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Federal Patents Judge Thinks Software Patents Are Good
New submitter Drishmung writes "Retired Judge Paul Michel, who served on the Federal Circuit 1988-2010 — the court that opened the floodgates for software patents with a series of permissive decisions during the 1990s — thinks software patents are good. Yes, the patent system is flawed, but that means it should be fixed. Ars Technica have a thoughtful interview with him. Ars' take: 'If you care most about promoting innovation, offering carve-outs from the patent system to certain industries and technologies looks like a pragmatic solution to a serious problem. If you're emotionally invested in the success of patent law as such, then allowing certain industries to opt out looks like an admission of failure and a horrible hack.'"
Slashdot headline: "Federal Patents Judge Thinks Software Patents Are Good"
Ars headline: "Top judge: ditching software patents a "bad solution"
If you bother to read the article, he says that simply throwing out the patent system is not a good idea. He also says that software patents are rife with garbage which needs cleaned out, and that the entire system from top to bottom needs to be overhauled.
But I guess it's easier to post a knee-jerk response and get a +5 Insightful than it is to read the article.
The other problem is ideas can't be patented.
Hmm, I've always thought that this was exactly the point of patents. So once you have them in laws, ideas can, in fact, be patented.
no, point of patents was to get protection on a specific way to implement a technical solution, for example to create an internal combustion engine you'd use valves and a cylinder and some way to deliver fuel/air mixture into it, have it attached to a set of wheels in specific way that's doable. you wouldn't grant and uphold a patent on something as "4 wheels and a motor" which is on some level a mere idea, but not a technical solution at all.
a quick fix would be that in order to get the patent you would need to submit a device and it's plans, including the software that makes it tick, to the patent office. that way you couldn't patent a perpetual motion machine without building one and showing how it works - which would be the point. that would protect your porridge boiler from 1:1 chinese copies but not from a ceramic pot. you also shouldn't be able to patent a chemical substance(which seems also to be a recurring thing for people to try), but you could patent the most viable technical solution for making said substance..
and supreme court definitely isn't the solution, no amount of hard work from them is going to fix it really when it's broken at the other end, the cases shouldn't even hit them - they're not supposed to be the guys who figure out what the law should be really.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
nobody who is seriously involved in the development of software products can claim that software patents are a good thing
Would you consider Steve Jobs "seriously involved in the development of software products?" When he announced the original iPhone, he noted "and boy have we patented it." It's right there in the presentation as a bullet point, alongside "works like magic" and "no stylus." Later he pointed out that "We filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone and we intend to protect them."