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A Defense of Process Patents
An anonymous reader writes "In light of the ruling against the University of California patent trolls seeking to claim ownership of the 'Interactive Web,' founding attorney of Beacon Hill Law Joe Stanganelli, has written an article defending process patents. In it, he refers to technology pundits as 'bizarro' and argues that it's a misconception that patents stifle innovation. As he writes, 'What I do not understand is — had the jury determined Eolas's patents valid — why it would be A-OK for dozens of already megarich corporations to get even richer adopting technology they did not invent or have legal permission to use, but somehow immoral for the actual creators of the technology to likewise profit[?]"" I am not a patent lawyer, but I doubt I'm the only one who thinks it's possible to support a patent on an industrial potash processing technique, but not software patents — or at least to distinguish them from each other.
How are ya?
I know I'm not supposed to feed a troll, but what do you call MS's vague threats over Linux and Android?
Patents exist solely to promote innovation. Or, more specifically, "science and the useful arts". There is plenty of evidence that traditional industrial patents do exactly that. There is very little evidence that software patents do so, and plenty of evidence that they stifle innovation.
This isn't about morals. It's about asking what bargain society wants to make with innovators, in order to promote innovation. The software patent bargain is helping neither society at large nor innovators. Making sure that the lawyers like it is not one of the goals here.
Patents on industrial processes are not the same thing as patents on mathematics, and that is what cryptography patents are. At one time it was RSA that was patented, and the RSA patent contributed to the stagnation of cryptography deployment in the early days of the Internet (we are still feeling the effects of that now). Today, it is elliptic curve crypto that is being mired down by patents, and cutting edge cryptographic technology is languishing in obscurity because of it. Patents have been granted on lattice crypto, which is even more obscure than ECC.
Mathematics is not supposed to be patentable, yet somehow these crypto patents -- which are really just patents on algebra -- have been granted, and our national security is threatened by it (the NSA has licensed some ECC patents for use in certain security sensitive contexts, but that is not even close to what we need). That anyone could defend that situation is mind boggling to me.
Palm trees and 8
In turn, take a look at Google who is outright buying companies to make their patent war-chest larger and larger. They're somewhat new company so they're only been preparing their chest now.
Meanwhile, how many companies have already filed patent lawsuits at Google already? I don't like it, and I definitely see it as a sign of how broken the patent system is, but Google's doing the same thing that most other big corporations do - they're trying to make sure they have a large enough patent war-chest that when the next group sues them, they can force it into a "well this guy says we're violating patent X, but they're violating our patent Y themselves" settlement scenario, the same sort of thing that happens all the time between big companies (look at the "patent-sharing access" agreements between, say, Intel and AMD).
It sucks, because it makes the patent system about fucking over the smaller companies and ensuring the big semi-monopolies are the only ones who can play on a level playing field. But that's how it works and WHY the patent system needs drastic reform.
OK, since no-one read TFA, let alone TFA's comments:
TFAuthor clarifies his position:
>Traditionally, the "patent troll" (or "[whatever-kind-of-IP] troll") term has been reserved for companies that buy underenforced IP and then make money by litigating it. FWIW, I have little inherent problem with this "trolling" act either because it's simply investing in an asset (the particular IP) that is obviously well in demand. The original creator wins by being able to realize a purchase price for his creation without having to go through the trouble of managing the IP, and the investor wins through selling licenses and/or getting judgments and/or settlements on violations. In practice, of course, there have been legal system abuses, but that should not speak to the inherent practice.
In other words, there's no problem with leaving a bunch of cookies on a table, then selling the rights to cookies to a debt collector, who shakes down everyone who ate one for a fair price (determined through a process of valuing their kneecaps).
Its difficult to draw a line Say, someone discovers a way to convert scrap metal to gold That person should be allowed to have a patent on it
Why? If that person just simply used their machine to produce and sell the gold, they would have no need of ever letting on that they even have it.
Lets use something a little more practical. The person(s) who designed the class D amplifier for example. It was a borderline idea. It was novel enough that most engineers wouldn't have thought of it, but about a handful did. It only missed being patented because the first ones to market were from academia back before the patent furor started in the mid 20th century. They all made quite a tidy bit on money selling motor controllers based off their amplifiers. Even today, many people come up with good alternative amplifier designs. Many of those designs are patented, but the patents are not what keeps the companies like Bose in business. What keeps them selling product are the more evolutionary things, like adding multichannel support for surround sound, adding MP3 playback ability, adding multi-room support, and other features that come from a marketing perspective instead of an engineering one. If Bose stopped improving on sound quality today, and focused solely on producing better and better feature sets, they could probably survive a long long time without ever filing for another patent. The only trouble they might run into would be if some idiot granted an overly broad patent on something like using a network to do X...
Toilet paper manufacturers seem to have no trouble staying in business without needing to sue everyone in sight over patents. Makes you wonder...
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Microsoft has always done this. I've been on Slashdot now about nine years and Microsoft has frequently astroturfed this place. And then every year or so there will be the quisling that Microsoft hires from the open source community to be in charge of whatever-they're-calling-their-Linux-lab-now, who will inevitably come here with an olive branch... dipped in arsenic. And let us never forget the level pro-SCO astroturfing that went on here in the day, and you still get a few of those old trolls making rude noises about Pamela Jones. Some, if not all of those guys were ultimately being paid by Microsoft, one way or the other (well, except Daniel Lyons, a fucktard of such incredible stupidity that he actually did it for free).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm a co-creator of MIME. I was recently interviewed about it, and one of the questions that came up was why we didn't patent it?
The obvious answer is it simply didn't occur to us, but even if it had, I very much doubly we would have done it. Our primary purpose was to change the capabilities of existing and future email systems in a fundamental way. (A secondary purpose for me at least was to drive a stake through the heart of X.400 - having just done an implementation of that mess, I was deeply worried that its very limited multimedia capabilities would drive its deployment in place of the much simpler Internet email protocols, and the entire world would have been much worse off had that happened.)
But neither of those goals could possibly have been met by patented technology. To be successful we needed as many implementers to adopt the technology as soon as possible, and a patent would have prevented that. (One of the reasons MIME is a bit ugly in places is because we believed that being able to implement and deploy it on top of existing infrastructure trumped design niceties.)
And while I can't speak for Nathaniel or Keith, it was certainly possible for me to profit from our work without a patent. But I did it the old fashioned way - by building a good implementation and selling it.
Of course there are situations where patents make sense, like to protect small inventors who come up manufacturing process or whatever. But there are lots of cases where they don't, and right now things are canted much too much towards patenting everything, even in cases where it actively stifles innovation and progress.