there any reason Disney should not have "bastardised" his work? Perhaps Disney's version doesn't agree with your personal tastes, but why shouldn't that version of the stories exist? Does Disney's version not have artistic value of its own? Would you prefer if that version had not been made? How many people would agree with you? Did Kipling lose anything when Disney adapted his work as a cartoon?

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[cpt kangarooski]

The sole determinant for whether a work should be in copyright is whether it will benefit the original creator for it to remain in copyright.

Not only no, but Hell No!

The issue is whether it will benefit the public for it to remain in copyright. Copyright exists for the sole purpose of serving the public interest, by promoting the progress of science. It does this in two ways: First, by encouraging the creation and publication of the greatest number of works which otherwise would not have been created and published; Second, by limiting the scope and duration of copyright as much as possible.

It doesn't really matter what authors want, except insofar as we're essentially trying to 'bribe' them with the offer of a copyright, and it needs to be the least bribe possible that still gets them to do what we want, viz. create and publish works. Of course, at some point there is an issue of diminishing returns: It might be impossible to get a particularly recalcitrant author to dash off a few lines without promising him the moon. In that case, much as we might like having that work available, the price is too high, and we'll just have to pass. So long as the public gets the most bang for its buck, as it were, who cares whether authors like the deal. It's not as though they have a lot of alternatives.

Copyright would be just fine if the term was limited to something sane.

No, it would take more than that. In fact, I'd say that the number one reform we need is to stop automatically granting copyrights; we need to require registrations and impose some strict formalities. A system of short overall terms comprised of even shorter initial and renewal terms would probably be number two, and a broad exception for non-commercial infringement by natural persons would probably be number three.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[Endo13]

Wish I could mod you up. So many people just don't realize what the reason for copyright is any more. It was never intended to generate monetary wealth. It was intended to generate cultural wealth by providing monetary incentive.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[airfoobar]

I'd say that the number one reform we need is to stop automatically granting copyrights; we need to require registrations and impose some strict formalities. A system of short overall terms comprised of even shorter initial and renewal terms would probably be number two, and a broad exception for non-commercial infringement by natural persons would probably be number three.

That's precisely what needs to be done. I'd mod you up if I could.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[cpt kangarooski]

Thanks.

It was never intended to generate monetary wealth. It was intended to generate cultural wealth by providing monetary incentive.

Not even that; it's intended to generate cultural wealth for all by providing a possibility of a monetary incentive. The genius of copyright is that whether a particular copyright has actual economic value depends on the author, the publisher, and the receptiveness of the public. Most works, frankly, are economic flops. But so long as authors who otherwise would not create and publish works are drawn to do so by the chance that they could exploit their copyright for money, things keep rolling along.

Registration, renewal, short terms, and formalities improve things greatly:

Requiring authors to register their works in order to get a copyright (beyond a minor level of protection for manuscripts), along with a token registration fee (more for the purposes of separating the wheat from the chaff in the author's opinion, rather than to fund the system), we avoid copyrights on a bunch of works that even the author doesn't think are worth protecting. And who are we to second-guess the author?

Short terms and frequent renewals (probably again with a token fee) let us weed out flops more quickly than if we just granted a single long term to everything and waited for it to expire. If a copyright holder doesn't think that a work is worth renewing, again, who are we to second-guess them? Let the work enter the public domain earlier than it might have otherwise.

Only a handful of works have a copyright that's worth a non-trivial amount of money more than a few years after publication, or sometimes after even less time. (When was the last time you bought yesterday's daily newspaper? Or a bestselling novel from 1911?) Let's reform the system so that we quickly and efficiently weed out the others and get them in the public domain. This will solve a lot of the problems. It'll be easier to decide what's to be done about Mickey Mouse when it's just Mickey Mouse, and not a million other things being dragged along for the ride.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[wrook]

But why should either of them have protection? Rudyard Kipling is long dead. It's unlikely either of his daughters are still alive as they would be over 115 years old. A copyright "protecting" this work would not be owned by anyone even remotely connected with its creation. It would simply be a money making instrument for anyone lucky enough to be in possession of it. Why should a person or organisation who had nothing to do with the creation of a work collect money for doing absolutely nothing?

The argument about things like Tai Chi Turtle is that someday, for some unknown reason it will come into popularity. For example, the song Soul Bossa Nova became popular beyond its probable merit when it became the theme song for the Austin Powers movie. The widow of the writer Quincy Jones received the royalties. Which is nice, but I personally I don't see why we should bend over backwards for these kinds of rare scenarios. Tai Chi Turtle (I'm suspecting this is not a real game ;-) ) had its run and its authors were compensated reasonably. Soul Bossa Nova was written for another movie and the writer was compensated.

Why should we continue to offer a monopoly to something well beyond any reasonable expectation of profit? This is especially true when we deny people access to artistic works in the process. Let's give a monopoly for a period that covers a reasonable period and possibility of return, and that directly supports the author (without consideration to any entity who is not connected with the construction of the work).

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[Rakishi]

No, it would take more than that. In fact, I'd say that the number one reform we need is to stop automatically granting copyrights; we need to require registrations and impose some strict formalities. A system of short overall terms comprised of even shorter initial and renewal terms would probably be number two, and a broad exception for non-commercial infringement by natural persons would probably be number three.

Congratulations, you're just killed 90% of open source software. And 90% of works created by individual artists and 90% of works put online by individuals.

Those are all entities who cannot afford to copyright all their works. It's simply not economically feasible especially if they create many small works. Nonetheless they benefit from having copyright protection as it prevents excessive outright copying.

Large corporations, who are the real source of problems, would simply pay the to them trivial fees for copyright and get on with their day. Trolls would probably also copyright the works of others, who didn't have the money to do it themselves, and then sue those who use them. That would be a fun lawsuit to see.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[cpt kangarooski]

ongratulations, you're just killed 90% of open source software. And 90% of works created by individual artists and 90% of works put online by individuals.

Those are all entities who cannot afford to copyright all their works.

You seem to think that copyright is necessary for most authors, but this is not the case. There are many incentives for an author to create and publish a work: art for art's sake, fame, non-copyright related revenue (e.g. an original Picasso is worth a lot because of its provenance; an effectively identical copy by John Smith, not so much), commissions, etc. Copyright is an incentive, but hardly the only one, and in many cases probably not the most important one.

Authors who don't care about copyright -- which is most authors -- will create and publish anyway. For example, would you have posted here on /. if your post were not copyrighted? I bet you would have. In that case, why should we give you an incentive to do something you would have done anyway? It's just wasteful. It causes harm to the public by restricting their rights in your work, with no greater benefit provided to them, since there was no need for the added incentive of copyright.

These are the sorts of works that we need to get rid of copyrights on; works where copyright didn't matter, and where the person judging that they didn't matter was the author himself, who is surely in the best position to know of anyone.

A copyright is nothing other than an economic incentive. It doesn't guarantee that a work has any economic value, but it acts like a funnel, directing some of whatever copyright-related economic value there might be to the author, so that he can exploit the copyright and get the money for himself. An author who cares about a copyright expects that it must be worth something -- something more than the cost of creating and publishing the work and obtaining the copyright. It must be quantifiable.

I'd be perfectly happy with a token fee of, say, $1, just so that copyright isn't absolutely automatic, and updating the already-existing practice of allowing collections and groups of works to be registered under a single registration, provided that certain requirements are met (e.g. the works are by the same author, the works are all published within a particular unit of time, etc.).

I am willing to take the chance that 90% of authors who care about copyrights are willing and able to do some simple paperwork (roughly on par with a change of address form filed with the post office) and pay a dollar or so every year.

If not, well then what the hell did they want a copyright for in the first place? If they're not in it for some economic reason that requires a monopoly, why the hell do they need one? Even the open source guys have economic reasons behind what they do, even if it's more of a trade for rights over someone else's work instead of cash money.

Large corporations, who are the real source of problems, would simply pay the to them trivial fees for copyright and get on with their day.

And? I really don't care whether an author is a guy in a garage or a sinister international corporation with evil plans. I just want more works. In an ideal world, works would just appear like magic; authors are really a necessary evil, like getting stuck with a cow, when all you really want is the milk.

Some people have suggested variable filing fees based on things like how long the work has been copyrighted ($1 for the first year, but perhaps $1,000 for the tenth year, and so on), or who the ultimate beneficiaries of the copyright are (poor natural persons pay less than artificial persons or wealthy natural persons) or other criteria. Personally, I don't care much. My goal is simply to require applicants to actively decide whether to get a copyright or not; not to get them automatically by operation of law, or by setting up a script that gets them for you for free. Even a company with billions of dollars is

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[Rakishi]

Your counter-arguments boil down to "it's this way because I say so." You provide no studies, research or numbers to back up your claims. You make grand claims with nothing of substance to back them. Disjointed anecdotes and rhetoric. I've long ago learned not to trust anecdotes or random guesses at how many people are X.

Of course, my post was no better but then again I'm not writing two page posts or making that many grand claims.. Seriously, even online I generally expect people who are as into something as you to have something of substance.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[DavidTC]

And an added bonus of requiring renewals is that works that have disappeared into some legal gray area without an owner also get released.

I say we give everything five years automatic copyright. Then 10 years more free (Or $20 processing fee, whatever.) renewal, but you have to actually file, which will result in 99% of stuff falling into the public domain. Aka, forum posts and random drawings and stuff, all that stuff no one actually meant to copyright, but got an automatic copyright never the less.

Basically, it has all the advantages of 'automatic copyright' in that mislabeled works don't become public domain, and it doesn't cost anything to publish something and see if it's successful. But then, if it is, if you want to keep it, you have to file the paperwork.

After 15 years, the fees become something along the lines of $1000 every decade for two more decades, and that's it, that's all they get.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[DavidTC]

I'm with you most of the way, but I think most of the objections can be answered, like I said in my other post, if you give people a very short-term automatic copyright, and then, after a few years, require a token fee for it.

The problem with non-automatic copyrights is that people often failed to follow the rules. Quite a lot of stuff has randomly fallen into the public domain because of that, like the original Night of the Living Dead. An argument can be made that a movie from 1968 should be in the public domain by now anyway, but it certainly shouldn't have been in the public domain in 1968 simply because someone forgot to affix a copyright notice correctly!

Which is why they came out with automatic copyrights, which is a fine idea for temporarily protecting works that the paperwork was incorrectly done, or for someone who recorded a viral YouTube video and probably should get the ad revenue from it, instead of people just copying it and taking it.

So give a few years free and automatic, and then require them to renew, and most of the original problems that resulted in 'automatic copyright' are solved, along with the problems that automatic copyright itself has caused.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[marnues]

Copyright is not something that comes about because of physical laws or anything. It exists because we feel it helps our situation. It is only through great debate that we can figure this out. Such economics have not even come close to being reducible to comparable figures.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[marnues]

Yes, cheers to this! Disney has no control over how I and billions of others perceive Mickey Mouse. They have no control, not even copyright can affect that. Mickey Mouse is a cultural icon that should be used as such, rather than stifled by copyright.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[Rakishi]

There is however a truth or close to one. If you implement all possible options in parallel universes then one will do better given however you weight better. This isn't philosophy, the aim of a debate on policy is to get as close to that best option as possible or to at least understand the pros/cons of various options.

In other words, it's science and not religion. Religion is people yelling at each other "I believe X because I believe it." Science is people yelling at each other "I believe X because this data says so." The later has practical value, the former does not (aside from entertainment).

Especially once you start making concrete statements "most people are X" or " most artists do it because of X" then you need to support them. Otherwise it's two people saying "it's X" and "no it's not X" back and forth for seventy posts. The "winner" is then the person who is more charismatic or stubborn. Not that their side isn't better by any rational or objective measure. That's Fox News or a pissing match, not an informed debate.

It's crucial one knows the difference and doesn't deceive themselves into thinking their views have actual meat behind them when they don't in fact. It's a dangerous trap to fall into mentally and we're all too irrationally human to avoid it most of the time.

I usually don't bother writing any of this however the person I replied to seemed like someone who might benefit and actually improve their knowledge of the issues.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[Endo13]

I'd be a lot more in favor of the fifteen years being all they get. It doesn't take 2 years to print and 20 years to distribute stuff any more.

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[robbak]

I agree about credit: but that happens anyway. Find an old song recently recovered by some street punk, mention the song to a 16 year old, and you won't hear the name of the original artist. It even affects old folks like me - I'd think that 'locomotion' was a Kylie Minogue song if I hadn't heard otherwise, and I can't remember the original artist. Mind you, 'locomotion' didn't deserve copyright at any stage.....

Re:Forget Patents, what about copyrights?!

[DavidTC]

I'm in favor of it being closer to $10,000, myself.

The problem is, trying to 'adjust' it is nonsense. There's no way we can do any of this.

We can't even stop them retroactively extending copyrights, which is utter nonsense under any theory of 'incentive'...

Not a great solution

[cjonslashdot]

Yes, the lifespan of patents is a big problem.

But in software, things change so rapidly that patent protection for even five years is an eternity: by then, it is game over.

The fundamental problem with software patents is that companies patent simple ideas. The Amazon one-click purchase patent is a prime example. These kinds of ideas should be considered "obvious" by the USPTO, but unfortunately these kinds of things are routinely patented. The result is that there is a minefield of patents around every simple idea, every basic thing that one can do in software. Anyone who wants to create a startup company around a software product is at great risk, and instead of investing their time and energy into product development they now have to invest it in legal research. That is not a very good state of affairs for an industry that thrives on innovation.

If patents are to be allowed to exist for software, the bar for what is not obvious should be much, much, much higher than it currently seems to be.

Re:Not a great solution

[stinerman]

The Amazon one-click purchase patent is a prime example.

I see what you did there.

Re:Not a great solution

[dachshund]

The fundamental problem with software patents is that companies patent simple ideas. The Amazon one-click purchase patent is a prime example. These kinds of ideas should be considered "obvious".

That's correct. Also, there's the fact that old software concepts can be re-patented simply by applying them to a new business area: so, the first person to patent shoe-tying in the context of an e-commerce application gets a monopoly on the idea for twenty years.

I would note that this doesn't seem to occur in the field of /mechanical/ inventions, where the patent office appears to have its head screwed on straight. For example, a few years ago my father tried to patent a simple device designed to unclog garbage disposals. The patent examiner came back with prior art from the late 1800s --- a device with a very similar schematic but a radically different purpose. It was designed to unspool barbed wire for fences. I think the sensitivity level was a little high on that one, but at least there was somebody awake at the switch.

There are good patents, that's the tricky thing. Still, there are a variety of things Congress could do to ameliorate the problem, even without tackling it head on. For one, it could provide more funding to the USPTO examiners. For another it could provide a more cost-effective path to getting patents into re-exam. Even better would be to change the standard for finding a patent invalid. It would be a huge help even if these ideas were limited to patents filed during the 1990s, when the .com boom was in full swing and the USPTO had reduced its examiner qualifications to "does not (routinely) eat human brains".

Re:Not a great solution

[Theaetetus]

The Amazon one-click purchase patent is a prime example. These kinds of ideas should be considered "obvious" by the USPTO, but unfortunately these kinds of things are routinely patented.

The Amazon patent that has colloquially been called "one-click" claimed a lot more than "buying a product by clicking once". It has been one of the most heavily litigated and reexamined patents out there, and even with ALL of the prior art that Slashdot members and the EFF could throw at it, has been ruled valid and nonobvious in reexamination. At this point, it's become an indicator of people who have never bothered reading the patent or researching it, but merely heard someone else talk about it once.

Re:Not a great solution

[cjonslashdot]

I have followed this patent. I am familiar with the specifics.

As you might recall, Amazon had to rewrite the patent when it was rejected upon initial re-examination. The rewrite limited the patent's scope.

Even so, the prior art criteria, which was the basis for the re-examination, is not the crux of the issue. The issue is that the patent is obvious. The criteria used by the USPTO for what is not obvious is too weak.

The Amazon patent has to do with storing one's credit card permanently (using encryption), and re-using that information to enable the customer to make a purchase with a single click. To me, that is obvious in the extreme.

That is the problem with the current regime: the criteria for what is not obvious is too weak. As a result, the things that programmers do in the normal course of their work, creating features based on the circumstances and needs of their customer, is now a perilous mine field.

Re:Not a great solution

[Theaetetus]

I have followed this patent. I am familiar with the specifics.

As you might recall, Amazon had to rewrite the patent when it was rejected upon initial re-examination. The rewrite limited the patent's scope.

Even so, the prior art criteria, which was the basis for the re-examination, is not the crux of the issue. The issue is that the patent is obvious. The criteria used by the USPTO for what is not obvious is too weak.

The only way to determine whether a patent is obvious or not is to look at prior art. Otherwise, you're engaging in impermissible hindsight.

The Amazon patent has to do with storing one's credit card permanently (using encryption), and re-using that information to enable the customer to make a purchase with a single click. To me, that is obvious in the extreme.

Sure. Good thing that's not the patent. I mean, gosh, if the claim was "1. Storing a credit card, using encryption; and using the stored information to enable a customer to make a purchase with a single click," we could find tons of prior art to invalidate that. 'Course, that's not the claim.

Any argument that a patent is obvious that relies on the title of the patent, a colloquial description of the patent, or a paraphrase of what the patent "has to do with" is irrelevant.

Re:Not a great solution

[cjonslashdot]

"The only way to determine whether a patent is obvious or not is to look at prior art. Otherwise, you're engaging in impermissible hindsight."

I disagree. Obviousness is a judgment.

Since you disagree with my statement of what the patent entails, perhaps you would care to paraphrase the substance of the patent, for the sake of this discussion, and for the consideration of the other readers?

Re:Not a great solution

[Theaetetus]

"The only way to determine whether a patent is obvious or not is to look at prior art. Otherwise, you're engaging in impermissible hindsight."

I disagree. Obviousness is a judgment.

A judgement to be performed using prior art at the time of filing of the application. If you disagree that hindsight shouldn't be used, then, sorry, Congress and the courts disagree with you and have for 220 years.

Since you disagree with my statement of what the patent entails, perhaps you would care to paraphrase the substance of the patent, for the sake of this discussion, and for the consideration of the other readers?

No. As I said, paraphrasing is not the patent. The patent is the claims. I'm happy to copy and paste claim 1 here for you, however:

1. A method of placing an order for an item comprising:
under control of a client system, displaying information identifying the item purchasable through a shopping cart model; and
in response to only a single action being performed, sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system;
under control of a single-action ordering component of the server system,
receiving the request;
retrieving additional information previously stored for the purchaser identified by the indentifier in the received request; and
generating an order to purchase the requested item for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request using the retrieved additional information; and
fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item
whereby the item is ordered without using the shopping cart model.

That's what the patent entails. Not "one-click" or "storing one's credit card permanently (using encryption), and re-using that information to enable the customer to make a purchase with a single click," but those words above.

Re:Not a great solution

[cjonslashdot]

"A judgement to be performed using prior art at the time of filing of the application. If you disagree that hindsight shouldn't be used, then, sorry, Congress and the courts disagree with you and have for 220 years."

And that is part of the problem. In software, there often is no prior art for obvious things.

If someone tells me their name is Carl Parker and I point out that it rhymes with "car parker", does the fact that there is no "prior art" for that make it non-obvious?

Prior art means someone already thought of it: but the absence of prior art does not mean that something is not obvious.

So here are the phrases in the claims, all debunked:

1. "under control of a client system" - Well, all online systems consist of a client system.

2. "displaying information identifying the item purchasable through a shopping cart model" - This is just on online client session state (which is all a shopping cart is).

3. "in response to only a single action being performed" - I.e., a button click. Nothing new there.

4. "sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system" - I.e., placing an order. Nothing new. Has been done in the real world for milllenia. The "identifier" is just the identity of the customer. Nothing new. The request for the order is just - well, the request for the order. What is new here? Nothing.

5. "under control of a single-action ordering component of the server system" - Oh, so they mean a piece of software. Nothing new.

6. "receiving the request" - Yeah, so? Kind of need this to do anything, right? Nothing new.

7. "retrieving additional information previously stored for the purchaser identified by the indentifier in the received request" - Oh, so they do a lookup on the purchaser. Quite obvious, if there is a business need to do this. Nothing innovative. Absolutely nothing. Nothing any programmer would not have thought of if there was a business need to do this.

8. "generating an order to purchase the requested item for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request using the retrieved additional information" - I.e., place the purchase. What is new here? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing.

9. "fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item" - Well what else would you do? Discard the order? Duh.

10. "whereby the item is ordered without using the shopping cart model" - But it did use the shopping cart. The shopping cart is the session state.

I am sorry: there is nothing new or innovative here. It is obvious, obvious, obvious. And it is just as I described it: a single click to purchase.

This should never have been given a patent. It is a travesty.

Re:Not a great solution

[Theaetetus]

"A judgement to be performed using prior art at the time of filing of the application. If you disagree that hindsight shouldn't be used, then, sorry, Congress and the courts disagree with you and have for 220 years."

And that is part of the problem. In software, there often is no prior art for obvious things.

If someone tells me their name is Carl Parker and I point out that it rhymes with "car parker", does the fact that there is no "prior art" for that make it non-obvious?

I can find you rhyming dictionaries hundreds of years old. What do you mean there's no prior art for it?

Prior art means someone already thought of it: but the absence of prior art does not mean that something is not obvious.

No, I don't think you understand what prior art actually means. Prior art doesn't mean "someone already thought of it." Lack of novelty means "someone already thought of it." If there is prior art that directly and fully anticipates the claim, then someone already thought of it. In other words, the claimed invention is not "new" under 35 USC 102.

But that's not obviousness, which is under 35 USC 103. Obviousness says "okay, fine... no one actually did the exact invention, but if you take prior art A and prior art B and combine them, the combination teaches everything in the claimed invention." A combination of prior art references can show that something is obvious.

So, when there's no prior art, that means you can't find something to teach all the elements of the invention, even in combination with other pieces of prior art. And yeah, that's a pretty good way to show that something wasn't obvious at the time of invention.

The fact that 10 years later you can look back and say, "gosh, [knowing what I know now] that was totally obvious" is irrelevant.

So here are the phrases in the claims, all debunked:

... 10. "whereby the item is ordered without using the shopping cart model" - But it did use the shopping cart. The shopping cart is the session state.

And right there, we see that the claim is nonobvious. The claim says "not using X". You say "oh, forget what the words actually say, I say it totally uses X," except that it expressly doesn't. In other words, even ten years later, using all of your impermissible hindsight, you still can't figure out how the thing works without using the shopping cart model. That's a really good indicator that it's not obvious.

I am sorry: there is nothing new or innovative here. It is obvious, obvious, obvious. And it is just as I described it: a single click to purchase.

This should never have been given a patent. It is a travesty.

Nope. You've expressly highlighted why it's new and innovative and why it's not obvious.

Here's a hint... If you have to expressly disregard words in the claim in order to make your argument, you've failed.

Re:Not a great solution

[cjonslashdot]

"I can find you rhyming dictionaries hundreds of years old. What do you mean there's no prior art for it?"

And if you can't find a rhyming dictionary that contains the specific rhyme in question, then that rhyme is to be construed as not obvious?

This is all legaleze that is, frankly, far removed from the reality of software development. It shows that lawyers don't understand the process of writing software. As a result, they are mucking it up, and creating a quagmire.

The Amazon patent is simply that the customer clicks once to purchase. That's is all it is. And it is obvious. All the legal technicalities merely prove that the law is too complex on this issue. Any software developer can see that a single click to perform a function - any function - is an obvious thing. It is a design choice whether to present a shopping cart or not. It is not an "innovation".

Re:Not a great solution

[Theaetetus]

"I can find you rhyming dictionaries hundreds of years old. What do you mean there's no prior art for it?"

And if you can't find a rhyming dictionary that contains the specific rhyme in question, then that rhyme is to be construed as not obvious?

... see my last post. You don't understand what prior art means. Prior art is not necessarily art that anticipates the invention. It's just art, that's relevant, and was available prior to the filing of the application.

Say no one has ever eaten peanut butter and tuna fish sandwiches before. Peanut butter sandwiches are still prior art. Tuna fish sandwiches are also prior art. The combination of these two prior art references teaches each and every element of the new, but obvious, "peanut butter and tuna fish sandwich".

Rhyming dictionaries exist for each of the individual words. There's your prior art. The combination may be obvious in light of the existing art.

This is all legaleze that is, frankly, far removed from the reality of software development. It shows that lawyers don't understand the process of writing software. As a result, they are mucking it up, and creating a quagmire.

Actually, it just shows that you don't understand software. As noted in your previous post, when the claim got to "not using a shopping cart model," you said, "pff, can't be done. It has to use a shopping cart model, and I can't think of any other way to do it." Just because you don't understand something and think it's just "clicking once to purchase" doesn't make it obvious. It merely indicates that you're not one of ordinary skill in the relevant art.

That's fine, though. I don't try to invalidate pharmaceutical patents, 'cause it's not my field. Nothing to be ashamed of.

It is a design choice whether to present a shopping cart or not. It is not an "innovation".

You said it does include one. Now you say it doesn't. I'm not sure you even understand your own argument.

Re:Not a great solution

[cjonslashdot]

You are now resorting to personal attacks to win an argument that is unwinnable.. The fact is, software patents are destroying the software industry. The fact is, anyone who understands software development knows that one-click purchasing is obvious, and is far to simple an idea to be worthy of a patent. If Amazon had not done it first, someone else would have. There is no innovation. They were merely the first to make that particular design choice.

Re:Not a great solution

[Theaetetus]

You are now resorting to personal attacks to win an argument that is unwinnable.. The fact is, software patents are destroying the software industry. The fact is, anyone who understands software development knows that one-click purchasing is obvious, and is far to simple an idea to be worthy of a patent. If Amazon had not done it first, someone else would have. There is no innovation. They were merely the first to make that particular design choice.

And you're resorting to pounding the table. Anyone who says "the fact is" without providing any evidence usually has none.

Software patents are destroying the software industry? Gosh, I guess Apple and Google will be declaring bankruptcy any day now since the industry is dead.

Anyone who understands software development knows that a two word phrase that bears only a tangential relationship to the patent is obvious? Well, sure, but no one other than you believes that proves anything about the patent.

There is no innovation, it's just that no one but Amazon had ever done this before, and it was wildly commercially successful and millions have been spent by competitors trying to invalidate the patent so they could use the technique, so therefore it clearly has no value? If there was no innovation, this whole thing would be 'meh'. But the fact is that companies have licensed the patent specifically because it is valuable.

The fact is, you don't have any facts backing up your assertions, and the actual facts point in the opposite direction. But keep pounding the table. It's really convincing of something.

Re:Not a great solution

[Theaetetus]

Also, rather than complaining about personal attacks, how about responding to the substance of the post? You're claiming the patent is obvious because if you ignore the express language in the claim and disregard an entire limitation, then it's obvious. And you think this is proper because...?

Re:Not a great solution

[cjonslashdot]

Apple and Google are not the entire software industry.

It is small startups that need protection from the giants that create patent "firewalls" around their products.

With regard to Amazon's one-click patent, the fact is (sorry, but it is a fact: I am not pounding any table, just stating a fact) that (1) the business process of buying something without reviewing the invoice is a simple and obvious concept, and (2) the design specified by Amazon in their patent, consisting of a web session ("shopping cart", etc.) is an obvious design. In fact, if I had no prior knowledge of Amazon's design, and someone told me to design a one-click purchase process, I would have designed it just like is specified in their patent. I.e., the design is obvious. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find another design: their design is the very design used by virtually every web app in the world.

It seems that their great "innovation" is to not display the shopping cart. Wow: that's innovative! - NOT.

Sorry, but in this case (obvious business process) + (obvious design) is still obvious.

Re:Not a great solution

[Theaetetus]

With regard to Amazon's one-click patent, the fact is (sorry, but it is a fact: I am not pounding any table, just stating a fact)

I don't see any evidence, so why should I take your word for these assertions?

Re:Not a great solution

[cjonslashdot]

Sorry, but the substance of the patent is obvious. That why there has been such an uproar over it. It just is. No legaleze can change that.

Re:Not a great solution

[Theaetetus]

Sorry, but the substance of the patent is obvious. That why there has been such an uproar over it. It just is. No legaleze can change that.

It's not "legaleze". It's called due process. When someone has applied for a patent, the patent office can't just reject it saying "eh, I have no evidence, but it's obvious," just like the government can't throw someone in jail saying "eh, I have no evidence, but you're guilty."

Re:Not a great solution

[cjonslashdot]

Problem is, the statute is flawed. Therefore, the only "due process" that can fix it is for Congress to repeal the statute. The outcry over the patent shows that it is obvious; the fact that the law defines a convoluted mechanism that cannot reflect what every programmer knows shows unequivocally that the law is flawed and is detrimental to the industry.

Bad idea

[funkatron]

Would reducing the software patent lifetime to 5 years or even less be the thing to do?

No. Don't accept a compromise, it'll only look like you're trying to change the deal if you get it and then try to go further. If you oppose software patents, then oppose them.

Better analysts perhaps?

[pixline]

Just stop granting random patents because the people who decide on 'em can't understand what's written in a paper.
Let real tech people judge and - eventually - grant a *limited* patent, but stop giving away things because people can't read a proposal..

Re:"Handed Out To Easily?"

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

Easily is an entity, not a he, and that entity is not you, nor me.

Re:it would be cool

[dougmc]

to see all MS Windows versions from WinXP and older all source code released as GPL-3

I don't see how changing the patent term would have any effect on this whatsoever. Even if the copyright term was shrunk and they fell out of copyright, they'd go into the public domain rather than GPL.

Re:I've got a better idea.

[Runaway1956]

Jew rat lawyers? Come on, AC - the Jews may own a few of these patents and copyrights, but it's been a free-for-all all along. If you MUST dump on the Jews, go ahead - but save some dumping for white, black, brown, English, French, American, etc etc ad nauseum. I believe in equal opportunity!

Re:it would be cool

[Runaway1956]

IMHO - WinXP is not quite there yet. I give 15 years for copyright protection. We can all argue the fine points of this thing, but at least we're talking the same language. Patent holders, on the other hand, speak some kind of gibberish.

The problems

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Making them 3 years would solve many many problems.

But, the TRIPS agreement says patents have to last 20 years.

However, the TRIPS agreement doesn't say that software has to be patentable. So countries could declare that software isn't patentable, and then create some new legal thingy called "petents", and say that petents last 3 years and that software innovations can be petented.

This would be hard work because some countries (USA for example) push the idea that TRIPS requires software patents.

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/TRIPS

Really, shortening the duration would be as much work, and there's always the risk that the monopolists will find some other nasty clause to stick in to make 3-year petents really harmful.

Let's just go for abolition. It will take time, but it's the only practical solution.

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Why_abolish_software_patents

No, the problem is: software patents are stupid

[jopet]

Anyone who has ever programmed just a little knows that programmers invent algorithms every day and reuse somebody else's algorithm every minute. It is just a greed-fuelled idiocy to patent random bits of what programmers invent as part of their work. It is like patenting a mathematical proof or a law of physics.
Then there is another matter: when are two algorithms identical? When the code is exactly the same, including the naming of variables? No matter the variable naming? When they generate the same machine code on some machine? When they compute the same results (but this is undecidable formally)?

Software patents are a stupidity to make lawyers richer and to make the life of developers more miserable.

Re:No, the problem is: software patents are stupid

[martin-boundary]

To me this is the most important reason why patents are evil. Unlike copyrights which prevent making an exact copy of someone else's work and passing it off as your own, the patents are a form of thought censorship.

A patent censors my right to think and act freely on my own thoughts, because someone else who I never met paid the government to get the exclusive rights on certain ideas. Worse, I don't even know if an idea I have is patented until I get sued out of nowhere long after I've moved on and developed the idea thinking it's mine because it came from my head.

Patents are a minefield of thoughtcrime waiting to happen - the only way to follow the law 100% is to never develop any ideas of your own, ever.

Re:"Handed Out To Easily?"

[PPH]

Who the hell is Easily, and why should he be getting all those patents?

Why do you think its a he?

That's what I've been saying!

[gman003]

Make software patents shorter-term - six months to three years should be about right.

Now, obviously, companies are going to start filing their software under non-software patents. But it's far easier to argue "this patent was misfiled, it should be a software patent (and thus expired two years ago)" than it is to argue "this patent is completely invalid and should never have been allowed". Remember, the people deciding these cases are bureaucrats - misfiled forms are something they can handle; the system being wrong is something they can't.

While we're at it, cut copyright in general to ten years, with a single ten-year extension if it has been in constant commercial production. That brings them in line with patents, and provides an incentive for companies to actually use their copyrights (instead of sticking them in a vault like Disney). A twenty-year copyright would put all kinds of things into the public domain: season 2 of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air", Final Fantasy IV, Terminator 2, Metallica's Black Album, and the novel "The Sum of All Fears" - and that's just things that would enter the public domain this year.

Patents are on Inventions, not ideas

[dwandy]

There's numerous reasons why patents on software are invalid. The most difficult to understand for a non-technical person might be that it can be reduced to math, which is already not patentable; so be allowing patents on software you are allowing patents on math. And demonstrating this in court for any scenario could be somewhat difficult.
But the simpler answer (from the start) should have been that you are not supposed to be able to patent an idea; you must patent an invention (implementation). In software it's either source code (covered by copyright) or it's an idea (not patentable).
The simple question from the patent examiner or judge for a software patent is a request to see the implementation. Since there's no implementation in "a way to navigate the web using a touch interface" it should get tossed. On the other hand, the specific implementation could (I suppose) be patented, but since the implementation is already covered by copyright, why bother with the (inferior) patent...?

Re:Patents are on Inventions, not ideas

[Theaetetus]

There's numerous reasons why patents on software are invalid. The most difficult to understand for a non-technical person might be that it can be reduced to math, which is already not patentable; so be allowing patents on software you are allowing patents on math.

Well, except it's the Supreme Court, not a statute, that says that math is not patentable... And the Supreme Court has repeatedly said that software implemented by a computing device is patentable. Additionally, they've said that you can patent math that's embodied in an otherwise patentable device (In re Warmerdam, as well as In re Beauregard).

That's why the equivalency argument really has no teeth... Sure, software can be reduced to mathematics... but can the computing device itself? No. It can be modeled mathematically, but that's it.

Incidentally, this is why the PTO currently requires an actual computing device, and virtual computers can't be claimed.

since the implementation is already covered by copyright, why bother with the (inferior) patent...?

Because patents aren't in any way inferior to copyright. They have a shorter term, but they have much, much broader scope. My copyright doesn't prevent you from independently writing the same software. My patent does.

The original point of a patent..

[sstamps]

..is NOT to reward someone who invested nothing other than a few neuronal sparks coming up with an idea, but to reward someone who risked a significant investment in time, money, and materials to be able to recoup that investment plus make a profit in exchange for sharing the fruits of that investment with everyone.

The VAST majority of software and business-method related patents are nothing that someone competent with ordinary skill in the field could not come up with as a common-sense solution to a specific problem, WITHOUT said investment OR risk.

That said, the problem is that bringing the original intent of patents back into the system is not in the best interests of those who decide who gets elected (it isn't the voters, natch) and, thus, will not happen without a revolution of some kind which circumvents their control.

Even civil disobedience won't get us very far because, ultimately, most people could care less that they are controlled like sheep, and believe that their masters are the "good guys" and can "do no wrong". As a result, get used to it until the system explodes and has to be replaced by something else, hopefully better, but such is not guaranteed. It is the time-honored tradition of the human race since time immemorial to let the decay of civilization outrun our ability to contain or mitigate it, to ultimately consume and destroy us.

I just wish it would hurry the hell up so we can start anew.

Re:The original point of a patent..

[cpt kangarooski]

to reward someone who risked a significant investment in time, money, and materials to be able to recoup that investment plus make a profit in exchange for sharing the fruits of that investment with everyone.

Not quite. The point of a patent is to encourage inventors to invent, disclose the workings of, and bring to market, the most useful, novel, nonobvious inventions which otherwise would not have been invented, disclosed, or brought to market, all for the least cost to the public by limiting the scope and duration of a monopoly.

Whether the inventor actually risked anything, or whether the reward is adequate to recoup investment is really irrelevant. We just want the most inventions for the least cost to the public; the fortunes of inventors are irrelevant, save for their effect as an incentive.

And so, software patents are a bad idea. Not because of a lack of risk -- I don't care whether an inventor can come up with something amazing in their sleep, or if it takes years of toiling in a lab -- but because the software industry is so dynamic at the moment that all of this stuff is going to be invented and brought to market anyway, and having been revealed, the information that needs disclosure will usually be pretty obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art. Simply, there's just no need for software patents; they are probably holding the industry back and causing the state of the art to stagnate, which is the exact opposite of what patents should ever do.

(Disclosure can also be handled by imposing a strict deposit requirement on software copyrights; no copyrights unless copies of the binaries and source (if any) are provided, along with any other information that is deemed useful so that others can make lawful use of the software, e.g. source code, notes about compilers, etc.)

Maybe someday the software industry will slow down, and it will then be appropriate to set up software patents so as to provide a little extra incentive for invention. But right now there is a surplus of natural incentive for invention, and there's simply no point in our offering any more, particularly when the cost to the public of doing so is probably greater than the benefit received.

Re:The original point of a patent..

[Theaetetus]

..is NOT to reward someone who invested nothing other than a few neuronal sparks coming up with an idea, but to reward someone who risked a significant investment in time, money, and materials to be able to recoup that investment plus make a profit in exchange for sharing the fruits of that investment with everyone.

No, that's simply not true. The original point of a patent is to encourage public disclosure to increase economic efficiency. Say an invention takes 100 man-hours to come up with. Well, that's not very much, so we shouldn't reward it? But what if it's done by a thousand companies? If all of them keep it a trade secret, you're now talking about 100,000 man-hours spent, of which 99,900 were a waste.

The revolutionary ideas that are also rewarded by the patent system are actually much less important - if you invented a portable cold fusion reactor, you'd be telling everyone about it, selling models, doing talk shows, receiving a Nobel prize, etc. We don't really need to encourage public disclosure in those cases. However, if you invented a way of getting 1% more drug output from your chemical process, you're going to sit on that idea for as long as possible so that you're 1% more profitable than your competitors... and of course, they're all trying to do the exact same thing. This is the stuff that needs encouragement for public disclosure: new and nonobvious improvements to existing technologies.

The VAST majority of software and business-method related patents are nothing that someone competent with ordinary skill in the field could not come up with as a common-sense solution to a specific problem, WITHOUT said investment OR risk.

But they do need time and experimentation. And that's the standard - not "whether one of ordinary skill could come up with the idea without investing a lot of money or taking on a ton of risk" but "whether one of ordinary skill could come up with the idea without undue experimentation".

Re:The original point of a patent..

[DavidTC]

No, that's simply not true. The original point of a patent is to encourage public disclosure to increase economic efficiency. Say an invention takes 100 man-hours to come up with. Well, that's not very much, so we shouldn't reward it? But what if it's done by a thousand companies? If all of them keep it a trade secret, you're now talking about 100,000 man-hours spent, of which 99,900 were a waste.

When you think about this, it makes software patents utterly pointless.

Almost all software patents are publicly disclosed. They're in software that people sell to the public! It would be trivial to figure out.

So, based on the original concept of patents, we don't need to let people patent software at all, because we have no need to 'encourage' them to disclose anything..they're going to have to disclose the damn thing when they sell the software!

Of course, there is the software that the companies use internally, which a company could hide as trade secrets. I don't think anyone thinks the amount of stuff we give up for software patents is worth 'encouraging' them to disclose and patent that.

Re:The original point of a patent..

[Theaetetus]

No, that's simply not true. The original point of a patent is to encourage public disclosure to increase economic efficiency. Say an invention takes 100 man-hours to come up with. Well, that's not very much, so we shouldn't reward it? But what if it's done by a thousand companies? If all of them keep it a trade secret, you're now talking about 100,000 man-hours spent, of which 99,900 were a waste.

When you think about this, it makes software patents utterly pointless.

Almost all software patents are publicly disclosed. They're in software that people sell to the public! It would be trivial to figure out.

Really? So you've got a non-leaked copy of the Windows 7 source code, then, right? How about the Apple iOS source?

Sorry, your "almost all" is simply incorrect. Trying to claim that because open-source software exists, therefore all software is open-source and therefore patents are irrelevant is just not true.

Re:The original point of a patent..

[DavidTC]

You don't understand what 'disclosed' means. Anything that has been handed out to the public in any form is disclosed. The options are 'disclosed' or 'trade secret'. Things that disclosed are no longer secret, and things that are secret must not be disclosed or you lose any protection, you can't sue people that steal it from you. (Even if they did get it illegally, oddly. If they can demonstrate it was legally out in the world, it is no longer a trade secret and the thieves aren't subject to the large-ish fines and cease and desist orders even if they actually broke the law to get it. Although they still might be on the hook for breaking the law.)

The courts have already addressed this issue, with companies that attempted to claim 'trade secret' protection over stuff they handed out and people disassembled. The courts said 'no'. That does not work. If you hand someone a device that does a specific method, that method is now disclosed. Even if that method is disguised and well-hidden.

It's the same with software. It doesn't matter if the source isn't out there. If the software itself(1) does something, and you hand that software to some third party who hasn't signed an NDA(2), you have now disclosed all methods in that software, you cannot claim any trade secrets on it.

So, as to the original point: The entire point of patents is to keep companies from locking things up in trade secrets forever.

So we offer them an alternative: Tell everyone, and for 20 years, no one else can use that thing without paying you, even if they invent it themselves.

This, as I said, renders software patents mostly pointless, at least software patents on methods in commercial software. Those aren't trade secrets. They can't be. If you sell me something that does your super-secret method, you just disclosed that method to me legally, even if it requires disassemble, software or otherwise, for me to figure out.

If software methods can't be kept as trade secrets, I'm confused as what we're 'encouraging' people to do with letting them patent them.

1) Not to be confused with a method to develop the software. If you have some super optimization process, that's still possibly a secret if you only give out the result of it.

2) And the court, as a bonus, have found that software license agreements that claim to bring you under a trade secret agreement do not do so. While the validity of EULAs is still under debate, trade secret law has pretty specific rules. You can't just casually hand out trade secrets willy-nilly and hope that random agreements that people might agree to will keep them secret. You have to, at the very least, check to make sure the people you're giving it to don't blatantly work for your competitors, or aren't children who wouldn't be bound by contracts anyway. Trade secret law requires a minimum level of effort keeping the secret.

Re:The original point of a patent..

[Theaetetus]

The courts have already addressed this issue, with companies that attempted to claim 'trade secret' protection over stuff they handed out and people disassembled. The courts said 'no'. That does not work. If you hand someone a device that does a specific method, that method is now disclosed. Even if that method is disguised and well-hidden.

It's the same with software. It doesn't matter if the source isn't out there. If the software itself(1) does something, and you hand that software to some third party who hasn't signed an NDA(2), you have now disclosed all methods in that software, you cannot claim any trade secrets on it.

So you've got a software disassembler that can recover everything that was in the closed-source executables?

Yeah, sorry, you're wrong. The decisions on trade secrets you're referring to are with regard to items that can be reverse engineered. You can disassemble software and get most of it, and those parts are no longer secret, but any parts that get lost in translation are still secret, and you most certainly can get trade secret protection. Unless you're really suggesting that Microsoft has no trade secrets?

So, as to the original point: The entire point of patents is to keep companies from locking things up in trade secrets forever.

So we offer them an alternative: Tell everyone, and for 20 years, no one else can use that thing without paying you, even if they invent it themselves.

This, as I said, renders software patents mostly pointless, at least software patents on methods in commercial software. Those aren't trade secrets. They can't be. If you sell me something that does your super-secret method, you just disclosed that method to me legally, even if it requires disassemble, software or otherwise, for me to figure out.

Disregarding for the sake of argument my point above about perfect software disassemblers not actually existing, how does your statement here not apply to things that can be easily disassembled? For example, machines. Under your argument, patenting machines is pointless because once you sell the machine, anyone can take it apart and figure out how it works.

So, are you advocating that machines shouldn't be patentable, for the same reason?

2) And the court, as a bonus, have found that software license agreements that claim to bring you under a trade secret agreement do not do so. While the validity of EULAs is still under debate, trade secret law has pretty specific rules. You can't just casually hand out trade secrets willy-nilly and hope that random agreements that people might agree to will keep them secret. You have to, at the very least, check to make sure the people you're giving it to don't blatantly work for your competitors, or aren't children who wouldn't be bound by contracts anyway. Trade secret law requires a minimum level of effort keeping the secret.

I'm sorry, this is relevant to our discussion of patents how, exactly?

Re:8 years from filing date or 5 from product laun

[HungryHobo]

The individual product still gets copyright protection forever so the loss of patent only means that they can't exclude *everyone* from competing with their own products using their own code written from scratch.

Patents are a terrible fit for software and should never have been applied to it in the first place. Copyright provides plenty of protection.

New angles

[Dragon_Hilord]

Instead of looking at this with that same crappy "algorithms and software are math" (apologies, but it hasn't worked before, and it certainly won't now (unless we maaaaybe reduce EVERYTHING to 100% pure mathematics)) view, let's start looking for new ways of explaining it to the masses - they don't get it. The fault is not entirely their own cause of their ignorance, we haven't properly educated them. What do you do when people don't get the idea in political situations?

Protest.
Civil Disobedience.
Lobbying.

I'm pretty sure if 1000+ hackers showed up on the doorstep of the whitehouse equipped with laptops running as much patent-violating software as they could possibly muster - that'd be a pretty good start. The only question is who has the gull to show up? Who has the balls to write that code? So far, the one thing the hacker community (and other code-centred groups yes) seems to lack is some kind of motivating factor. Perhaps, and this is just a thought, the right to code what we please?

I'm almost tempted to organize something of these lines myself, problem is I can already smell the -1 rating this is going to earn for "stating the obvious" or "trolling". Can't say I didn't try.

The issue isn't patent length...

[copponex]

The real issue is that patenting has moved from protecting the method of solving a problem into solving a particular problem.

For instance, I cannot patent mowing a lawn. I can patent a lawn mowing machine, even one that exactly copies the pattern created by another lawn mower that also runs on gas and uses a rotary blade to do it. As long as my lawn mowing machine is different enough to merit the patent, I think it's fair so someone doesn't come along and copy my machine.

Now people are patenting ideas. So when Amazon patents "one click shopping" and I write open source software with different libraries to complete the same task, they claim patent infringement, which is nonsense. They should be able to patent a particular method, which is really just their code, not an end result. Even then it's redundant, as it's already protected by copyright.

Large corporations do not want patent law sane, because it's their multi-million dollar playground, and they can crush innovation and startups by simply filing a few law suits. The first nation with decent infrastructure to fix their system or abandon it will lead the way into the 21st century.

tl;dr: The ability to patent end results instead of particular methods is why the current patent system is a failure.

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[Theaetetus]

The real issue is that patenting has moved from protecting the method of solving a problem into solving a particular problem.

For instance, I cannot patent mowing a lawn. I can patent a lawn mowing machine, even one that exactly copies the pattern created by another lawn mower that also runs on gas and uses a rotary blade to do it. As long as my lawn mowing machine is different enough to merit the patent, I think it's fair so someone doesn't come along and copy my machine.

Now people are patenting ideas. So when Amazon patents "one click shopping" and I write open source software with different libraries to complete the same task, they claim patent infringement, which is nonsense.

No, it isn't, because they never patented "one click shopping". The title is not the patent, nor is the colloquial description of it. Go look at the claims - it's a particular method, not just an end result.

The reality actually follows what you suggest, which makes the rest of your post a bit moot.

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[copponex]

Here's the abstract:

A method and system for placing an order to purchase an item via the Internet. The order is placed by a purchaser at a client system and received by a server system. The server system receives purchaser information including identification of the purchaser, payment information, and shipment information from the client system. The server system then assigns a client identifier to the client system and associates the assigned client identifier with the received purchaser information. The server system sends to the client system the assigned client identifier and an HTML document identifying the item and including an order button. The client system receives and stores the assigned client identifier and receives and displays the HTML document. In response to the selection of the order button, the client system sends to the server system a request to purchase the identified item. The server system receives the request and combines the purchaser information associated with the client identifier of the client system to generate an order to purchase the item in accordance with the billing and shipment information whereby the purchaser effects the ordering of the product by selection of the order button.

What we have here is a description of every single e-commerce transaction on the internet, with the novel method being that they click less times. It's not worthy of a patent, and barely worth discussion.

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[Theaetetus]

Here's the abstract...

What we have here is a description of every single e-commerce transaction on the internet, with the novel method being that they click less times. It's not worthy of a patent, and barely worth discussion.

You're right, the abstract isn't worthy of a patent.

You're wrong, however, in that abstracts are never patentable. As I said before:

The title is not the patent, nor is the colloquial description of it. Go look at the claims - it's a particular method, not just an end result.

The claims. Not the title, not the description, and NOT THE ABSTRACT.

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[copponex]

Here's the summary from the claims:

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

An embodiment of the present invention provides a method and system for ordering an item from a client system. The client system is provided with an identifier that identifies a customer. The client system displays information that identifies the item and displays an indication of an action (e.g., a single action such as clicking a mouse button) that a purchaser is to perform to order the identified item. In response to the indicated action being performed, the client system sends to a server system the provided identifier and a request to order the identified item. The server system uses the identifier to identify additional information needed to generate an order for the item and then generates the order.

The server system receives and stores the additional information for customers using various computer systems so that the server system can generate such orders. The server system stores the received additional information in association with an identifier of the customer and provides the identifier to the client system. When requested by the client system, the server system provides information describing the item to the requesting client system. When the server system receives a request from a client system, the server system combines the additional information stored in association with the identifier included in the request to effect the ordering of the item.

Here's a list of the claims. Tell me which ones are particular.

I know you're a fucking idiot... but are you Republican stupid? Can you ignore facts? Let's see.

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[Theaetetus]

Here's the summary from the claims:

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

That's the summary. That's not the claims. What the hell is wrong with you?

You: "Here's the title."
Me: "That's not the patent claims. Go look at the claims."
You: "Here's the abstract."
Me: "That's not the claims. Look at the claims."
You: "Here's the summary."

And then you call me an idiot?

Pro-tip: The CLAIMS start with the word "CLAIMS" and are numbered. They say things like "1. A method for..." or "10. A system for..."

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[copponex]

No, you're a fucking idiot. And you have the stupidity of a Republican. I have made the (very) easily falsifiable claim that the patent holds no claims that merit a patent based on any particular method. For illustration, I used the abstract and the summary as provided by Amazon, because it would be a huge waste of my time, and that of anyone whose opinion I care about, to list each claim and refute them individually.

So, if you can present one of these claims as a particular method that you think warrants a patent, the burden is on you to do so. I'm going to bet you'll again focus on imaginary semantics instead of substance because you made a bad argument, and you're too much of a pussy to admit it.

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[Theaetetus]

No, you're a fucking idiot. And you have the stupidity of a Republican. I have made the (very) easily falsifiable claim that the patent holds no claims that merit a patent based on any particular method. For illustration, I used the abstract and the summary as provided by Amazon, because it would be a huge waste of my time, and that of anyone whose opinion I care about, to list each claim and refute them individually.

Except that you linked to a document that included the claims at the USPTO. But instead, you cited the abstract and summary, being deliberately disingenuous.

No.

Go back to the document you cited. Go down to where it says "claims". Read those. Then present some prior art that invalidates them.

And if your argument is that I should be doing all that work, 35 USC 282 and the Supreme Court (as of last Thursday) disagree.

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[copponex]

So you're changing your argument from

...they never patented "one click shopping". The title is not the patent, nor is the colloquial description of it. Go look at the claims - it's a particular method, not just an end result.

to

Go back to the document you cited. Go down to where it says "claims". Read those. Then present some prior art that invalidates them.

Holy pathetic rhetoric, Batman. You just graduated to the Tea Party Express of Credulity. Are you prepared to admit that you have abandoned your first statement so we can address the second?

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[Theaetetus]

So you're changing your argument from

...they never patented "one click shopping". The title is not the patent, nor is the colloquial description of it. Go look at the claims - it's a particular method, not just an end result.

to

Go back to the document you cited. Go down to where it says "claims". Read those. Then present some prior art that invalidates them.

Holy pathetic rhetoric, Batman. You just graduated to the Tea Party Express of Credulity. Are you prepared to admit that you have abandoned your first statement so we can address the second?

Yes, I have totally changed my argument from "go read the claims, they're the legally important part of the patent" to "go read the claims, you fucking idiot. They're the legally important part of the patent, you dolt." I readily concede that the former is no longer my true position.

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[copponex]

The only assertion you made in your first response was that "The title is not the patent, nor is the colloquial description of it. Go look at the claims - it's a particular method, not just an end result." You quoted it again a few days later.

I have looked at all of the claims. None of them are a particular method worthy of a patent. I have asked you to provide me with the claim that you believe merits the patent. This is a sound, falsifiable argument: I assert that there are zero claims worthy of a patent. You say at least one claim does, so it's up to you to present it.

Since then, you have failed to provide me with the claim, because you don't have it, and saying so will reveal your stupidity. Continually denying this simple fact makes you an idiot of the Republican variety, whereby denial -- turning into a different argument some days later -- seems to be preferable to admitting that you were full of shit.

So please, support your original argument, or get back to whatever lighted box is running your life these days. Since I'm such a nice guy, and you're so obviously in need, let me help you further. Complete the following sentence by filling in the blanks:

I assert that claim number _____ from the Amazon filing is a particular method worthy of a patent because _______________________________.

Feel free to use your notes, and of course, I'll expect more than "because I said so" in that second blank. Good luck!

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[Theaetetus]

The only assertion you made in your first response was that "The title is not the patent, nor is the colloquial description of it. Go look at the claims - it's a particular method, not just an end result." You quoted it again a few days later.

I have looked at all of the claims.

No, you haven't. You've looked at the title, and at the summary, and at the abstract. Not once have you quoted a claim. They start with a number. It's really easy.

None of them are a particular method worthy of a patent. I have asked you to provide me with the claim that you believe merits the patent. This is a sound, falsifiable argument: I assert that there are zero claims worthy of a patent. You say at least one claim does, so it's up to you to present it.

Claim 1 is worthy.

Since then, you have failed to provide me with the claim, because you don't have it, and saying so will reveal your stupidity.

Claim 1. Also, all of the dependent claims. I haven't "failed to provide" you with anything. I said look at the claims of the patent, and you haven't ever looked at one.

Continually denying this simple fact makes you an idiot of the Republican variety, whereby denial -- turning into a different argument some days later -- seems to be preferable to admitting that you were full of shit.

As pointed out above, there was no substantive change in my argument. I merely upgraded from directing you to the claims to directing you to the claims, you fucking idiot. Denial? How about your denial of the fact that you haven't quoted a SINGLE CLAIM yet, while simultaneously repeating over and over that you've totally looked at them?

So please, support your original argument, or get back to whatever lighted box is running your life these days. Since I'm such a nice guy, and you're so obviously in need, let me help you further. Complete the following sentence by filling in the blanks:

I assert that claim numbers 1, 6, 9 and 11, and all of the dependent claims from the Amazon filing are particular methods worthy of a patent because the prior art fails to show or suggest an ordering system, or method of placing an order that utilizes a system, which includes the single action ordering system or component and a shopping cart model or component as recited by the claims.

More specifically, the art of record included single-click-to-purchase systems, but did not include a shopping cart model. Other art of record included a shopping cart model for purchasing multiple items, but taught away from single-click-to-purchase.

Feel free to use your notes, and of course, I'll expect more than "because I said so" in that second blank. Good luck!

Now, your turn. Please refer to a CLAIM - not the abstract, not the figures, not the background, not the summary, but a CLAIM starting with a number, a period, and the words "A method... comprising:" - and cite one or more pieces of art that existed prior to September 12, 1997, that teach each and every element of that claim.

And when you say "I don't need to, it's obvious," please state why it's obvious. I'll expect more than "because I said so". Good luck... You're going to need it, as evidenced by all your prior posts that claimed to quote from the patent claims and yet horribly failed each time.

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[Theaetetus]

So, given up?

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[copponex]

Claim 1 is worthy.

This is an assertion with no evidence to support it. For instance, I could say "Theaetetus a fucking idiot." That's an assertion. Then I could provide a link to this thread, which would make it an unassailable argument. Thankfully, you make more specific arguments later among the normal backwash which typically fills out the fetid and preposterous string of words you think are worth typing out.

I assert that claim numbers 1, 6, 9 and 11, and all of the dependent claims from the Amazon filing are particular methods worthy of a patent because the prior art fails to show or suggest an ordering system, or method of placing an order that utilizes a system, which includes the single action ordering system or component and a shopping cart model or component as recited by the claims.

Claim #1 is a prime piece of shit. After deleting the items that are a requirement of every single e-commerce transaction that has ever occurred, we are left with one statement:

in response to only a single action being performed, sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system

The key phrase being "only a single action performed." So, nothing new, just performing the same action as every other e-commerce transaction in less clicks.

Claim #6 is more oblong and orange hued, but still excrement. After deleting items common to all e-commerce transactions, we are left with nothing. If you disagree, provide an example.

Claim #9 is the server side of this nothingness they would like to patent, and holds nothing uncommon with all other e-commerce transactions. Again, if you disagree, provide an example.

Claim #11 is another restatement of common e-commerce actions with the only change: the phrase "a single action."

In essence, in that bucket of misery you call a head, you believe that if a car company invented a way to navigate to a radio station with one press of a button intead of two, they should be awarded a patent, and allowed to sue other automakers who make the same function available in the same number of button presses. How ordinarily pathetic.

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[Theaetetus]

Claim 1 is worthy.

This is an assertion with no evidence to support it.

I know... It's almost as if you have to read the entire fucking post.

Claim #1 is a prime piece of shit.

This is an assertion with no evidence to support it. You'll notice that in my post, I linked to evidence. Where's yours, Spanky?

Oh, right... You have NONE. You just have a bunch of assertions with no evidence.

Good day.

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[Theaetetus]

Also, remember the rules of your game. I filled in the blanks in your little quote, I provided explicit evidence to back it up... And then it was your turn:

Please refer to a CLAIM - not the abstract, not the figures, not the background, not the summary, but a CLAIM starting with a number, a period, and the words "A method... comprising:" - and cite one or more pieces of art that existed prior to September 12, 1997, that teach each and every element of that claim.

And you failed to do that. You lose.

Re:The issue isn't patent length...

[copponex]

You do realize that linking to the patent response (which isn't your work) reinforces my point, don't you? Amazon is not defending their particular methods, because they are not particular. They are defending the idea of one less click within the spectrum of e-commerce. That's why they sued Barnes and Noble, even though Barnes and Noble used their own code to achieve the same end result. You plagiarized the patent reviewer in your support of claims 1, 6, 9, and 11 because you don't have any ideas that are your own. The only thing you could scrape up was a veiled argument from authority, and you even did poorly at representing that.

One less click is not a particular method. It's the end result of a suite of programs, just as two clicks are. Making superficial end results patentable is killing innovation, because they are not innovation. They are weak permutations of existing technology. Imagine if someone had patented the spreadsheet or the word processor or "a process by which a computer system returns the time to the upper right hand corner of a computer screen in one less click". How long would we have suffered with a weak product because there was no legal competition?

As I have said constantly, if you have specific ideas to support your original thesis that one less click is a particular method, I'm ready to hear it. Next time, I would suggest an attempt not to provide more evidence for my argument. Your stupidity has made me too demoralized about the future of our society to make fun of you, and that's really something I had enjoyed. Thanks for ruining what little value our conversations had.

Re:it would be cool

[stinerman]

That sounds better, but you're missing the big picture. No source code.

When I buy a book, I can extend the work quite easily after it is in the public domain. I read the book, come up with my own ideas, and write a new one.

When I buy Windows XP, I can...disassemble the code and look at it. Have fun trying to extend it or fix any bugs. And that's assuming a shorter copyright term. The copyright on MS-DOS 1.0 expires in 2102. At that point we'll be able to copy the binary here and there, assuming any binaries can be found. The source will probably have been long gone and no hardware that it supports will likely be around either.

What a nice deal for Microsoft! They get a government monopoly on the exploitation of their works and all they have to do is give you an opaque version of the work that won't be useful for anyone when the copyright term finally expires.

We need at least source in escrow with the Library of Congress. When the copyright term runs out, the source is published. I'd rather require source publishing for any copyright, but I don't think that's going to fly.

Non sequitur?

[pclminion]

If software is unlikely to be relevant after 20 years, then what is the danger of a 20 year patent?

Re:Non sequitur?

[blackest_k]

It's not the current software's value that is the problem but the use of patents to block new developments even in unrelated area's not even thought about by the patent holder.

Software patents are an intellectual tar pit. Luckily there are large area's of the world where software patents are invalid so innovation can continue sadly american software engineers are now bogged down in a legal quagmire which in the long term will contribute to making america a backwater instead of a leader in technology.

Re:Non sequitur?

[sxeraverx]

The danger is that it slows down progress. Instead of seeing a good idea, and extending it a year or two later, now someone has to wait 20 years to make the same improvement. Instantly, technological progress slows down 10x, especially for the little guys. The big guys can cross-license their gigantic portfolios all they want, so that they aren't affected at all by the duration of patents. All they want is to keep the little guys little for as long as possible because it's easier to sit on top of an invention for 20 years than to keep making new things. Basically, competition is no longer free-market, but rather dominated by the players already in it (an oligopoly if there ever was one).

Standards need IP assurance

[TheSync]

(speaking for myself), I feel that the biggest problem is when a collection of intellectual property is bundled into a standard (such as H.264), but despite the valiant efforts of standards development organizations to require their participants to document their participant's intellectual property in a standard, you can't really ensure that "submarine patents" by non-participants are not accidently infringed upon, and frankly even the SDOs don't have any real police power over participants that either on purpose or accidently don't disclose IP.

I feel that some organization (perhaps ANSI, or just the PTO) should be responsible for designating the most valuable standards (such as "national standards") for "mandatory IP declaration". This would start a process where within a set time (1-2 years), all intellectual property owners would have to "put up or shut up", i.e. declare that their intellectual property is covered by the national standard. If they don't declare during the limited time period, they forfeit their right to sue for infringement on implementation of the national standard.

Real businesses do not generally have a problem licensing known intellectual property protected by patent. It is the unknown that is the bigger risk, and makes adoptions of new standards slower (I've personally seen this at a previous position).

Re:Standards need IP assurance

[TheSync]

"Nice, now H.264 gets protection from submarine patents and WebM doesn't."

No one is stopping Google from presenting WebM to recognized standards development organizations such as SMPTE, ISO, ITU, etc. Heck, even Microsoft sent Windows Media through SMPTE as VC-1.

Doing so would likely cause some submarine IP to "surface". Not to mention you'd get a coherent, readable standard out of it.

The fact that Google is unwilling to present WebM for standardization is a red flag that something is amiss with it.

Re:it would be cool

[Runaway1956]

Oh, I agree. I didn't miss the GPL-3 at all. You are perfectly correct. Source in escrow sounds great to me! I merely established what I thought was a reasonable time period for protection of copyrighted works, which differed from your own by a fraction. ;>)

5 years just to patent

[loufoque]

You do realize it takes at least 5 years just to get something patented?
So by the time your thing is patented, and you've paid up to $100,000 to do so worldwide, it's not worth anything anymore?

Nice.

Re:5 years just to patent

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Better to just eliminate them for software. And business methods, and genetic stuff as well while we're at it.

Just think, with the reduction in volume it will not take nearly as long nor cost nearly as much to get a patent for real inventions. Everybody wins.

Treating the symptoms

[king neckbeard]

It would likely be a big improvement, but it doesn't mean that it fixes the problem. Also, doing so would almost certainly involve clearly legitimizing software patents.

I say there arent ENOUGH software patents

[metalmaster]

People need to start patenting dumb software ideas; not just the great ones.

How many $obnoxious_sound or $picOfTheDay apps do we really need? Some dumb schmuck needs to claim those ideas and put a limit on entrants to that cesspool.

To patent or not to patent

[woboyle]

Generally, I am against software patents, however I do believe that there are some software innovations that should be patentable. My feeling is that they should be held to much higher standards of innovation, non-obviousness, and utility than current software patents are. I say this as the holder of a software patent related to adaptive systems that allows compiled applications to alter the structure and behavior of application classes at run time without writing code or recompiling the application source code. I honestly believe that the innovations I invented (and are in use by most semiconductor and similar high-tech manufacturing enterprises to enable them to tailor off-the-shelf manufacturing software to their particular enterprise without writing and integrating new code) meet the same standards required of physical devices and such. That said, most of the software patents I have read about, or studied in detail, are totally bogus and should have been laughed out of the Patent and Trademark Office. Period of time for software patents? 10 years max in my opinion. 20 years is absurd. As stated elsewhere in these comments, software innovations occur too rapidly to lock up some concept for that much time.

Re:To patent or not to patent

[Just Some Guy]

I say this as the holder of a software patent related to adaptive systems that allows compiled applications to alter the structure and behavior of application classes at run time without writing code or recompiling the application source code.

How the hell did you patent Lisp?

Mod parent up - knows what they are talking about

[langelgjm]

Mod this up. We don't have the flexibility to alter our domestic law in this manner any more. But, as parent suggests, we could implement some kind of utility model system, aka "petty patents" that are shorter. Whether we can do it and grant them within a reasonable time is a different question...

What if there was a quota?

[jader3rd]

While I do feel that most software patents are absured, there are occasionally some really good innovations and implementations. What if the US put a cap on the number of software patents allowed per year. Say 50. The USPTO takes all of the software patent applications for the year, ranks them according to most ingenious and the top 50 get their five year patents.

A compromise

[Moe Taxes]

A compromise is where you get some of what by giving up 100% of your principles.

Software is just not patentable. It can be part of a patentable invention, but by itself it is math, just one of the possible permutations of a computers bits.

Re:it would be cool

[icebraining]

Almost no software depends on actual specific hardware, they depend on general well documented interfaces. People don't write games for Nvidia cards, they write games for DirectX.

Sure, we'd still have to implement compatibility layers, but imagine how extraordinarily easier it would be to write Wine if we had both the source of the programs and of Windows.

Re:"Handed Out To Easily?"

[arth1]

Despite what the gender neutral language movement thinks, in current English, the masculine pronoun is used when gender is known to exist but not established.
Use "they" if you must, and if it doesn't introduce ambiguity of plurality, but don't expect that everyone does so.

Re:it would be cool

[billcopc]

Being unable to compile the code as-is would be a tiny setback, compared to the potential knowledge gained from studying and modernizing it.

Prime example: look at any ID Software source code release (Doom, Quake). These games have been ported, upgraded, remade a hundred times over. Did this hurt the company ? Or did it create a huge following of dedicated gamers and modders and source hackers, some of which have gone on to create games of their own, or even work for ID producing great content.

And so what if Intel finally grows a pair and ditches the legacy A20 ? If we're too lazy to fix the code, we'll emulate the stupid old thing. And Creative Labs is fantastically irrelevant, has been for over a decade. They've tried to cheat death with that EAX garbage, but really there is nothing mysterious anymore about outputting sound from a computer. The only secret in that code is the number of bugs their Singapore-based dev team manages to conjure up on a daily basis.

I'm not saying everything should be forcibly open-sourced, but I do firmly believe these companies would do just as well if they concentrated on making their product better than the competition's, rather than relying on secrecy to protect their bottom line.

Australian Patent Office

[Bandraginus]

The Australian Patent Office - IP Australia (disclosure: I work there) back in 2001 introduced another form of IP called an "Innovation Patent" to address this need. An Innovation Patent differs from a normal patent in the following ways:

• * Innovation Patents are not examined. They are simply rubber stamped and put on file. Thus they are granted usually within a month.
• * Innovation Patents last 8 years vs 20 for a standard patent.
• * You only need to pay to have an Innovation Patent examined when you need to stop others from copying your invention.

Sounds pretty much what you're after?

Re:Mod parent up - knows what they are talking abo

[cpt kangarooski]

We don't have the flexibility to alter our domestic law in this manner any more.

Sure we do. We can withdraw from TRIPS, Berne, etc. at any time. No one is forcing us to remain in these agreements. We just need the political power to get the country doing what is in the best interests of its people, rather than a privileged few.

Sure, let's reduce the term

[russotto]

Let's pick a nice, round number to reduce it to. Zero is a nice, round number.

Reducing the term to anything more is just putting a band-aid on a festering boil. Until the USPTO gets far more selective about what is considered patentable, and the courts get far more selective about what is considered infringement, there's no empirical way to tell whether software patents could have any value at all. As it is, they are clearly of negative value.

Sanity first, worry about software later

[Entropius]

The biggest problem with software patents isn't the software part -- it's the patent part.

We need to seriously examine our idea of what is patentworthy and what fails the "obviousness" test. Lots of things are patented which really, really should not be patented. For instance, I have a digital SLR made by Olympus. Olympus uses a unique sensor size (a little smaller than Canon and Nikon), has decided their standard distance from that sensor to the back of the lens mount, and has built a bunch of lenses tailored to this. There is nothing magic about these values -- they're just engineering choices Olympus made. Yet these numbers -- the sensor size and the sensor-lens distance -- are patented. This is absurd. There's no invention here, just some choices that a bunch of engineers made. Canon and Nikon made different choices.

Likewise, people patent obvious solutions to problems, or solutions that have no particular inventive merit to them. This is just bog-standard engineering. Why is "multitouch" patentable? It's an obvious way to interact with a touchscreen, just like holding down two keys rather than just one at a time is an obvious way to interact with a keyboard.

Clean out all the bullshit patents, patents on things that shouldn't be patentable, and then we can talk about software patents. The great harm caused by software patents isn't really related to their software-ness; it comes from their stupidity. Slashdot just likes to talk about moronic software patents since we're software people, but moronic hardware patents are just as bad a deal.

Re:"Handed Out To Easily?"

[speedplane]

The summary is fairly poorly worded in general.

This whole post is flame bait, clearly submitted by someone who hasn't spent five minutes looking into the matter.

Artist conception of a flying car

[opencity]

I had a meeting once to develop someones patent (they had been granted the patent already). I spent the whole time confused until I realized that they had developed none of the technology they had patented, wanted me to write a demonstration demo - a look and feel front end that didn't actually do anything under the hood but demonstrated the idea. I told them they were hiring me to draw a flying car as they had patented "personal transportation vehicle (car) that operates in three dimensions" but hadn't actually solved any of the technology at all (purely for description, their undeveloped technology was not a flying car). Anyway ... they were friends so I said "sure" thinking their plan was probably to wait until someone actually developed the tech and then sue and suspecting, correctly as it turned out, that there was some basic computing issues involved and they were probably going to be up against prior art / patents held by the big boys. I described visions of platoons of lawyers hitting the beach but we did the little demo anyway.

I lost touch. I wonder if they're suing someone in Texas right now.

Re:Let's go back to square 1

[AvitarX]

My real issue is that with software a workable machine can be included with no space (source code), but then we bump into the execution is actually protected for over a century.

Clearly methods in software are different than mechanics, as copyright law applies, so we need to throw out the patents, or the copyright (but I bet hat would make people even more upset).

Contact your Senator!

[Jim Hall]

I am already working for "software" patent reform. I live in Minnesota, and this morning I visited with Senator Franken's office, discussing "software" patent reform. Sen. Franken is also the Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, so this is a topic he's paying attention to.

The America Invents Act is already in progress, so the reality is that Congress won't have the appetite to pick up the patent topic again in the next few years. So I'm afraid that the window has closed to get a law to enact "software" patent reform. Temporarily, anyway. This is unfortunate, since AIA doesn't really address any issues related to "software" patents or patent trolls.

However, it is possible to have a procedural change made with the USPTO. So I'm working that angle now.

To do that, we need to build popular support, enough voices that the Subcommittee will hear. As cheesy as it sounds, that means we need your help to contact your Senator's office and voice your opinion. Seriously, call their office, write them a letter (handwritten carries the most impact, but typed will do), or visit them in their office. Ask your Senator to push for "software" patent reform. Have some examples of "software" patents handy, and feel free to make a suggestion for how to fix the system. I think the citizen review method is a workable option. I've been discussing this topic with Sen. Franken's office for a while now, so if you don't have a particular suggestion to offer, ask your Senator to see what Sen. Franken is up to. I'm not kidding, they do listen to that. You can reference Katie Topinka, in Sen. Franken's Minnesota office, as the staffer who's closest to this. I'm working with her on this (and hopefully she won't mind me mentioning her name.)

If you live in Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Oklahoma, Utah, or South Carolina, note that your Senator is already on the Subcommittee for Privacy, Technology and the Law. This is a topic they will listen to.

The best advice I have heard in politics is that it's your politician's job to listen to you and to take that back to Washington to get it done. I'm lucky that my Senator actually does this. That's why if you don't feel your Senator will listen to you on "software" patent reform, you need to send them to Sen. Franken, because he will work on this. And Senators do talk to one another, even across the aisle.

Patent Backlog

[tony1343]

It often takes 3, 4, 5, or more years just to get the patent granted from the Patent Office.

I'm split on this issue. I've seen a few software patents where I've thought--"these inventors really did deserve a patent." But, then I've seen dozens of others where I've thought--"this is ridiculous." Perhaps, the answer isn't patentability of software but just giving the Patent Office better resources to examine correctly and grant patents that aren't super broad and that are actually novel.

Lots of talk about changing the rules here, with patent reform, etc. Seems like the biggest problem is just patent quality--and to fix that you need more resources at the patent office, better and more examiners.

Fix the grant latency

[k2backhoe]

If your premise is that the dynamics of software is faster than other technologies, then this only makes sense if you can streamline the patent examination process to grant software patents in an average of 6-9 months. This also implies publishing the applications after only 2 months, and acting on public input in a month or less. An interesting idea, but not feasible with the current USPTO.

Re:My solution to the patent issue

[krishkrish]

What about having a "bounty" system for patent examination?
The entity that wishes to patent something posts a problem description and bounty money and time frame to solicit response. The bounty money will be say 5 million times the amount they will be allowed to charge per license and one human being required only one license in his lifetime and duration of the patent will be five time the time frame they give for soliciting the competing solutions.
Then anyone one from common public (bounty hunter) is allowed to propose the solution to the given problem. Top ten peer rated proposal are compared against the "candidate" solution by the same peers. If the candidate solution is rated better by the peers proposing the solutions it gets patented using above mentioned licensing scheme. All the proposed solutions become public domain knowledge and the bounty hunters get the bounty money divided in them.
High cost: Makes sure that no silly patents.
Reasonable time frame: If they want to patent for 20 years, good for them. People will get 4 years to think about solutions.
Clear licensing cost: Everyone know how much is it worth.
More innovation: For every patent idea multiple free alternatives.

It can be tweaked to say the bounty money will be what it would cost to license for 5% of the market that define. If they define narrow market, the patent will be applicable only in that narrow market.

Right to think + presume innocience = no patents

[james_gnz]

Copyright disallows people from copying ideas that others thought of. Patents disallow people from using ideas even if they thought of them themselves, if someone else thought of them earlier. Some people think that copyright is a moral right. I don't think so. But even if we were to assume that copyright were a moral right, I can't see how anyone could honestly think that patents are. It seems to me that if we accept that people have a right to think of ideas themselves, and also accept that we should not punish people on the mere presumption of guilt (i.e. we shouldn't assume that someone has copied an idea if it's possible they thought of it themselves), then there can be no basis for considering patents as a moral right.

If there is any basis for patents at all, then, it must be, like tax, justified as a democratically agreed upon imposition on liberty as a means for promoting the greater good (even if we assume copyright to be a moral right).

By using clean room design (starting with an empty code base, and ensuring everything added was written in-house), it is possible for a company to ensure that software they produce is not covered by other people's copyrights. This is not the case with patents. The only way to determine that software is not covered by other people's patents is to check every part of it against every patent in existence.

In the case of pharmaceuticals, patents do significantly promote innovation, and a patent search is realistically achievable, so pharmaceutical patents do promote the greater good. In the case of software, patents do not significantly promote innovation, and patent searches are generally impractical, so software patents do not promote the greater good.

Length not the problem

[plague911]

The problem is the breadth of the patent. "Hey dude your code does something kinda similar but not really but hey I to have a variable called "counter" so you violated my patent and now I will send my army of 100 million dollar lawyers at you and you cant afford to do anything so you LOOZE"

Software doesn't NEED patent protection

[rsilvergun]

development costs are a small fraction of the profits involved, and the 'manufacturing' costs are small to nil. Lets not forget what patents are for: encouraging invention. We don't need to encourage people to write software. It's so profitable they'd do it anyway. Hell, millions do it for free. We need to encourage people to make drugs and machines et al because the investment costs are much higher. I'm writing software right now, and I'm doing it with the same tools and resources as the big guys (well, not quite, I got a day job). I couldn't just jump into drug research or chip manufacturing...

Would reducing the software patent

[tokul]

Would reducing the software patent lifetime to 5 years or even less be the thing to do?

Reduce them to one day and they still get 24 hours more than deserve.

Obviousness

[gdshaw]

The length of the term is one of the problems, but at a practical level I would be more concerned about:

- Patents that were not obvious when they were invented because they depend on infrastructure that didn't exist them (eg. ubiquitous Internet access, smartphones, fast processors, cheap storage etc.) so would have been useless, but are obvious and useful now.

- Patents to solve a problem that the holder of the patent created, in order to protect a particular file format, protocol or suchlike. Microsoft's patent on long file handling in VFAT would be an example of this.

yes please! zero

[kubitus]

make it an infinitesimal short periode!

Lawsuit > patent lifetime

[lwoggardner]

Is it really practical to have patents (or copyrights) with shorter terms than the lawsuits required to enforce them?

It seems more like patents hinder innovation

[gerddie]

More in this paper.

Employing PatentSim, a multi-user interactive simulation of patent and non- patent (commons and open source) systems, this study compares rates of innovation, productivity, and societal utility. PatentSim uses an abstracted and cumulative model of the invention process, a database of potential innovations, an interactive interface that allows users to invent, patent, or open source these innovations, and a network over which users may interact with one another to license, assign, buy, infringe, and enforce patents.
Data generated thus far using PatentSim suggest that a system combining patent and open source protection for inventions (that is, similar to modern patent systems) generates significantly lower rates of innovation (p<0.05), productivity (p<0.001), and societal utility (p<0.002) than does a commons system. These results are inconsistent with the orthodox justification for patent systems. However, they do accord well with evidence from the increasingly important field of user and open innovation.

Dear seattle_coder, are you running for Congress?

[Rogerborg]

House or Senate?

Because if you're not in Congress, and I'm not in Congress, and neither of us can afford to buy a Representative or Senator, why are we fantasizing that our opinions matter?

5 years in IT is an eternity

[brunes69]

As an example, 5 years ago the iPhone did not even exist on the market. Today it is 4 generations ahead of the original, the OS 5 generations, and phones of the original's caliber are considered extremely outdated and nearly useless (no 3rd party apps, slow CPU, 2G, etc) to the point that you can pick them up on eBay for $50 when they used to sell for $400.

Unless the lifespan is cut to something reasonable like 12 months, then software patents have no place. The whole point of patents is supposed to be to encourage innovation. The reality however is a) There is innovation aplenty in the software world regardless of patents, b) In the software world, the truth of the moniker "innovate or die" is a lot more of an incentive to innovate than software patents.

Riddle me this batman!

[gnarlin]

What would you call cutting the heads off the French aristocrats?
A good start!

So it is also with patents (and not just software patents). After reading about patent lawsuits for years I have come to the conclusion that the whole patent system should go. I doesn't serve the interest of the majority of the human race. Barring that, shortening the life span of a portion would be a tiny hen step in the right direction.

Re:Mod parent up - knows what they are talking abo

[langelgjm]

Well, Berne Convention (and Paris Convention) compliance are required by TRIPs, so denouncing either one would involve violating or denouncing TRIPs - and as TRIPs is a crucial part of WTO membership, we would probably also have to leave the WTO, or face enormous retaliatory trade sanctions for non-compliance. None of that is going to happen, and in reality leaving tho WTO is probably not in the best interests of the country.

Senator, listen to your people!

[bzipitidoo]

Seriously. It's all very well for us to write letters. But we're busy trying to feed our families and keep our heads above water in this difficult economy, and cannot spare much time for that sort of thing, particularly when it is so likely to be wasted effort. If I'm going to take the time to write something, I prefer it to be available to a large audience, not an audience of 1 who may well be bought. As Lessig complained, our system is unable to reach the obvious conclusion that intellectual property law has gone too far. Instead, our representatives have sold us out time and again to special interests. If more than 10 years of opposition to and derision of things like the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" have been unheard or unheeded, that's not our fault for not writing enough letters. Why don't they come read these discussions on Slashdot? (Maybe they do already? Doubt it.) Here we have a group of people who are more closely concerned with the problems posed by patent law, having a good discussion full of good examples and covering many aspects and ramifications. Representatives could also participate, anonymously or not, as they please. They could even try us with an "Ask Slashdot" article.

On-line forums are the town halls of the 21st century.

Re:Senator, listen to your people!

[Jim Hall]

> [...] Why don't they come read these discussions on Slashdot? (Maybe they do already? Doubt it.) Here we have a group of people who are more closely concerned with the problems posed by patent law, having a good discussion full of good examples and covering many aspects and ramifications. Representatives could also participate, anonymously or not, as they please. They could even try us with an "Ask Slashdot" article. On-line forums are the town halls of the 21st century.

I get what you're saying. Online forums are the townhalls of today, it's a great way to bring a large number of people together to discuss an issue. But you also need to understand that politicians don't have the time to attend every online forum to seek community input. There are simply too many things going on. How will a Senator or Representative know what are the important topics their constituents need addressed? They pay attention to it when you direct their attention, but first you need to get their attention. And the way to get their attention right now is through writing letters, calling, and visiting them.

Also keep in mind that politicians are busy, busy people. Don't expect to reach your Senator or Representative directly; you'll likely need to speak with a staffer, and that's fine. They delegate these things to their offices, and it's the staffers' jobs to stay in touch with the issues being brought forward.

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The purpose of patents

[WOOFYGOOFY]

The purpose of patents is to "promote the useful arts and sciences" . That's in the Constitution- if they don't DO that, then there is no "right" to a patent. Patents aren't there so people can profit, they're there to serve a societal good, as defined by the Framers. In the case of software, we know for a fact that patents are NOT needed for software to be created. The virtual entirety of all software prior to 1994 or so- including operating systems, databases, word processors, the internet- everything you use on a regular basis and forms the backbone of computing, was invented without patent incentives. The strongest proof possible is an existence proof- the thing stands there, so the argument over its existence is done. So it is with software and the need for a "patent incentive". No patents are necessary to incentivize software development. The fact that corporations have their valuations deeply intertwined with "intellectual property" in the form of software patents is not an argument for their legitimacy. That's just another form of Too Big To Fail. We've built this mess, not it must be sustained no matter what ! It's too big to permit change ! Software patents are a tax on development and a drag on innovation- both prices consumers must bear. They favor existing billion dollar players- who can afford the millions to acquire and defend them- over entrants and reduce competition. We're a CAPITALIST country, not a CRONY CAPITALIST country. The capitalist system is to work for the benefit of the People not corporations. Obviously, people get confused on this point. Systems that align themselves with specific business interests and arrange incentives to benefit those interests are not capitalist- they're crony capitalist plutocracies.

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question on the US patent "system"

[arisvega]

Okay, can someone who knows answer this?

On the likes of a "patent troll", can a "patent stalker" exist? Someone who would wait until a patent has expired, and then file a patent for something quite similar, but arguably different? How does this work?

Re:"Handed Out To Easily?"

[marnues]

That is in your current English. Just because that's how you learned it does not make it universal. That's a distinguishing feature of English over French or German. English is the freest of the languages.

Re:The issue isn't... nor your political alignment

[Dragon_Hilord]

Get real. What the hell does Republican/Democrat have to do with this? This isn't "call down your favourite party to hate", it's a discussion on PATENTS. Grow the fuck up.

copponex, grow the hell up. You sound like a gawdamn child.

Theaetetus, you're correct.

I'm not american, so don't even try that bull with me.

Re:The issue isn't... nor your political alignment

[copponex]

Nothing about your nationality prevents you from being as stupid as a Republican. Your failure to grasp this concept is proof in and of itself.

Also, thank you for not providing a claim representing a particular method that you feel is worthy of a patent. You are learning a lot from your mentor, which is to say, you're learning to be proud of very little. I'm sure Theaetetus is reveling in his new-found protégé's ability to say jack shit and feel great about it.

Re:Comments from a new patent attorney

[Dragon_Hilord]

1 - software is taught AS mathematics. it can also be expressed AS mathematics (see Functional Programming). There is plenty of math that has nothing to do with nature. Do you know a mathematician? One of their favourite pastimes is making stuff up that "is neat". It doesn't have much to do with anything, other than to float the creator's boat. You still can't patent it.

2 - software is an artistic expression.

3 - software isn't a process, it's a series of expressions ACCELERATED by a computer. We just call it software cause it's a specialized case of math. you mistake biochem for quantum mechanics.

4 - physical is gears, ropes or chemicals. Electrons do not qualify as any of these things.

5 - They don't have time to "use its [sic] own judgment". Have you seen the latest report on the backlog?

6 - "they affect things that are part of the lives of the average Joe on the street" - anybody who writes any code. "But those Joes generally have no idea of the true issues at play" - neither do you. "less than ten in the last 20 years to my count" - learn to count. "copyrights & trademarks" - protect your stuff and leave the rest of us alone. we're hobbiests and open-source developers/users.

"FWIW, my 2c." - and that's going to be $20,000? Buy a programming textbook and get a real job in the field your profession loves to oppress in the name of big business.

That's my Toonie, eh?

Re:The issue isn't... nor your political alignment

[copponex]

you are no better than a member of the KKK spouting pure-opinion.

That was actually quite funny. It's unfortunate that you don't know why.

All intellectual property should be abolished.

[CondeZer0]

The government should not be in the business of granting and enforcing private monopolies. The only economy that benefits is that of lawyers and other parasites.