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The Software Patent Debate Is Incorrectly Framed
An anonymous reader writes "It doesn't matter whether a true invention is implemented in hardware or software, it should still be patentable, argues Marty Goetz — the man who was granted the first software patent in 1965."
The crux of the argument, according to the author: "Has there ever been a controversy about whether an invention using hardware circuits is patentable? I doubt it, even though hardware circuits are much like software in that they can be reduced to a mathematical algorithm."
I'm not sure if software patents should be completely abolished, just reduced. Maybe five years? I mean, how long in the software industry until something is considered old news or common knowledge? For them to last 20 years just seems to be nothing but inhibiting of innovation to me -- and I'm a software developer! I'm one of the guys that should be benefiting from a longer term. But so far, it's only been a major pain in the ass. I'm sure Goetz could argue I'm just not "inventive" enough to hold software patents. I'd wager I'm just not up to the task of working with an army of lawyers.
I actually take serious issue with Goetz's explanation on the second page of the article about software:
Note that these terms are all consistent with a manufactured product: research, competitive analysis, functionality, specifications, operational environment, operating characteristics, interfaces, modules, engineering, implemented, debugged, tested, quality assurance, alpha and beta testing, documentation, installation, training, OEM, component, system, repackaged, maintenance, warrants, workmanship, guarantees, errors, defects, improved, enhanced, upgraded, and models.
Dude, you can make software development as complicated as goddamn rocket science. But at the end of the day some kid in a basement can also write software sans all that shit. I know where we work, we use Agile Methodologies, high communication, we work in very small teams and we depend on our developers not to be complete liabilities. Sure your control gates and extensive product assurance works too with just about any level of competence in your developers but I feel that's why software is so unreasonably expensive these days.
There are plenty of resources online that get you from nothing to your first "Hello, World!" program in a matter of minutes. The same is not true of hardware circuits -- especially if you want to manufacture them at all in a commercially viable way.
This analogy is rather flawed.
My work here is dung.
That's why all patents are just plain bullshit and should be nullified...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Hardware is just physics and physics is just applied mathematics, so everything can be reduced to a mathematical problem ... if you're willing to be silly and unhelpful enough.
Has there ever been a controversy about whether an invention using hardware circuits is patentable? I doubt it, even though hardware circuits are much like software in that they can be reduced to a mathematical algorithm.
So because the two things are similar in one respect they should be treated as if they are the same?
My sister and I bear the same family name, so we are the same?
Flawed logic at it's best.
I found it odd that the author didn't cover mask work rights in the United States. They only last 10 years in semiconductor mask works and are also reducible to mathematical equations despite being amazingly complex layouts of basic transistors and connections.
Mask work rights are arguably more like copyright, which is why they're in the same title as copyright law. A patent restricts all machines implementing a particular function. A copyright, on the other hand, restricts only one particular implementation of a function. Likewise, as I understand it, a mask work is only one particular identifiable "amazingly complex layout" of a semiconductor; other layouts implementing the same logical function are not encumbered.
There are plenty of resources online that get you from nothing to your first "Hello, World!" program in a matter of minutes. The same is not true of hardware circuits
Write your logic in Verilog, prototype it on an FPGA, and then synthesize it onto an ASIC.
I don't mind that one should be able to patent software or hardware, or anything that is more complex than basically a rectangle with rounded edges. Where the problem starts is that is seems as if anything, no matter how vague the definition might be, can be patented nowadays. Not only is it plain stupid, it also harms the market as it is used as a weapon to block competitor from entering a whole market segment instead of being used to protect complex and expensive research and design in a specific way.
Personally I think as long as it's a new idea shouldn't you be allowed to patient it? Hardware or Software or whatever, if it's a new idea no one has seen or isn't widely accepted then I should be able to patient it.
make everything patentable.
patents expire in 5 years.
everyone wins.
Yeah and software are pretty much like ideas too, so lets go and patent ideas. Ideas can be reduced to a mathematical algorithm for sure ;P
I hate companies stoping evolution and progress in terms of money. Yes, saving my investment over the knowledge of progress, I could accept something like 2 years or so, but what we got now is bloody greed. No one can invent anything in his own garage because you will get sued.
Is there any debate that a printer can be patented? No. The output of the printer however is another story altogether.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
At one time, innovation and invention were hard to come by, and needed to be encouraged greatly. They weren't viewed as profitable and useful enough otherwise.
Today, innovation and invention is far cheaper, faster, and more profitable. The low end of the range can have massive changes in weeks. The high end still take years, money, and knowledge.
It's still worth protecting the high end. But 'protecting' the low end just stifles innovation. The system was supposed to correct for this by refusing 'obvious' patents. Now, either we need to redefine 'obvious', or there needs to be more unpatentable things. If you can bring something to market in a single month, there's no way that should be patentable. (1-Click, I'm looking at you!)
But if it takes a year, then it needs protection for the creator to recoup their money.
I don't know if it would work, but it would be an interesting twist to see patents expire when their cost has been recouped. So if you try to license patents out instead of creating the item, the best you could do would be to break even. (This would not include operating costs in the mean time, only profit, so you could probably make a decent living by stretching it out, but you couldn't possibly grow your company with it.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
If LET A=1 is patentable, then so is music. In fact, if OS elements are patentable then so is any graphical arrangement. I now own the concept of showing an eggplant on the back of a camel. The IP system is missing the ability to be proactive- to define protections for an evolving world. One thing's for sure, the guy in his garage is no longer a threat to any tech giant.
Since the examiners are skilled in the art, how can they possibly apply that test? The purpose is to reward actual innovation (dare I say "strokes of genius"), not "what we were working on this week in the lab."
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Article 29 Conditions on Patent Applicants 1. Members shall require that an applicant for a patent shall disclose the invention in a manner sufficiently clear and complete for the invention to be carried out by a person skilled in the art and may require the applicant to indicate the best mode for carrying out the invention known to the inventor at the filing date or, where priority is claimed, at the priority date of the application.
Emphasis mine.
While there are a great deal of faulty patents granted, one of the larger problems Software Patents in particular face is the 20 year duration. For an industry which re-invents its self every two or three years, twenty years might have well be two lifetimes worth of work. If the duration was shorter many of the obvious junk patents would have already expired and we would be in a far healthier place.
To solve Software Patents you can't get rid of them, we're already in too deep. But you can shorten the duration substantially and make a series of special courts who's job it is to deal with technical patents (and who employ technical experts). The courts are simply too ignorant to be able to understand what it is they're meant to be deciding. They have no expertise in the software field, or in any other special area (drugs, business processes, etc) but yet we expect these people to use their "common sense" to decide things like if slide to unlock or one-click checkout should be a valid patent.
..the way they are applied?
I don't know _enough_ about patents. I'll happily admit but it seems to me if you patented a device, hardware which does a series of sums via some circuits which have a mathematical function to them and then create another device which can do the same sums, but used a different layout of circuits and still comes up with the same result a patent for the first device wouldn't' cover the second device?
However in software you seem to patent the idea of how to do something, and anyone else who does something which looks slightly similar gets sued until they give up.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
That's an argument for hardware not to be patentable, not for software to be patentable. As an engineer turned programmer, I say neither should be patentable. Patent monopolies steal from us all. It's time to abolish the whole patent system, and fuck you you fascist theiving bastard if you disagree.
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
Personally I put patents in the category of "reverse socialism", that is all those cases in which the free market approach, which is blindly applied when it means firing workers, lowering wages, relocating production to foreign sweatshops, gets suspended when it's time to protect some elite which supposedly can't afford to sustain competition.
I totally agree with what he says. However, he misses the point that's called reality.
Problems that could easily be solved in hardware, would require a description of this hardware. A transistor here, a flywheel there and a plate of metal here in order to achieve X. It's that description that is then patented, not its functional result. Alternative implementations would then not be covered by the patent so anybody that finds a way to achieve X with a piece of plastic instead of metal should not be bothered by it.
That's not what we see in software patent land today; instead of the technical design, the functional result is patented. There are a million ways to implement slide-to-unlock and somehow Apple has a patent on all of them. That's odd, since most of these million ways have nothing to do with the original research Apple has done in order to obtain the patent.
If the same standards for granting a hardware patent would be applied to software patents, I could probably live with them (since in that case there would hardly be any software patents). Now I cannot, especially not when selling software in the USA.
Also, mathematical formulas cannot be patented. Therefore the comparison with mathematics is moot. What can be patented, is the practical use of that specific formula. Also note, the patent Marty Goetz was granted was not a software patent in the sense that we think of it today; his patent was valid ONLY when used on a machine using two tape reels. A pure software implementation would NOT have been patentable. Therefore using this patent as an example of a software patent is misleading; it is not a software patent, it is a regular patent that has part of the solution implemented in software.
0x or or snor perron?!
The problem with software patents is not that they are software, it's that the vast majority of them are obvious and they tend to be overly broad. Anyone encountering vaguely the same problem would produce the same solution, or one sufficiently similar that it would be covered by the patent.
The other problem is that patents really fail at their primary purpose: encouraging disclosure. No one looks for algorithms by doing a patent search. People look for published papers, existing libraries, or invent something themselves. Any one of these can end up violating a patent, but without gaining any of the advantages of the patent system.
People campaigning against software patents often get bogged down by assuming that this is something that is limited to software patents. It isn't. Talk to people in almost any industry, and you'll hear the same thing. They either have big cross-licensing agreements that let them ignore all patents and just keep out new people, or they find themselves constantly having to pay royalties for things that they invented independently.
I would have no problem with software patents if they were limited to the scope that the patent office claims: novel, non-obvious, useful. If this happened, I doubt even 1% of current patents would stand up.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The big difference is that with a hardware patent, you can still do the same thing as the patented implementation but in a different (ind ideally, improved) manner without infringing on the patent. With software, the idea itself is patented, meaning you can't even come up with a vastly superior implementation. In my view, this (along with the fact you don't even seem to have an implementation to get the patent) is the most important part of why software patents are a roadblock to innovation.
How many components does a patentable sub-components does a piece of typical consumer hardware have? A dozen? A few dozen? Take an stereo amplifier for example. There are filters, converters, amplifiers, knobs, buttons, a power supply, and a handful of other parts. In theory, you can pay a license fee for each component and still make a profit.
A piece of software, on the other hand, has thousands of patentable pieces. There is no feasible way to pay a license far each and every one and still be able to create a product that you can profit from and run a business off of.
It's an economic necessity that we treat software patents differently from hardware patents.
Circuits; code; cars.. they can -all- be reduced to a series of mathematical functions. But that means nothing and does not make them worthy of being patentable. Patents should only protect the big ideas; ideas such as making transistors on silicon; making wheels with inflated pneumatic tubes on them, using a quartz crystals to make tuned circuits (to use some very old examples).
The reason is that 99.9% of our modern 'patents' do not represent any real innovation; they only represent iteration; finding different ways to do something that has been thought of already. The top level ideas are the innovative steps that deserve to be patented; very little else is.
Eg; consider the concept of a patent on: 'this is how to search a relational database'. In reality the only two patentable ideas there are the originals of 1) a relational database and 2) searching a database; everything else, each stepwise 'improvement' on them is just an iterative step that maybe deserves copyright protection, but nothing more.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Software is no different than any other written material. These writings are expressions of ideas - nothing more. Software should be protected by copyright and not by patents.
Things or processes that exist in the natural world, including the mathematics to describe those things or processes should not be patentable. Patents should be reserved for physical devices that are unique and non-obivous to someone skilled in the art.
At this point in our human history, patents should be extremely rare, granted only to new things - not evolutionary improvements of existing things.
The point is, not that software can be reduced to maths, but that no reduction is necessary. A software program is maths. Already. A programming language is simply a language for writing down maths. It just happens to be one which computers can understand too.
These are simple statements of fact. Like global warming, they are facts that corporations just want to ignore.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Masks have to work in the real world, not the constructed one of mathematical proofs or software.
Therefore in software, you don't get magnetic interference unless you put it there. If you don't want interference, you take it out of your software or maths equation.
In software you can have a gear with 10,000 teeth. In the real world, you can't. The ingenious (inventive) step is how to get the effect of 10,000 teeth in a world where such a thing cannot exist.
You can work out mathematically how many gears you need to get that effect from the set of possible gear teeth, but in the real world, the gearing reduces your available torque and your mathematical gear doesn't produce your result.
Therefore the real world is different from the world of maths or software.
And this is why a mask or any physical creation is patentable but a mathematical form isn't.
... apparently circuits should not be patentable. Basically anything that's obvious or just the next logical step (even if clever) should not be patentable. So if he's right then we should see circuit design as just another program and get rid of those patents too.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Let's grant, for the sake of argument, that software patents should be no different than regular patents.
I want proof that patents at all are a net benefit to society. Could they possibly be worth the damage to our freedoms, and our pace of innovation?
The issue with the way software patents are enforced currently is that, unlike a physical invention, you can't come up with a completely different approach to implement the idea and not violate it. In the physical domain, clean room reverse engineering is allowed, but software patents have been allowed to be so ambiguous your implementation is probably covered.
I think software patents could be fine as long as they are specific to a SINGLE IMPLEMENTATION of an algorithm or idea. If your patent was implemented in C++, then the same algorithm implemented in Perl or even COBOL SHOULD NOT BE COVERED.
Under this concept, the way to invalidate patent claims is to simply show in court a different implementation. This would take out the teeth out of patents, remove lawsuits based on vague claims that might or might not be covered while still "promoting the arts" since now you can both license your invention and allow others to improve on it.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
Software should be patentable *as long as the source code is released*, which is not the way it's usually done.
But that's the way it's done by the MPEG effort of ISO and IEC. For example, MP3 is patented, but demonstration source code for an encoder was made available. In fact, BladeEnc and LAME were bootstrapped from the ISO demo code, replacing one component at a time.
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when algorithms become patentable/protectable, the next will be recipes etc....
THOU SHALL NOT ....!!!!
Most software patents handed out theese days, are about the first solutions that entered the head of the first person trying to do something. Unless the problem can be given to (in this case) a reasonably competent developer without him coming up with the same solution - the inventor is not giving anything of value to the public in return for his monopoly.
A few software inventions like: arithmetic coding and the RSA cryptosystem pass this test - whereas things like the FAT filesystem patents, and most other software patents, like the currently popular ending in: "...on a mobile device" are things that would have been made and disclosed to the public if they matter at all.
Run with the lemmings, and you'll get your feet wet.
Software is not just math. Software is an embodiment of a process. The programmer must reduce the process to a specific set of instructions, which eventually end up as a set of logical operations and data movements/transformations. However, it took a whole lot more than math to create the process.
Saying software is just math is a gross oversimplification of the facts. It's comparable to saying all engineering is just math, writing is just pressing keys, and music is just a series of notes. By that reasoning, digital books, music, pictures, and video are just data, and all the engineering that went into creating any product is just math, therefore, nothing should be patentable or copyrightable. That logic completely ignores the creativity, art, knowledge, assumptions, engineering, and inventiveness that went into creating the product. It's completely flawed logic.
For example, video compression is not just math, you have to determine what data can be removed with the least visual/audible impact, invent new ways to encode that information, invent ways to perform motion compensation for the encoder. For the decoder, you need to invent ways to skip detail or frames when playing back on devices that aren't fast enough to decode and play back all the data in real time, all while keeping the audio and video synchronized. And those playback features will affect the design of the encoder and format of the data stream. That's not just a mathematical process, it involves understanding visual and audio perception, and a bunch of other non-mathematical processes.That's a whole lot more than just math.
So, even though it is eventually reduced to a set of logical and mathematical operations, the software is the embodiment of much more than math. All the work is in converting an idea into a process, then reducing that process to a set of steps that can be executed as a series of mathematical and logical operations that will execute in the necessary time window on the available computer equipment. In some cases, such as the video encoding example above, the process should be patentable, even if it's sole embodiment is in software.
I'm not defending all software patents, many of them are bad patents. But when software is the embodiment of an invention, that invention should be patentable even though there is no "physical" embodiment of the invention. Copyright is not the appropriate type of protection for such an invention, patent is. The specific software might also be covered by copyright, but the novel and useful process embodied in the software should be covered by patent.
And, I would support a shorter term for patents that have only a software embodiment, perhaps 10 years. But what happens when someone creates a dedicated purpose piece of hardware for that process, does it then extend to a 20 year patent? That's something to work out before seriously pursuing shorter terms for software based patents.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
"The software products industry is competitive and needs patent protection as much as any other tech industry. Those software doomsayers who say software is just ideas, mental processes or mathematics would change their mind if they examined the different phases of the life cycle of a software product."
Last time I checked the people that were opposed to Software Patents where almost exclusively Software Engineers, since almost no one else is aware the issue even exists.
Is he trying to say the Software Engineers do not understand their own product?
What is the hardware equivalent of Bezos' One Click patent? A binary switch? With software/business patents the way they are, you can patent trivial features and then extract fees or at least gum up the works for actual innovation. Do hardware patents allow someone to patent a set of logic gates and then scan all existing designs for that subset of logic? That would be the equivalent situation.
Do hardware designers have to not use obvious logic design patterns because some not very bright examiner said they belong to someone else? Even CPU instruction sets are not patentable. I think that you can copyright an instruction set representation (the human readable form), but not the bit patterns and execution results. (This may have changed since I was involved in this area a long lime ago.)
So the guy who started the current mess is defending his bad idea. Why am I not surprised? Has he any other real accomplishments, or is this his only claim to fame? As far as I can tell his only "innovation" was dragging software down to the level of scummy lawyers.
Why is Snark Required?
Basically anything that's obvious or just the next logical step (even if clever) should not be patentable.
This is already the law, but examiners have historically had a poor time judging obviousness.
You patent a hardware implementation of an idea. Software implementations are already protected by copyright. Software patents are being used to patent the idea itself. This is not how patents are supposed to work.
This is a very biased article full of half-truthes from a man who thinks that the bigger half of the world are "anti-patent zealots".
Even school children are taught about patents, that a patent protects the execution of an idea, not the idea itself. I've yet to see a software patent that passes this test.
Medical research, like research into climate change and many fundamental technologies, is something that should always be Government funded to protect it from commercial pressures.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This ignores the bigger issue, that software patents rarely include sufficient detail to allow others to duplicate the work. The whole point of patents is to give the tech to others.
It is one thing to warrant a patent to ensure people can amass the resources to keep on working -- or enterprises, but this is very debatable, since an enterprise should be able to take on risks, by definition, and not depend on government help.
It's another thing to warrant such right only to discover the next day/month/year anyone could do that effortless -- and it is artificially prevented from doing it because of a patent: this is the proverbial "shooting the foot".
If anyone spent 10 years and 3 million USD on something a 7-year old kid solves in fifteen minutes, it is wrong to punish the kid.
And ideas cannot be patented, get over it. Change your line of business, if you need. You can move the entire US DOJ and spend billions of dollars, and yet it won't make a difference on Bali. Have a nice day.
PS: The above is my opinion only, unrelated to anyone else.
Shocker: Man With First Software Patent Defends Software Patents
Well, using other people’s knowledge and work. But let’s disregard for a moment the fact that anything he ever created built upon other code. He goes on to saying something which in no way contradicts the fact that software is mathematics and in fact reinforces this fact. For example: “Highly skilled personnel are employed in these companies and many have advanced computer science degrees, including PhDs. And because of their complexity, many programs are written using software engineering disciplines.”
Or mathematics? And equations? Seriously, scientific programming is all about formulating rules and applying them in code. Do we want a monopoly on rules that are immutable? “When these programs are inventions,” he claims (whatever “invention” actually means), “patent protection is important to help protect these companies’ investments.”
http://techrights.org/2011/10/31/martin-goetz-mistakes/
There are several problems with meeting that standard, but mainly it is that we pay the Patent Office practically nothing to do a search (less than $1,000). We put a patent examiner into a body of prior art that uses so many terms that it's impossible to do one quickly in most cases. For bicycles, we have one term for a "handlebar". For software, every developer with their "new" product has to come up with interesting terminology or it won't be accepted. Many products in the software field are "flashes in the pan": their companies went belly-up within a year or two and whatever documentation existed on them ain't easy to find. If the Patent Office were given the resources to do a proper search, the software patents that would be issued would cover narrow features that would have so many work-arounds that the true value of most inventions (small) would be realized.
All the drug companies patent are "Hedex plus plus extra", the minimum change in the patent for "Hedex plus plus" to get a new patent when their older patent is expiring and generics come out.
Anyways, even if patents were how drug companies paid for research, your query is really "How would the marketing of drugs be financed?"
I have a problem with trivial patents and the examples of trivial patents have often been software patents. When someone actually creates a useful invention in software and it's non trivial, I think they should reap the rewards of it. That encourages people to go work on hard problems that otherwise might be ignored as unprofitable. Unfortunately what often happens is that someone goes out and solves a problem in a fairly straightforward way, a way that most of us would have solved the problem had it been what we're working on, and only because they were the first to file a patent for it, they get to restrict everyone else's right to do something obvious for the better part of 2 decades.
We can never get far from automotive analogies - so, how about all those different brands and types of carburetors that were sold for cars?
Unlike copyrights, patents expire. The electronic information processing industry is much younger than the automotive industry. How long after the invention of the carburetor did those appear?
I can see in some cases the patents can be used on software, like if you spent years developing an encryption algorithm. That could take years of research with results easily duplicated once known, but for the majority of software, there are enough barriers of entry to protect its creators.
Good software is more about the implementation of ideas than the idea themselves. Anyone can hack together an idea into a simple prototype. Implementing it in a solution that is robust and competitive in the market is a completely different thing.
It takes years to develop good software which gives the first creators a huge advantage in the fast moving market. It will be years before competitors will create a product that is on par or better than what you have. Copyrights protect people for stealing your software, but it allows people who can implement your ideas better an opportunity to provide innovation in the market.
All the drug companies patent are "Hedex plus plus extra", the minimum change in the patent for "Hedex plus plus" to get a new patent when their older patent is expiring and generics come out.
But that doesn't keep doctors from putting their patients on generics for Hedex plus plus. One common way to "evergreen" a drug patent is to develop its metabolite or one of the enantiomers in a racemic drug as a new drug. But this prohibits generic competition only if the drug company manages to get the government to declare the old version of the drug unsafe, such as the transition from Seldane (terfenadine) to Allegra (fexofenadine). Otherwise, you get the situation where a whole bunch of manufacturers of the old version are competing with the manufacturer of the new version, and uptake of the new version slows. Who needs Nexium (esomeprazole), the new purple pill, when everyone else makes omeprazole that's just as effective? Who needs Clarinex (desloratadine) when regular old loratadine is effective enough?
A hardware patent generally describes the exact mechanism needed to achieve the result. It even comes with a diagram to help rebuild the mechanism.
This also allowed competitors to design around the patent, finding a better or at least different way of achieving the result. This is true to the intent of the copyright clause that allows patents -- the advancement of science.
A software patent says "it does X" and that's it, just the general idea, or the general steps to that idea. IMHO any valid software patent should have at least a pseudocode implementation example to show how it is done.
In short, vagueness needs to be absolutely removed from our patent process. Too often, what was invented was the patent itself, worded vaguely to cover anything that might arise.
Allow me to ramble a bit...Mr. Goetz says that software and (certain) hardware should be thought of in the same way, and that his sorting algorithm was the first to be implemented based on use with a general-purpose computer.
The algorithm was a set of instructions for a general-purpose computer. Those instructions don't perform any work themselves. The apparatus involved in doing the work is the computer, and not the algorithm. The apparatus could have just as easily been my youngest son...it would take him longer to perform the same operation as the computer, but he's equally capable.
If we're saying that there's a whole new class of patents waiting to be filed just by replacing "general purpose computer" with "organic calculating unit", then I guess I'll just throw my hands up in the air and try to never write software that does anything useful.
I'm guessing that to most people, the obviousness of a human completing a calculation not being an invention is higher than for a computer (a magical electronic do-everything machine) doing the same.
The question of hardware circuits being patentable may be the big one here. If we're asking if a hardware circuit that is nothing more than the embodiment of a mathematical algorithm should be patentable, then I'm more inclined to say "probably not", after reading his article than I was before. Just because there has never been a question about whether such a collection of logic gates should be patentable, doesn't mean that the question needn't be asked.
If mathematical algorithms are not patentable, and a machine invention is an embodiment of a mathematical alogorithm that could also be implemented by a general purpose computer running a program or a human being following a set of instructions, then I guess I would have to say that no, it shouldn't be patentable either.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
The ultimate justification for patents is not moral, but economical. Does the ability to patent a work actually stimulate innovation? If it does, then patents are useful. If it does not, then patents are harmful. It is on these merits that we should decide what industires should honor patent law.
Too bad we don't live in an ideal world.
This is a critical point IMO.
The big problem with software patents, IMO, isn't that they are patents on math, but that they are so grossly vague that they have absolutely no purpose ever being patented.
If a person of moderate experience in the field can't read the patent and make an exact duplicate of it, it shouldn't be a patent.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Seriously, go back and read some of my comments.
Software ~= hardware, and yet no one seems to have a problem with hardware being patentable.
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
The ultimate justification for patents is not moral, but economical. Does the ability to patent a work actually stimulate innovation? If it does, then patents are useful. If it does not, then patents are harmful. It is on these merits that we should decide what industires should honor patent law.
- MK Gandhi
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you're trying to argue that the current system isn't broken, then using an argument like "the current system doesn't do X elsewhere" (X, in this case, being restrict patents, and elsewhere being in hardware) is spurious and circular: if the current system ISN'T broken, then the fact that it works elsewhere is a given; if it IS broken, then using its current actions in one area as model behaviour for another is a bit pointless, isn't it? The argument assumes that the current system works to prove that the current system works, and doesn't end up proving anything.
So the advance of medicine isn't being promoted by patents on drugs.
I have ideas all the time. And they occur quite independently of observation. I see a need and think of a way to address it. But here's the rub -- I'm not brilliant though sometimes people mistake be for being so. Without fail, every idea I have ever come up with has been thought of and implemented before I did. And because I know I am not some extraordinary brilliant visionary creative, I would classify just about every idea I come up with as "obvious."
There are too many obvious things being patented. It's just that simple. And SOFTWARE patents are a collection of smaller things that are provided for in the framework of the software programming environment. To me, patenting software is like patenting a device made of LEGO. Software is a set of "pre-fabricated parts" if you will that are designed to perform special limited tasks. In short, software is using a machine for its intended purpose.
In my mind, it is like the stupidity of a touchscreen maker creating a "multi-touch" display panel complete with implementation instructions who then sells them to Apple who then patents the use of these things for their intended purpose. It's just damned stupid.
The real problem with all patents is that it is difficult to judge which applications are sufficiently non-obvious, and the current system chooses to err on the side of granting more patents rather than fewer. In my opinion, one test for patents should be to check if the patent depends on a technology that has not been widely available for, say, at least 5 years. If it does depend on such a technology, the invention should not be patentable. This way, everybody would have 5 years to develop the same idea. If nobody does, then it is non-obvious. If everybody does, then it is obvious, and shouldn't be patentable.
So, for example, if someone figured out how to efficiently solve the traveling salesman algorithm on a regular computer, that would be patentable: computers have been around for more than 5 years. But if their solution requires a quantum computer, then the idea is not patentable, because quantum computers are not widely available.
By this logic, inventions of internal combustion engine, steam engine, rocket engines, etc, would be patentable. But being the first to create some gene just because you invented the sequencing technology would not allow you to patent the gene. The sequencing technology may be patentable. Most current software patents would not be allowed under this system.
Michal
What about these crossover software-hardware patents?
"Let's patent a swipe." "Let's patent one button that does everything."
It's like patenting your first grade.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
By "each implementation of a drug" do you mean any company wanting to make acetaminophen (the active ingredient of Tylenol, called paracetamol in some markets) should have to take it through the whole New Drug Application process, including all three phases of clinical trials in animals and humans, instead of just the bioequivalence test required of generic drugs under current law? Talk about a broken window fallacy.
First, output was printed.
Then we had a CRT display. Invention!
Then we had a color CRT display. Invention!
Then we had the GUI and LCD screens. Invention!
Then we had the touch CRT / Glass. Invention!
Why is it not fair to claim the GUI the invention and all GUI elements and enhancements underneath it part of that?
That any GUI elements that leverage touch fall under the invention of the touch GUI?
Consider things like Apple's slide to unlock patent. Wouldn't that be like patenting the new ticker on the bottom of the TV?
Why are things like slide to unlock not considered purely content? What makes it any different than, say, how the weather channel shows radar images versus the local TV station?
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
News at 11.
Math is the language we created to model the universe. It has undergone many revisions over time as we learned more about the world. It does a pretty good job now, mainly because so many man-hours have gone into making it good.
It amazes me how people sometimes forget this, and think that the universe is somehow built out of our language.
Let's say Person A makes a Thingy (tm)
1) Person B steals the Thingy (tm) - that's clearly wrong.
2) Person B buys the Thingy (tm), but only to create exact copies of it to sell and profit from it - that's clearly wrong.
3) Person B buys the Thingy (tm), but only to manipulate a copy of it to sell and profit from it - that's clearly ok.
We're also fine with people copying or cloning as long as it's taking away persons A chance to profit from making the Thingy (tm)
So all we're interested in is the effort involved, if youre doing something which could possibly injure the sale of Thingy (tm) for person A, did you do enough so you're not just copying the Thingy exactly without any effort regarding differentiation.
Or am I wrong?
Here's a dilemma I'm facing: I'm working on a machine-learning algorithm that, in the (admittedly remote) chance that it ends up achieving the goals that I've set for it, could be useful for all sorts of real-life problems. As a test, I'm considering entering a bot in this year's AI Challenge (formerly the Google AI Challenge). There are ways to test it against other contestants' bots without submitting the full source during the run-up to submissions closing, but to actually enter the contest I'd be giving up a good chunk of the algorithm.
If the idea (and my implementation) turn out to be viable, I'd to make some money with it. A 5-year window would give me time to build a consulting business or something, or at least license it out so that when others use it to make money for themselves I get paid too.
BTW, I don't think the idea is obvious at all, but the problem is one that people have been working on for quite a while.
A song (software) should be patented because it can be reduced to math just like the instruments (hardware) that it run upon are patented and it NEEDS hardware the to run it...
Red herring: Hardware may be reduced down to math but so can a whole lot of things (think CAD drawings used to illustrate some patents.) False analogies are possible by oversimplification and that is what is going on when it is "framed" in such ways.
JUST LIKE MATH, the big point is that it is not tangible!!
Just like a story, it is not tangible, just like a song, it is not tangible... just like an idea, it is not tangible... Sure you write it down and run it on something; but just like those, that doesn't make it tangible; it is just expressed by tangible means. (Just as an abstract concept is expressed and experienced by tangible sentient beings...) You can't patent a book; well a certain kind of book or ebook reader but the story itself can't be patented (yet....)
A patent is a REAL item which is described abstractly on paper for the purpose of identifying the real-item so when they are made it is the legal basis for comparison upon which ownership decisions are made-- the patent is for the REAL PHYSICAL items, people are free to copy the description all they want but when they MAKE IT then it becomes active. This abstract description process is inherently similar to that of copywrite and trademarks which makes it extremely easy to confuse them especially when a broken political system allows patents to expand when copywrite and patents have such a thin line between them. It is getting TOO FUZZY.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I think the biggest problem with software patents is that you can patent a fundamental algorithm that is necessary for the function of a software. As an example let's take the mousetrap. If you get a patent on a specific mouse trap it doesn't mean other people can't create different mousetraps. However getting a patent on the idea of a mousetrap means that nobody can build any types of mousetraps. This is basically what a software patent is, it's the patent on the idea itself not the implementation.
In the case of commercial drugs, it's not promoted.
Innovation producing new drugs are almost entirely (the lion's share at least) paid for by government grant. Therefore, like I said, "the same way as they do now: Government grant" to your query "How would development of new drugs be paid for?".
(Italics added)
The question he is posing is only part of the question that he is claiming has been asked and is incorrect. That is, if software itself is not patentable, then the natural result is that something that is patentable in hardware is not patentable when implemented solely in software; however, the versus is not true - if you deem that anything implemented in hardware is patentable but its software implementation is not, then that does not mean that all software is not patentable.
This only goes to show that the software industry has been asking the right question by first asking whether software - any software - is patentable first and foremost.
However, even changing the argument as he wants still renders a flawed analysis. Why? Because as others here have pointed out the patent on the hardware implementation is not simply the function of the hardware implementation but the entirety of the implementation itself - the layout, the components, the interconnects, the materials, the dimensions, and the function; where as a software patent is simply the function - anything else it the mathematic model to produce the function - but that is not enough to make something patentable as it is by nature abstract and (per SCOTUS) non-patentable.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
and only for drugs on the market for less than half the average human lifetime.
That'd be like extending patents from the current 20 years to 40 years. Did Cher tell you to do this?
The author's quote from the summary demonstrates that he doesn't understand the subject matter well enough to make any informed comments on it.
"Has there ever been a controversy about whether an invention using hardware circuits is patentable? I doubt it, even though hardware circuits are much like software in that they can be reduced to a mathematical algorithm."
A hardware circuit cannot be reduced to a mathematical algorithm. It can be *modeled* by one, but it cannot be reduced to one. To clarify this point, I'll reduce it to a bit of 'hardware' so simple almost everyone reading this has an implementation somewhere in their home/apartment, a candle.
The process by which a candle produces light and heat can be accurately modeled using nothing more than mathematics. (I was going to say 'simple mathematics', but some of the formulas used are actually fairly complicated.) However, this model can be easily distinguished from the hardware implementation of that model, the candle itself.
How, you ask?
Easy. The model, will produce neither heat nor light when the formulas are run. The candle will produce both when it is lit.
That is the difference between something which can be *modeled* with mathematics, and something which *is* mathematics.
Software, and the mathematical model of it (being the same thing) will produce the same result when the formulas are run.
Hardware, and the mathematical model of it (being different things) will not produce the same result when the formulas are run.
Computer hardware will result in a certain pattern of electrical charges at the other end. The model will result in a set of values which *represent* those electrical charges.
... is that human beings just don't have the cognitive power, wisdom or experience to even have a patent system. You'd have to be a higher being and know an enormous amount to even begin having enough judgement to seperate 'obvious' from 'non obvious'.
We see this in the courts all the time - judges are frequently ignorant morons and do just the most bone-headed legal shit because of their ignorance. Same thing happens in regard to patents.
Drug companies have no interesting in curing cancer it is making them too much money
BS. Drug companies want to cure cancer so that their users can survive long enough to buy the drug companies' other "lifestyle" products.
The patent debate should be framed around the massive irreparable damage monopolies, including patents, do to local and domestic economies worldwide.
His point is interesting HOWEVER the vast majority of
software patents I have seen recently are little more than arm waving
and insufficient to implement white board renderings.
It is the RARE patent that has sufficient bounds and goals
to be let as a cost plus contract that cannot be canceled.
A method for foo and bar... needs to pass the sufficient
to contract an implementation test. i.e. both parties
the company and the programming service should be able
to arrive at a sound and well considered contract to
implement by prudent men.
Style and design... that is interesting and different.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Of course it is incorrectly framed. Knowledge and use of knowledge should not be limited by the ego of the first one to implement the idea or even the first to have a big enough ego to actually think he was the only one who had the idea and then patented the idea. Yea, but money money.. I don't give a shit about your money. Knowledge and science was here first.
The age of mass-produced stupidity is obviously going to end, and science isn't. I win. Shut the fuck up about patents and just ignore them. I'll take the lawsuit and make my case every time. I'll donate all my money to a good cause and declare myself bankrupt before giving money to anyone over a patent and then I'll just start again.
You can and must not limit the capabilities of me as a thinking and creating human being. Not over an economic bullshit system that everyone can see is just a transitional phase in our history. Because it IS NOT sustainable and you know it. It's time to realize it too.
Isaac Newton - "If I have seen further than others it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."