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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.'"
Drug enforcement agents think the war on drugs is a really good thing.
God spoke to me
"If you're emotionally invested in the success of patent law as such" - that's the problem. You should never be emotionally invested in a cedrtain law. You may be emotionally invested in a goal and thus support a law which you think helps with that goal (and revise that support if it turns out that the law doesn't help with that goal). However as soon as you are emotionally invested with the law as such, you are not any more objective about it.
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.'"
Isn't that the actual, official, reason for having patent laws and protections in the first place?
Surely being 'emotionally invested in the success of patent law' would require you to want it to achieve what it was meant to achieve?
I think, given the number of lawyers involved and the kind of income they can make from corporates, that for "emotionally invested" read "benefiting financially". There are a few judges who, once they have a permanent appointment, suddenly start telling litigants to grow up and keep the courts out of it, but the majority are looking over their shoulders at their former colleagues and their children.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Is this a suprise to anyone? Central planners always have an excuse for their failures and always insist they just need some reforms and tweaks to get it right. They insist the problem isn't that central planning cannot work it is just some little switch or dial needs adjusting. The fact is Central planning can never work. Free people following having the liberty to do what they want with their time and property will always work better. It won't always be successful but that is the point. The failures will simply run out of their own money. The central planners get to take everyone's money to keep funding their failures.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Software patents have two main problems.
The biggest problem is, generally they aren't novel enough. Too many can be conceived by a general practioner of the art. And claiming XYZ can now be done on the internet, or on an IPad, or on 'fancy new device' doesn't make it novel enough.
The other problem is ideas can't be patented. Yet that seems to be what most patents are. They won't show the code, so how do you know if you are infringing on the patent? There are multiple ways to solve a problem. Just because I got to the same end point doesn't mean I infringed on the patent.
Lets take a look, machine translation is done by companies like Google and Word-lens. They are the ones inventing and making products. However if you look at the patents, this is typical:
2009: "U.S. Patent # 7,610,187 - Lingual translation of syndicated content feeds ", a typical IBM patent.
Now the patent isn't enabling the invention here, IBM has just done the typical thing, looked at what people are doing and patented around it. This isn't to create things of value because IBM don't make translation software, they make patents. It's about using the weakness of the patent system to make money from companies that *are* inventing things. It adds an overhead to those companies, an extra cost in their R&D budget.
No more than all English works are 'predictable', since they use the same alphabet.
Just because the building blocks are a limited set doesn't mean the result is in any way predictable. Hell, the halting problem alone shows that unpredictableness.
You inadvertantly validated the point. English works of literature are not patentable! The source code of a program should be copyrighted, as it was during Xerox vs. Apple and Apple vs. Microsoft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation
Corporations, in the interests of preserving their monopolies have worked hard to change the laws of the United States and by treaty, the rest of the world.
No. Hardware understands machine code - instructions, addresses, etc - which happen to be encoded in binary, but could just as well be encoded with pictures of cats.
Cats are numerable, but that is not the point. Lacking an understanding of and, nand, or, & nor gates, one is tempted to imagine that magic occurs at the hardware level. Really, it is all as simple as turning on and off light switches. Here is an example made of wood if it helps.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDshWmhF4A
The math does not change, despite the context.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_finite_automaton
Patents are not supposed to cover particular implementations, but higher level concepts that can be implemented in many ways, just like a drug patent covers all drugs with a particular active substance and not a specific mixture that is comprised in a tablet.
It is the "particular active substance" that is patented. This does not occur in software, which is written like a book, movie, or song.
Why is software considered patentable AND copyrightable? "Intellectual Property" is an illusion created by those who hope to confuse the rest of us into believing that one can own thoughts. Only the United States courts insist on patenting software - against the advice of the USPTO and the software industry. Copyright is sufficient. It seems evident that lawyers either do not understand software, or insist that reality conform to their wallets.