I don't disagree. I particularly like #2. But for better or worse, software patents have seemed to be by far the single worst "product" for patent trolling. I mean by a long ways.
Get rid of software patents, and you would probably eliminate about 80% of patent trolling at the same time.
"The flaw in your logic is the same as all centrally planned things."
The flaw in MY logic? I think you may have gotten a couple of things backward.
First off, that's basically what I was saying: we have to recognize that at least sometimes it is bad administration of the law, rather than the law itself.
But secondly, patents have absolutely nothing to do with "central planning". Quite the contrary. Apples and oranges.
By law, patents are granted to inventors based on the merits of the invention. The government itself (theoretically) has no control over that. According to law it isn't a preferential "licensing" scheme in the usual sense, because it is the nature of the patent itself that gets it approved, not some political opinion. That is about as opposite to central planning as you can get.
"The idea of a patent sounds good. The first people to invent something useful get a monopoly on it. The implementation of this is impossible. It would be best to do away with it all together."
But we know that it isn't impossible, because for most of 200 years it worked pretty darned well. It has only been some very modern changes (in the last 20-30 years) that have been destroying the system. Change it back the way it was, and while it may not be perfect it is at least a system that we know actually works.
"Patents not only cause harm, they don't cause good. Let's start with the main argument FOR patents, which is that they create a supply of inventors/producers/artists/etc. This argument is unproven, and clearly (as we agree with software patent) circumstantial at best."
No theory can ever be proven, they can only be disproven. But regardless: the evidence may be circumstantial but that circumstantial evidence is very strong.
Look at the areas of the world where the ability to profit from your own research / inventions did not exist. A couple of good examples are behind the iron curtain during the cold war, and China, even today (although that is changing). Russia simply could not keep up technologically or economically. To illustrate the profit motive: even peoples' backyard farms were several times more productive per acre than the collective farms, because people could keep part (or all) of what they grew. A kind of profit motive was the only real difference.
Although the situation has been changing as China has slowly been becoming more capitalist, the fact of the matter is that China has not innovated very much at all: the bulk of their economy has been manufacturing things that were designed and engineered in other places.
And I will conclude by partly repeating myself. Although it is true the evidence that a patent works are circumstantial, there is a lot of that circumstantial evidence. And I have to ask: where is any real evidence (evidence, not just abstract argument) that it doesn't work? Again I am talking about the patent concept in general, not just bad examples like software patents.
"And no, I absolutely don't think you should ever separate the laws from the administration of said laws. I think this is one of the absolute WORST things you can do as a public official."
No, I did not say that public officials should separate the administration of laws from the laws themselves. What I wrote was that in discussing what the problems are, we need to recognize that sometimes the problem is the law, and sometimes the problem is bad administration of the law.
Johnson was not exactly my favorite President, but he hit that right on the head:
"You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered." -- Lyndon B. Johnson
"I'd love for you to explain in detail with real world examples what makes software patents so much worse than regular patents. With brothers in both chemical and mechanical engineering, they deal with the same crap we do."
And I'd love to take a couple of hours to explain it all to you. But I have done so here on Slashdot about 5 different times in the past, when this subject has come up, and I really don't feel like doing it again, even if I had the time to do it.
But I will briefly summarize, and you can look it up for yourself:
Software is fundamentally nothing more than a collection of very simple instructions, slung together into different combinations, in order to produce an effect. Guess what else is like that? Writing. Writing is nothing more than a collection of simple elements (words), strung together in different combinations to produce the effects we want.
Software is inherently a written work. People WRITE software. Past court decisions for over 100 years have said that no matter what form written works take, even if it controls a machine (like player pianos, for a famous example), it is properly protected by copyright, but not patent because it is fundamentally no different from any other written work, again no matter the form that it took. An encrypted (or "compiled") book is still a book.
Please tell me: why would a certain string of code be any more patentable than a few paragraphs of original poetry? Both are unique. Both produce a desired effect. Both are made up of nothing but very simple essential components. Both are written by people.
But if you were to allow people to patent simple short combinations of words, you would stifle communication! People would not be able to use those words anymore in conversation. The whole idea would be pretty ridiculous, and it would lead to all kinds of unintended consequences.
Sound familiar?
I might point out that for this last 100 years or so, also, we have had software in one form or another. Player piano rolls and Cobol interpreters. Paper tape for controlling manufacturing machines like looms.
And that worked!
But allowing software to be patented hasn't worked. Those little chunks of code are now illegal for others to use. And it has had exactly the kind of effect you might expect if text were patentable:
"Your honor, this man is guilty of infringing the patent I have on paragraph 6 of my sonnet. He doesn't use exactly the same words, but he essentially says the same thing!"
And that has been stifling innovation and advancement in the field. That's what everybody is bitching about. But... we had a system that worked, before these patents were allowed. So I say: just scrap what we know doesn't work, and go back to what we know did work.
But I did say that was an exception: software patents. That's what software patents are all about: it isn't the software per se that is being patented, but the process. However, it is considered differently because it is implemented by "some apparatus".
That was simply a bad decision. For something like 80-100 years prior, software was unpatentable (but copyrightable), regardless of whether it controlled some "apparatus". That was the famous ruling in regard to player pianos. The courts reasoned (correctly, in my view) that it was simply music in a different form, and telling a machine what to play via music encoded in punched holes was fundamentally no different from telling a musician what to play via music encoded in little black dots.
So I'm agreeing with you here, not disagreeing. The whole concept that a software should somehow become a different thing merely because it controls a machine is ludicrous. There are a number of different ways that simply flies in the face of logic.
And that is why I did in fact mention it as an exception to what I was talking about. I don't blame the PTO for that at all. I do, however, blame them for a lot.
"History [wikipedia.org] paints a slightly different story. The Patent Office initially refused to allow software patents and the total number of patents granted per year was fairly small. After being overruled by the supreme court in Diamond v. Diehr, the Patent Office was forced to change its policies. From the wikipedia article:"
You must have misunderstood me or gotten my context wrong, because I do not (and did not) disagree with any of this.
Yes, I would. In my opinion that was another mistake. Genetic material is not "altered" and therefore no longer "natural" because it has been taken out of a cell. A dolphin in an aquarium is not "not natural" or "patentable" for that reason, why should DNA be?
Then why does it say that in all the dictionaries and encyclopedias? Far be it from me to "appeal to authority" in the manner you have kept doing, but in a case like this "authority" is the only way to settle the matter. And the authorities disagree with you.
Why does your brain have to "pop" before you can grasp very simple -- and long acknowledged -- rules of evidence? This is what is a mystery to me.
If something is testable, then it is NOT unfalsifiable. This is simple logic.
If a theory's ability to predict is tested -- and it turns out that it does in fact work -- then it is not unfalsifiable. Why are you having such trouble with this simple concept? You have been giving me peoples' OPINIONS, and I have been giving you verifiable facts. YOU weigh these things, and have decided that the opinions are worth more than demonstrated fact.
And yet *I* am supposed to be the stupid or weird one here? I'm not the one breaking all rules of logic, you are.
It is true that software patents, such as the one mentioned in the article, should never have been allowed in the first place. They have done almost nothing but damage.
But aside from the bad decision of allowing software patents, the big problem has been the apparent incompetence of the Patent Office itself: issuing patents for things it never should have (because of things like prior art for example).
If we want to have rational debate about the matter, we have to distinguish between bad laws (software patents), and bad administration of good laws (just about all the rest).
Other than the software patent ruling, the system per se isn't flawed. It has just been badly administered, and in some cases abused. Those are not the same things.
If you're playing poker, and somebody cheats (or fumbles while dealing the cards), that is not a flaw in the rules of poker. Similarly, the fact that our "patent system" is currently being abused in some cases and badly implemented in others is not a flaw in "the system", per se. It's just failure of the responsible parties to do it properly. There is a rather big difference.
"But it's not just the Nobel laureates and I making this assertion either: Ludwig von Mises..."
Well, first off, it isn't "his" theory, although he has added to it and promoted it.
But secondly: do you even know what falsifiability is?
von Mises aside, Keynesians like to claim that Austrian theory is "unfalsifiable", even when their own theory was actually "falsified"! (The stagflation issue, for just one example.)
Logically, the claim of "unfalsifiable" is false on its face, because any theory (where it it physically possible, unlike String "Theory" until recently, and certain other issues in physics) can be falsified by simply showing that it has no ability to predict.
And I have already given you historical, easily verifiable instances where it did not just predict future events, but explained exactly how ans why they would come about.
So you can talk about unfalsifiability all you want, but it won't wash, because exactly as I have stated several times already, it contradicts known and easily verifiable facts.
If you want to refute that, then you will have to find some way to refute the facts. Offering opinions -- by ANYBODY -- simply doesn't hold water in comparison.
This whole "conversation" started out with my assertion that speculative money trading was not "capitalism", because it had little or nothing to do with the production of goods.
You took issue with that, because your definition of "capitalism", apparently, was simply trade. Which is FALSE.
Supermarkets have everything to do with capitalism, because they deal in the trade of GOODS.
And I am done here. You have been doing so many contortionist verbal gymnastics to try to support unsupportable arguments, it is a complete waste of my time to be doing this.
"The details of your Austrian school economics are of little interest to me."
This is the most hypocritical statement you have made so far. If you have no interest, why are you expending so much effort in the process?
Further, I repeat: I gave you simple facts that you can verify yourself. If you don't understand the role of facts in a debate, as opposed to rhetoric, then it is not I who is getting it wrong.
"Oddly, I don't know how you could then make the claim: "Further, as far as I know nobody (except for you) has tried to make a credible claim that Austrian economics is essentially unfalsifiable." when the very article that you referenced yourself contained details and knowledge about someone other than me (and significantly more credible) making the claim that Austrian economics is unfalsifiable."
The key word there is "credible".
I don't care if God made the claims, if they contradict verifiable facts. That's not credible.
An interesting thing to say, since I referred to the same Wikipedia entry in my reply.
"Oh, and as for falsifiability:"
And I showed you verifiable ability to predict economic events. Apparently, you are willing to take the word of some "expert" over actual historical fact. Who is "appealing to authority" now?
Come back when you have real arguments that refute real facts, as opposed to quotes from scholars that contradict actual history.
Sheesh, again. I thought I was having a discussion with someone who actually understood the rules of intellectual argument.
Well, that's true. Technically the government does not control it. But as a practical matter, government and the Fed work hand-in-hand and coordinate the monetary policy.
For example, the recent "quantitative easing" required collaboration by the government and the Fed, as did the bailouts and recent government borrowing.
But you make a good point. In the first-ever audit of the Fed (which was restricted by law to investigating events surrounding TARP), the congressional committee concluded that the Fed had made $16 TRILLION in loans to U.S. banks and foreign borrowers over that same period, which they didn't tell anybody about, including the government. JUST during the last couple of years.
And those are newly-created, inflationary dollars that the US government did not even know had been inserted into the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't disagree. I particularly like #2. But for better or worse, software patents have seemed to be by far the single worst "product" for patent trolling. I mean by a long ways.
Get rid of software patents, and you would probably eliminate about 80% of patent trolling at the same time.
That's its job. If it doesn't have experts in a field, it should be consulting those who are.
I don't know why that would not work. It used to.
"The flaw in your logic is the same as all centrally planned things."
The flaw in MY logic? I think you may have gotten a couple of things backward.
First off, that's basically what I was saying: we have to recognize that at least sometimes it is bad administration of the law, rather than the law itself.
But secondly, patents have absolutely nothing to do with "central planning". Quite the contrary. Apples and oranges.
By law, patents are granted to inventors based on the merits of the invention. The government itself (theoretically) has no control over that. According to law it isn't a preferential "licensing" scheme in the usual sense, because it is the nature of the patent itself that gets it approved, not some political opinion. That is about as opposite to central planning as you can get.
"The idea of a patent sounds good. The first people to invent something useful get a monopoly on it. The implementation of this is impossible. It would be best to do away with it all together."
But we know that it isn't impossible, because for most of 200 years it worked pretty darned well. It has only been some very modern changes (in the last 20-30 years) that have been destroying the system. Change it back the way it was, and while it may not be perfect it is at least a system that we know actually works.
"Patents not only cause harm, they don't cause good. Let's start with the main argument FOR patents, which is that they create a supply of inventors/producers/artists/etc. This argument is unproven, and clearly (as we agree with software patent) circumstantial at best."
No theory can ever be proven, they can only be disproven. But regardless: the evidence may be circumstantial but that circumstantial evidence is very strong.
Look at the areas of the world where the ability to profit from your own research / inventions did not exist. A couple of good examples are behind the iron curtain during the cold war, and China, even today (although that is changing). Russia simply could not keep up technologically or economically. To illustrate the profit motive: even peoples' backyard farms were several times more productive per acre than the collective farms, because people could keep part (or all) of what they grew. A kind of profit motive was the only real difference.
Although the situation has been changing as China has slowly been becoming more capitalist, the fact of the matter is that China has not innovated very much at all: the bulk of their economy has been manufacturing things that were designed and engineered in other places.
And I will conclude by partly repeating myself. Although it is true the evidence that a patent works are circumstantial, there is a lot of that circumstantial evidence. And I have to ask: where is any real evidence (evidence, not just abstract argument) that it doesn't work? Again I am talking about the patent concept in general, not just bad examples like software patents.
"And no, I absolutely don't think you should ever separate the laws from the administration of said laws. I think this is one of the absolute WORST things you can do as a public official."
No, I did not say that public officials should separate the administration of laws from the laws themselves. What I wrote was that in discussing what the problems are, we need to recognize that sometimes the problem is the law, and sometimes the problem is bad administration of the law.
Johnson was not exactly my favorite President, but he hit that right on the head:
"You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered." -- Lyndon B. Johnson
"I'd love for you to explain in detail with real world examples what makes software patents so much worse than regular patents. With brothers in both chemical and mechanical engineering, they deal with the same crap we do."
And I'd love to take a couple of hours to explain it all to you. But I have done so here on Slashdot about 5 different times in the past, when this subject has come up, and I really don't feel like doing it again, even if I had the time to do it.
But I will briefly summarize, and you can look it up for yourself:
Software is fundamentally nothing more than a collection of very simple instructions, slung together into different combinations, in order to produce an effect. Guess what else is like that? Writing. Writing is nothing more than a collection of simple elements (words), strung together in different combinations to produce the effects we want.
Software is inherently a written work. People WRITE software. Past court decisions for over 100 years have said that no matter what form written works take, even if it controls a machine (like player pianos, for a famous example), it is properly protected by copyright, but not patent because it is fundamentally no different from any other written work, again no matter the form that it took. An encrypted (or "compiled") book is still a book.
Please tell me: why would a certain string of code be any more patentable than a few paragraphs of original poetry? Both are unique. Both produce a desired effect. Both are made up of nothing but very simple essential components. Both are written by people.
But if you were to allow people to patent simple short combinations of words, you would stifle communication! People would not be able to use those words anymore in conversation. The whole idea would be pretty ridiculous, and it would lead to all kinds of unintended consequences.
Sound familiar?
I might point out that for this last 100 years or so, also, we have had software in one form or another. Player piano rolls and Cobol interpreters. Paper tape for controlling manufacturing machines like looms.
And that worked!
But allowing software to be patented hasn't worked. Those little chunks of code are now illegal for others to use. And it has had exactly the kind of effect you might expect if text were patentable:
"Your honor, this man is guilty of infringing the patent I have on paragraph 6 of my sonnet. He doesn't use exactly the same words, but he essentially says the same thing!"
And that has been stifling innovation and advancement in the field. That's what everybody is bitching about. But... we had a system that worked, before these patents were allowed. So I say: just scrap what we know doesn't work, and go back to what we know did work.
But I did say that was an exception: software patents. That's what software patents are all about: it isn't the software per se that is being patented, but the process. However, it is considered differently because it is implemented by "some apparatus".
That was simply a bad decision. For something like 80-100 years prior, software was unpatentable (but copyrightable), regardless of whether it controlled some "apparatus". That was the famous ruling in regard to player pianos. The courts reasoned (correctly, in my view) that it was simply music in a different form, and telling a machine what to play via music encoded in punched holes was fundamentally no different from telling a musician what to play via music encoded in little black dots.
So I'm agreeing with you here, not disagreeing. The whole concept that a software should somehow become a different thing merely because it controls a machine is ludicrous. There are a number of different ways that simply flies in the face of logic.
And that is why I did in fact mention it as an exception to what I was talking about. I don't blame the PTO for that at all. I do, however, blame them for a lot.
"History [wikipedia.org] paints a slightly different story. The Patent Office initially refused to allow software patents and the total number of patents granted per year was fairly small. After being overruled by the supreme court in Diamond v. Diehr, the Patent Office was forced to change its policies. From the wikipedia article:"
You must have misunderstood me or gotten my context wrong, because I do not (and did not) disagree with any of this.
Yes, I would. In my opinion that was another mistake. Genetic material is not "altered" and therefore no longer "natural" because it has been taken out of a cell. A dolphin in an aquarium is not "not natural" or "patentable" for that reason, why should DNA be?
What's funny though is I really did expect you to look it up and call me on that 300 year thing, because it's not true. It was bait.
But 150 years is good enough for me.
Then why does it say that in all the dictionaries and encyclopedias? Far be it from me to "appeal to authority" in the manner you have kept doing, but in a case like this "authority" is the only way to settle the matter. And the authorities disagree with you.
Why does your brain have to "pop" before you can grasp very simple -- and long acknowledged -- rules of evidence? This is what is a mystery to me.
If something is testable, then it is NOT unfalsifiable. This is simple logic.
If a theory's ability to predict is tested -- and it turns out that it does in fact work -- then it is not unfalsifiable. Why are you having such trouble with this simple concept? You have been giving me peoples' OPINIONS, and I have been giving you verifiable facts. YOU weigh these things, and have decided that the opinions are worth more than demonstrated fact.
And yet * I * am supposed to be the stupid or weird one here? I'm not the one breaking all rules of logic, you are.
No, CREDIBLE objection. You keep forgetting that part.
Actually, that was the very first thing that crossed my mind.
It is true that software patents, such as the one mentioned in the article, should never have been allowed in the first place. They have done almost nothing but damage.
But aside from the bad decision of allowing software patents, the big problem has been the apparent incompetence of the Patent Office itself: issuing patents for things it never should have (because of things like prior art for example).
If we want to have rational debate about the matter, we have to distinguish between bad laws (software patents), and bad administration of good laws (just about all the rest).
Other than the software patent ruling, the system per se isn't flawed. It has just been badly administered, and in some cases abused. Those are not the same things.
If you're playing poker, and somebody cheats (or fumbles while dealing the cards), that is not a flaw in the rules of poker. Similarly, the fact that our "patent system" is currently being abused in some cases and badly implemented in others is not a flaw in "the system", per se. It's just failure of the responsible parties to do it properly. There is a rather big difference.
"I've simply objected to your definition being a good definition."
Well, it has only been pretty much exactly the same definition for about 300 years. You go ahead and argue with it, if it makes you feel better.
"But it's not just the Nobel laureates and I making this assertion either: Ludwig von Mises..."
Well, first off, it isn't "his" theory, although he has added to it and promoted it.
But secondly: do you even know what falsifiability is?
von Mises aside, Keynesians like to claim that Austrian theory is "unfalsifiable", even when their own theory was actually "falsified"! (The stagflation issue, for just one example.)
Logically, the claim of "unfalsifiable" is false on its face, because any theory (where it it physically possible, unlike String "Theory" until recently, and certain other issues in physics) can be falsified by simply showing that it has no ability to predict.
And I have already given you historical, easily verifiable instances where it did not just predict future events, but explained exactly how ans why they would come about.
So you can talk about unfalsifiability all you want, but it won't wash, because exactly as I have stated several times already, it contradicts known and easily verifiable facts.
If you want to refute that, then you will have to find some way to refute the facts. Offering opinions -- by ANYBODY -- simply doesn't hold water in comparison.
"Ah... so now we redefine "credible" to get out of the moral quandary of you being either a deceitful liar, or an ignorant moron."
Look, fool. One last time: "appeal to authority" does not trump verifiable facts.
You tried to pull the "appeal to authority" thing on ME before, yet don't recognize when you are doing the same.
I really shouldn't be answering you at all, because as I stated before, this is obviously a waste of time.
This whole "conversation" started out with my assertion that speculative money trading was not "capitalism", because it had little or nothing to do with the production of goods.
You took issue with that, because your definition of "capitalism", apparently, was simply trade. Which is FALSE.
Supermarkets have everything to do with capitalism, because they deal in the trade of GOODS.
And I am done here. You have been doing so many contortionist verbal gymnastics to try to support unsupportable arguments, it is a complete waste of my time to be doing this.
Again: have a nice day.
"The details of your Austrian school economics are of little interest to me."
This is the most hypocritical statement you have made so far. If you have no interest, why are you expending so much effort in the process?
Further, I repeat: I gave you simple facts that you can verify yourself. If you don't understand the role of facts in a debate, as opposed to rhetoric, then it is not I who is getting it wrong.
"Oddly, I don't know how you could then make the claim: "Further, as far as I know nobody (except for you) has tried to make a credible claim that Austrian economics is essentially unfalsifiable." when the very article that you referenced yourself contained details and knowledge about someone other than me (and significantly more credible) making the claim that Austrian economics is unfalsifiable."
The key word there is "credible".
I don't care if God made the claims, if they contradict verifiable facts. That's not credible.
This isn't even worth arguing with.
The stock market is trading. Capitalism has to do with the production of goods. You aren't even arguing about the same subject you think you are.
Have a nice day.
Hint, by the way:
If you want to make any actual refutation, you are going to have to dig a little deeper than just Wikipedia.
"Appeal to authority", indeed.
"Apparently, you can't click links, so here:"
An interesting thing to say, since I referred to the same Wikipedia entry in my reply.
"Oh, and as for falsifiability:"
And I showed you verifiable ability to predict economic events. Apparently, you are willing to take the word of some "expert" over actual historical fact. Who is "appealing to authority" now?
Come back when you have real arguments that refute real facts, as opposed to quotes from scholars that contradict actual history.
Sheesh, again. I thought I was having a discussion with someone who actually understood the rules of intellectual argument.
Well, that's true. Technically the government does not control it. But as a practical matter, government and the Fed work hand-in-hand and coordinate the monetary policy.
For example, the recent "quantitative easing" required collaboration by the government and the Fed, as did the bailouts and recent government borrowing.
But you make a good point. In the first-ever audit of the Fed (which was restricted by law to investigating events surrounding TARP), the congressional committee concluded that the Fed had made $16 TRILLION in loans to U.S. banks and foreign borrowers over that same period, which they didn't tell anybody about, including the government. JUST during the last couple of years.
And those are newly-created, inflationary dollars that the US government did not even know had been inserted into the economy.