If you ever saw the Triumph of the Nerds documentary by Bob Cringely, you'd have seen Steve Jobs saying "Picasso had a saying Good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless in stealing great ideas."
Of course, in the same documentary he also says "The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste":)
No, they don't. Only one independent claim (i.e., 1, 2 or 9) has to apply (at least it's like that in Europe), or an independent claim along with some dependent claims if you want a stronger case because then the claims become more specific and hence hopefully more distant from the prior are (e.g., 2 and 3, or 2 and 7 and 8).
This isn't exactly sudo.
That's true. It's still a crappy patent application though, since it basically covers showing a password dialog box with eligible user accounts (along with some details about their associated privileges) when an operation requires elevated privileges.
Thumb is just a subset of ARM - so not another instruction set:-)
ARM instructions are encoded as 32 bits per instruction. Thumb instructions are 16 bits per instruction. You have to explicitly switch to Thumb mode before you can execute any Thumb instructions (and back to ARM mode if you want to execute ARM instructions again). So they most definitely are two different instruction sets. The fact that they have similar mnemonics is irrelevant.
Jazelle etc just let you implement very fast Java apps on a very low power CPU - so what's wrong with that?
The GP didn't say there was anything wrong with that. He said that this was an example of another instruction set supported by ARM CPUs.
There is no such thing as magic - it's all design at some point.
Yes, that's what the GP said.
I think that you're a bit fixated on CPUs that fit into machines with power cords or heavy batteries and what makes them good - which isn't what makes mobile CPUs good.
I think that you're a bit fixated on straw man arguments.
But you want to get rid of them because of present day technical difficulties that may one day be overcome? That's some good planning there, Lou.
Of course it is. You can always reintroduce them at that mythical day of the second coming when the unicorns finally descend to Earth and solve all problems with the patent system. Patent proponents have been saying for decades that problem X with the patent system would be solved within Y years once the system has adapted to whatever the new development challenging the patent system is (chemical processes, medicine, software, biotech, trolls, court/forum shopping, patent thickets, alternative innovation/dissemination models,...), while in practice the problems only get worse and worse (increasing examination backlogs, increasing amounts of trivial patents that get granted, increasing court case costs and associated innovation overhead/drain, legal uncertainty, various uses of patents in ways that have nothing to do with increasing innovation such as Monsanto's suing of farmers that are victims of cross-pollination and continuation patents in pharma,...)
The standard answer to remarks like this is always "don't throw away the baby with the bathwater". Reality check: the baby is long dead, now stop beating it as if it were a horse (hey, I am replying to BadAnalogyGuy).
I work on server design, specifically motherboards. ECC is a feature, it helps prevent bit errors from passing through undetected. It is not a method for preventing errors from happening in the first place, nor does it influence the number of bit errors.
It does, sort of, because errors can also occur in the parity RAM. Of course, this does not change the actual number of errors in the data ram, but the ECC will detect more errors than actually occur in a non-ECC chip of the same size.
I also bought it from their website (on that weekend where they had that promo), but I did get the Mac version.
If you go to their online store, you can read the terms (go to the "Frictional Games Store", and click on the "End User License Agreement" at the bottom):
4. The Software may be loaded onto no more than one computer at a time. A single copy may be made for backup purposes only.
5. The rights and obligations of this Agreement are personal rights granted to the Licensee only. The Licensee may not transfer or assign any of the rights or obligations granted under this Agreement to any other person or legal entity. The Licensee may not make available the Software for use by one or more third parties.
So you're not allowed to sell your copy to someone either, as far as I can tell.
Depending on your definition of DRM, Penumbra is not without DRM. It uses a serial number system that requires online activation, and this is used to prevent you from installing the game on more than a single computer of yours (and in particular the latter condition annoys me).
Very few homes in (North-)Western Europe have air conditioning, and the warm water tank would obviously not be placed in your living room. Average summer temperatures are between 20 and 30 degrees Celcius. And while the system would probably be overall less efficient in summer than in winter, you will still need some warm water anyway to do the dishes, to clean, to take showers, etc. There are also washing machines and dish washers nowadays that can take warm water as "input" rather than cold water that is subsequently heated using electricity.
And here's my own collection of summaries a bunch of economic studies on the effects of and importance of software patents (it also includes some opinions of political committees, but those are clearly marked).
Which is why Microsoft, with its thousands of patents, so easily struck down Google when all it had was a couple of patents on search technology, effectively cutting Google off at the knees and leaving Microsoft free to dominate the search engine market.
I think the main reason that Microsoft didn't do that, is because Microsoft completely missed the initial boat as far as the Internet is concerned.
The fact that large companies regularly go rent seeking with small companies is fairly well documented, even though most companies don't advertise this fact (which company would want to publicise that they're at the mercy of a patent owner?). Unless a case goes to court, you're unlikely to ever read anything in the press about it. Nevertheless, e.g. IBM's rent seeking tactics have been documented fairly well.
Not exactly the most IP-compliant country in the world, and pretty much has the USA over a barrel economically right now from the look of things.
It's actually worse than that. The whole "the Chinese are stealing all of our patents" mantra turned out to be largely BS. It were US companies that started by convincing the Chinese to license all sorts of worthless patents. And, oh surprise, when the Chinese companies later on figured out they had been duped in paying tons of money for worthless rights, the next time they said GFY.
I don't get it either. If you write code for a living, don't you want your work to be protected?
You realize that when someone DLs your code off the internet for free, that reduces the value of your work.
You realise that if you cannot sell your work because it infringes on the patents of 5 patent holders that each want 10% of your revenue, that makes your work entirely worthless.
Try to see the big picture:
Ditto.
So why the anti-patent, anti-copyright hostility? Its not like you personally have to worry about infringement anyway. That's your legal departments job.
That is, if you have a legal department. At least in Europe, most of the software houses are SMEs, and they also employ the majority of people and provide the majority of tax income. Not to mention that each Euro spent on patent lawyers by the IT industry cannot be spent on developers.
To put it crudely: patent attorneys and patents are intrinsic overhead. Unless they are absolutely mandatory because otherwise the entire IT economy basically comes crashing down, you should get rid of them as much as possible. And no, that's not because patent attorneys are bad people.
PS: I'm only talking about patents. I'm not against copyright, except for the way it is being extended into perpetuity.
It's however doubly so applicable to software, because software innovation requires much less investment in materials, works with an idealised abstraction (rather than with finicky physical bits), and consists almost exclusively of incremental innovation.
I'm curious. Which one of these would *not* apply to mousetraps?
Before you point to the "abstraction", remember that all claims cover concepts in the abstract, even if they are attempts to describe a physical object.
I wasn't talking about the claims, but about the innovation. In case of software, the innovation is purely in the abstract, unlike in case of mousetraps (where you do have to play with the "finicky physical bits" I mentioned). As far as incremental innovation is concerned, I guess that mouse traps at this point indeed also are mostly in that boat, and it's quite likely that patents are hardly useful anymore for the purpose of stimulating "mousetrap innovation", too.
I'm not aware of any economic studies looking at the effects of patents on the mousetrap industry though, presumably mostly because unlike software, mouse traps are not a pervasive enabling technology forming a fundamental underpinning of our daily lives and the entire economy.
Of course, there are many more arguments than those I mentioned above, such as
network effects: mouse traps have no compatibility requirements with other mouse traps
alternative innovation means in the software world (such as open source)
the high pace of innovation in the software world and the rapid changes of requirements: mouse traps don't evolve that rapidly, and even if they would, it would hardly matter unless the mice also evolved equally quickly:)
the complexity of software: in 2004, there were 783 patents on the ethernet plug, and as David Martin nicely explained at that conference:
The degrees of freedom in a plug, Ladies and Gentlemen, are two. You've got the insulative surface, you've got the prongs. That's two degrees of freedom. The third degree of freedom is where you shove it.
With software, the number of freedoms are much larger than in an ethernet plug or a mouse trap, so the problem of patent thickets is much bigger (and the cost of analysing whether or not you infringe as well -- personally, I'd say it's virtually impossible to guarantee that any reasonably complex program does not infringe on any currently published patent).
You might want to have a look at the studies overview I linked to earlier. It contains various citations from economic studies explaining why patents are inappropriate specifically for the software field.
So if even those guys specialised in risk management can't determine the risk of infringing on a patent, what makes you think Joe the Programmer can do so with any degree of accuracy?
If you're dumb enough to hire Joe the Programmer to evaluate your patent infringement risk, instead of a patent attorney, then you deserve what you get.
I was reacting to this statement:
Well, you could read the claims of the patent. That would make it very easy to figure out whether your program is off the hook.
Because of the "your program", I interpreted this as "if a programmer wants to know whether or not his program infringes on a patent, he should just read the claims of the patent". So I was not talking about hiring a programmer to do it, but about a programmer reading the patent himself.
Yes, he is, at least in the EU. Reverse-engineering is forbidden by software copyright law here
Small correction: reverse-engineering through decompilation is forbidden here (which the directive broadly defined as "translation, adaptation, arrangement and any other alteration of a computer program and the reproduction of the results thereof", see article 4.b). The disassembling and trawling through the code with a debugger that was mentioned before falls in that category.
I thought black-box reverse-engineering was not forbidden, but the "reproduction of the results thereof" above does seem to go in that direction...
They are when implemented using a computer algorithm. There is no inherent difference between, e.g., a computer program that implements one-click shopping and a computer program that compresses data. You can also turn both into dedicated circuit designs, should you want to.
This is incorrect. A compression algorithm has a strict definition for all use cases, a set of input bits mapped via specified transformations to a particular set of output bits. This is no different than a chemical process patent, which specifies the inputs and transformations to generate the output; it says nothing about the specific plant implementation or similar transformations that work on different inputs or generate identical outputs.
A compression algorithm is an abstract mathematical entity, limited only by mathematical truths. A chemical process is a physical process that operates under the limits of the physical world. Neither the nature of both things nor the economics and dynamics of both innovation environments are even remotely comparable.
Again: playing a piece of music on a piano is also a particular input, a set of transformations (by the piano) and a certain output. This is not an argument to declare something patentable.
Patents are economic tools. You should only apply them where strictly necessary, since they introduce waste/overhead in the system (every dollar spent on acquiring patents, litigation,... cannot be spent on useful stuff). Theoretical thought experiments likening the nature of abstract algorithms to physical transformations are not really relevant (and sound really strange to me as a doctor in computer science).
What are the logical transforms and the input and output bit set pattern for one-click shopping?
The one-click shopping patent basically claims the concept of storing customer data on the server and using (e.g.) a cookie to keep track of the customer, so that when he comes on the website you can immediately look up their data so that they do not have to explicitly log in before they can buy anything (or add things first to a shopping cart).
Of course, this can be implemented in many ways, but so can any software claimed in broader terms than exact source code (including compression algorithms). And even the above succinct description would be enough for any programmer worth their salt to implement one-click shopping. The patent description obviously goes into much greater detail.
What is a universal boolean logic for selling pet food on the Internet?
That's akin to asking what the universal chemical process is for "producing hydrogen". A claim phrased like that is a wish list patent, and you can give examples of those in any patent category.
The very reason business method patents are being questioned is because no such specification exists or can exist for a useful implementation; any specification strict enough to be reducible to a machine would also be too narrow to have any value.
I think it is wrong to state that in general no such specifications can exist. That statement also suggests to me that the claims and description are combined, while the claims are a lot broader than the description (which describes a "preferred embodiment" of the invention, rather than the only possible way). So while the claims may not be specification enough by themselves, the description may very well be (once you translate the barely readable legalese to something that's usable by a software designer).
I think we can indeed agree that software patents have not killed the software industry. That's however not a very strong argument if you claim that software patents are necessary or even helpful.
Yes, but it refutes GP's argument that software patents are bad per se.
No, it only proves that they (or at least the way they are used by the majority of patent holders at this time) are not bad enough to kill off the industry. It does not in any way refute the argument that they are bad.
It's equivalent to an assertion that if we didn't have the death penalty, there would be a thousand-fold increase in the murder rate. Sure, that's an interesting thought, but there's no evidence whatsoever, so on its own, it doesn't really mean much.
There are many countries without a death penalty and with lower murder rates, which is an indication that this would be an incorrect assumption. The same goes for software patents: economic studies (Bessen&Hunt, also in the overview I gave in my previous post) show that companies investing more in patents, invest less in R&D (the rest is spent on patenting and subsequently regained via rent seeking). They also show that the number of court cases is exploding (last slide).
An important fact to also keep in mind is that having patents an sich causes overhead. All money spent by the industry as a whole on obtaining patents, licensing negotiations, court cases, legal counsel regarding patents, etc is money that cannot be spent on R&D, customer service, etc. So having patents starts out at a loss, and it has to have really large positive effects to end up in the black again.
It's however doubly so applicable to software, because software innovation requires much less investment in materials, works with an idealised abstraction (rather than with finicky physical bits), and consists almost exclusively of incremental innovation. A.o., the FTC report and the report by the National Research Council cited above go into more detail.
Sure, but this goes to my later statement that software patents may deserve a shortened term. It doesn't support GP's argument that software needs no patent protection because, after all, it would get invented eventually.
It does support that argument, though it obviously cannot conclusively prove it. Where is your evidence that a shorter term is required rather than no possible patent attacks on re-inventors at all?
They are (correctly) viewed as strict abstractions of circuit designs, circuit designs being unambiguously patentable subject matter.
And as I mentioned in previous post, so are pianos. You can also make a dedicated piano or hand-crancked organ that only plays that piece of music (a "dedicate circuit"). That does not make "this piece of music when played by an organ/piano" any more patentable though. At most, the specially constructed organ/piano could be patentable, but that does not confer any extra rights to the music, even when someone else plays it on another piano.
Business method patents are not an abstraction of a circuit design
They are when implemented using a computer algorithm. There is no inherent difference between, e.g., a computer program that implements one-click shopping and a computer program that compresses data. You can also turn both into dedicated circuit designs, should you want to.
Copyrights are not enough. If X is the new innovative piece of code within a program, a competitor can buy the program, fire up a debugger, and look at the disassembled code for X.
At this point he's infringing copyright just as much as when he'd making unlicensed copies.
No, he's not.
Yes, he is, at least in the EU. Reverse-engineering is forbidden by software copyright law here, except if all of the following conditions are true:
it's solely for the purpose of interoperability
the information you need is not readily available otherwise
you do not publish the information that you discovered this way (although you can sell programs making use of this information; not sure how this would work with open source)
The output of his reverse engineering will be the abstract method that can be covered by a patent, but not by copyright. For example, after looking at the disassembly for X, and performing more analysis using a debugger, he figures out the steps to perform X are:
At the very least, you are tainted when you do stuff like this. Phoenix didn't do clean room reverse-engineering for nothing when they re-implemented IBM's BIOS.
Then there are cases where the code is not that hard, and you can copy the idea by just looking at the end product. Therefore having patents is necessary.
Well, no. It's only necessary if the competition stemming from this imitation kills the market rather than stimulate it. In general, more competition is better.
Right, but competition usually means performing to equal or exceed your competitor.
And this can be in many ways: customer service, price, time to market, branding, offered products etc.
If you simply sit by and wait, then copy (steal) something innovative created by your competitor, that's not performing at all.
Actually, that is exactly how competition works. You take what already exists, duplicate it and presumably add value in one way or another (from the list above). A certain amount of imitation is mandatory to have a competitive market.
Thanks to copyright and to the complexity of making well-working and polished software, innovators automatically have a limited lead-time advantage. Artificially extending this by many years using patents is only justifiable if otherwise the entire innovation of the industry would collapse. And there are simply no indications that this is the case, on the contrary.
It's just leeching off someone else's work to profit yourself. Soon inventors will get tired of getting taken advantage of, and only pursue inventions that take little time and money. That way, if someone copies their ideas, the loss won't be much. But society, as a general, will suffer more because many good inventions take more time and money, and those won't be created without sufficient protection.
It turns out that the above is simply not true in case of the software world. Competition (i.e., what you call copying, stealing and whatnot) is what drives innovation in the software industry, and the traditionally mild IP-regimes have been very conductive to this. See the overview of studies I posted in a previous comment.
Patent attorney here. Yes, software patents shouldn't be there. Patents are there to stop people from sitting on their ideas. Stopping people from sitting on their ideas helps society, because it give society more knowledge. However, for software there is no need for this mechanism.
[Citation needed].
Here's a bunch of citations I once collected (note that it also includes a few opinions of political committees, but those are clearly marked).
Since State Street, there has been immeasurable innovation in the field of software. You've got nothing to back up this assertion.
I think we can indeed agree that software patents have not killed the software industry. That's however not a very strong argument if you claim that software patents are necessary or even helpful.
There is no shortage of innovation because of lack of progress. If one person doesn't think of it, another one will.
The same could be said about any field of invention, including machines and compositions of matter.
It's however doubly so applicable to software, because software innovation requires much less investment in materials, works with an idealised abstraction (rather than with finicky physical bits), and consists almost exclusively of incremental innovation. A.o., the FTC report and the report by the National Research Council cited above go into more detail.
Well, you could read the claims of the patent. That would make it very easy to figure out whether your program is off the hook.
Of "the" patent? You mean of all the granted patents, right?
And actually, the risk of whether or not you infringe on a patent (software or otherwise) is simply not manageable in practice. How do I know? Because you cannot insure yourself against such risks. AIG, Lloyds and others have tried for a short while to offer such policies, and suffered losses up to 3000%! So if even those guys specialised in risk management can't determine the risk of infringing on a patent, what makes you think Joe the Programmer can do so with any degree of accuracy?
Copyrights are not enough. If X is the new innovative piece of code within a program, a competitor can buy the program, fire up a debugger, and look at the disassembled code for X.
At this point he's infringing copyright just as much as when he'd making unlicensed copies.
Then there are cases where the code is not that hard, and you can copy the idea by just looking at the end product. Therefore having patents is necessary.
Well, no. It's only necessary if the competition stemming from this imitation kills the market rather than stimulate it. In general, more competition is better.
The reason algorithm patents (also part of the "software" patent suitcase) have long been acceptable just about everywhere
Well, no. The real software patents have only been acceptable in the US since State Street (Diamond vs. Diehr was about curing rubber, except that the rubber curing was software-controlled; i.e., the patent claimed a process for curing rubber, the fact that it was computer-controlled was just an aside and not central to the patentability). State Street was in 1998.
Both in the US and in Europe, there is still a lot of controversy about software patents till today (this paper only confirms that). India didn't go exactly all the way either during its last patent reform. Except among patent attorneys (although amongst them you also have excetions), I'm not sure where this general acceptance would be.
is that they are strict abstractions of novel circuits (patentable material in virtually every country).
Biochemical processes are also patentable material in virtually any country, but that does not mean that anything you can do with your brain automatically is a patentable process. Mechanical devices are patentable material in (virtually?) any country, but that does not mean that the abstractions of what you do with a piano (music) automatically is a patentable process.
The whole point is that these generic circuits indeed don't do anything but perform some abstract algorithm. Adding the generic circuit shouldn't suddenly make the novel algorithm patentable, not any more than a "piano + sheet music" becomes a "new, patentable piano" because the sheet music is just an abstraction of a mechanical process. But I guess I shouldn't give the RIAA new ideas...
As a general observation, most proponents of software patents are thinking of algorithm patents while most opponents of software patents are thinking of business method patents.
I think you observed that wrongly. Most opponents I know are opposed to claims on stuff that is normally not patentable, but suddenly does become patentable by adding "performed by a computer". Compare to the rubber curing from Diamond vs. Diehr: rubber curing is also patentable subject matter by itself.
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If you ever saw the Triumph of the Nerds documentary by Bob Cringely, you'd have seen Steve Jobs saying "Picasso had a saying Good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless in stealing great ideas."
Of course, in the same documentary he also says "The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste" :)
Remember that they all have to apply.
No, they don't. Only one independent claim (i.e., 1, 2 or 9) has to apply (at least it's like that in Europe), or an independent claim along with some dependent claims if you want a stronger case because then the claims become more specific and hence hopefully more distant from the prior are (e.g., 2 and 3, or 2 and 7 and 8).
This isn't exactly sudo.
That's true. It's still a crappy patent application though, since it basically covers showing a password dialog box with eligible user accounts (along with some details about their associated privileges) when an operation requires elevated privileges.
Thumb is just a subset of ARM - so not another instruction set :-)
ARM instructions are encoded as 32 bits per instruction. Thumb instructions are 16 bits per instruction. You have to explicitly switch to Thumb mode before you can execute any Thumb instructions (and back to ARM mode if you want to execute ARM instructions again). So they most definitely are two different instruction sets. The fact that they have similar mnemonics is irrelevant.
Jazelle etc just let you implement very fast Java apps on a very low power CPU - so what's wrong with that?
The GP didn't say there was anything wrong with that. He said that this was an example of another instruction set supported by ARM CPUs.
There is no such thing as magic - it's all design at some point.
Yes, that's what the GP said.
I think that you're a bit fixated on CPUs that fit into machines with power cords or heavy batteries and what makes them good - which isn't what makes mobile CPUs good.
I think that you're a bit fixated on straw man arguments.
But you want to get rid of them because of present day technical difficulties that may one day be overcome? That's some good planning there, Lou.
Of course it is. You can always reintroduce them at that mythical day of the second coming when the unicorns finally descend to Earth and solve all problems with the patent system. Patent proponents have been saying for decades that problem X with the patent system would be solved within Y years once the system has adapted to whatever the new development challenging the patent system is (chemical processes, medicine, software, biotech, trolls, court/forum shopping, patent thickets, alternative innovation/dissemination models, ...), while in practice the problems only get worse and worse (increasing examination backlogs, increasing amounts of trivial patents that get granted, increasing court case costs and associated innovation overhead/drain, legal uncertainty, various uses of patents in ways that have nothing to do with increasing innovation such as Monsanto's suing of farmers that are victims of cross-pollination and continuation patents in pharma, ...)
The standard answer to remarks like this is always "don't throw away the baby with the bathwater". Reality check: the baby is long dead, now stop beating it as if it were a horse (hey, I am replying to BadAnalogyGuy).
I work on server design, specifically motherboards. ECC is a feature, it helps prevent bit errors from passing through undetected. It is not a method for preventing errors from happening in the first place, nor does it influence the number of bit errors.
It does, sort of, because errors can also occur in the parity RAM. Of course, this does not change the actual number of errors in the data ram, but the ECC will detect more errors than actually occur in a non-ECC chip of the same size.
I also bought it from their website (on that weekend where they had that promo), but I did get the Mac version.
If you go to their online store, you can read the terms (go to the "Frictional Games Store", and click on the "End User License Agreement" at the bottom):
4. The Software may be loaded onto no more than one computer at a time. A single copy may be made for backup purposes only.
5. The rights and obligations of this Agreement are personal rights granted to the Licensee only. The Licensee may not transfer or assign any of the rights or obligations granted under this Agreement to any other person or legal entity. The Licensee may not make available the Software for use by one or more third parties.
So you're not allowed to sell your copy to someone either, as far as I can tell.
Depending on your definition of DRM, Penumbra is not without DRM. It uses a serial number system that requires online activation, and this is used to prevent you from installing the game on more than a single computer of yours (and in particular the latter condition annoys me).
Very few homes in (North-)Western Europe have air conditioning, and the warm water tank would obviously not be placed in your living room. Average summer temperatures are between 20 and 30 degrees Celcius. And while the system would probably be overall less efficient in summer than in winter, you will still need some warm water anyway to do the dishes, to clean, to take showers, etc. There are also washing machines and dish washers nowadays that can take warm water as "input" rather than cold water that is subsequently heated using electricity.
Here's a link to a post with some quotes from that paper.
And here's my own collection of summaries a bunch of economic studies on the effects of and importance of software patents (it also includes some opinions of political committees, but those are clearly marked).
Say goodbye to a lot of software inventions.
And say hello to the far greater number of inventions so far unrealized because of the legal expense and danger.
[citation needed]
As requested.
Which is why Microsoft, with its thousands of patents, so easily struck down Google when all it had was a couple of patents on search technology, effectively cutting Google off at the knees and leaving Microsoft free to dominate the search engine market.
I think the main reason that Microsoft didn't do that, is because Microsoft completely missed the initial boat as far as the Internet is concerned.
The fact that large companies regularly go rent seeking with small companies is fairly well documented, even though most companies don't advertise this fact (which company would want to publicise that they're at the mercy of a patent owner?). Unless a case goes to court, you're unlikely to ever read anything in the press about it. Nevertheless, e.g. IBM's rent seeking tactics have been documented fairly well.
Not exactly the most IP-compliant country in the world, and pretty much has the USA over a barrel economically right now from the look of things.
It's actually worse than that. The whole "the Chinese are stealing all of our patents" mantra turned out to be largely BS. It were US companies that started by convincing the Chinese to license all sorts of worthless patents. And, oh surprise, when the Chinese companies later on figured out they had been duped in paying tons of money for worthless rights, the next time they said GFY.
You're right, I was mistaken. Copyright is indeed also an exclusion right.
Thanks for setting the record straight.
I don't get it either.
If you write code for a living, don't you want your work to be protected?
You realize that when someone DLs your code off the internet for free, that reduces the value of your work.
You realise that if you cannot sell your work because it infringes on the patents of 5 patent holders that each want 10% of your revenue, that makes your work entirely worthless.
Try to see the big picture:
Ditto.
So why the anti-patent, anti-copyright hostility? Its not like you personally have to worry about infringement anyway. That's your legal departments job.
That is, if you have a legal department. At least in Europe, most of the software houses are SMEs, and they also employ the majority of people and provide the majority of tax income. Not to mention that each Euro spent on patent lawyers by the IT industry cannot be spent on developers.
To put it crudely: patent attorneys and patents are intrinsic overhead. Unless they are absolutely mandatory because otherwise the entire IT economy basically comes crashing down, you should get rid of them as much as possible. And no, that's not because patent attorneys are bad people.
PS: I'm only talking about patents. I'm not against copyright, except for the way it is being extended into perpetuity.
I'm curious. Which one of these would *not* apply to mousetraps?
Before you point to the "abstraction", remember that all claims cover concepts in the abstract, even if they are attempts to describe a physical object.
I wasn't talking about the claims, but about the innovation. In case of software, the innovation is purely in the abstract, unlike in case of mousetraps (where you do have to play with the "finicky physical bits" I mentioned). As far as incremental innovation is concerned, I guess that mouse traps at this point indeed also are mostly in that boat, and it's quite likely that patents are hardly useful anymore for the purpose of stimulating "mousetrap innovation", too.
I'm not aware of any economic studies looking at the effects of patents on the mousetrap industry though, presumably mostly because unlike software, mouse traps are not a pervasive enabling technology forming a fundamental underpinning of our daily lives and the entire economy.
Of course, there are many more arguments than those I mentioned above, such as
The degrees of freedom in a plug, Ladies and Gentlemen, are two. You've got the insulative surface, you've got the prongs. That's two degrees of freedom. The third degree of freedom is where you shove it.
With software, the number of freedoms are much larger than in an ethernet plug or a mouse trap, so the problem of patent thickets is much bigger (and the cost of analysing whether or not you infringe as well -- personally, I'd say it's virtually impossible to guarantee that any reasonably complex program does not infringe on any currently published patent).
You might want to have a look at the studies overview I linked to earlier. It contains various citations from economic studies explaining why patents are inappropriate specifically for the software field.
This is in direct contract to continental Europe, where they're historically been viewed as a moral right grounded in natural law.
I wasn't aware of that. Do you have any background on this? At least the history of patents in the UK does not suggest anything like that, nor does this overview.
What you say is generally true about European copyright (author's rights) though.
If you're dumb enough to hire Joe the Programmer to evaluate your patent infringement risk, instead of a patent attorney, then you deserve what you get.
I was reacting to this statement:
Well, you could read the claims of the patent. That would make it very easy to figure out whether your program is off the hook.
Because of the "your program", I interpreted this as "if a programmer wants to know whether or not his program infringes on a patent, he should just read the claims of the patent". So I was not talking about hiring a programmer to do it, but about a programmer reading the patent himself.
Yes, he is, at least in the EU. Reverse-engineering is forbidden by software copyright law here
Small correction: reverse-engineering through decompilation is forbidden here (which the directive broadly defined as "translation, adaptation, arrangement and any other alteration of a computer program and the reproduction of the results thereof", see article 4.b). The disassembling and trawling through the code with a debugger that was mentioned before falls in that category.
I thought black-box reverse-engineering was not forbidden, but the "reproduction of the results thereof" above does seem to go in that direction...
This is incorrect. A compression algorithm has a strict definition for all use cases, a set of input bits mapped via specified transformations to a particular set of output bits. This is no different than a chemical process patent, which specifies the inputs and transformations to generate the output; it says nothing about the specific plant implementation or similar transformations that work on different inputs or generate identical outputs.
A compression algorithm is an abstract mathematical entity, limited only by mathematical truths. A chemical process is a physical process that operates under the limits of the physical world. Neither the nature of both things nor the economics and dynamics of both innovation environments are even remotely comparable.
Again: playing a piece of music on a piano is also a particular input, a set of transformations (by the piano) and a certain output. This is not an argument to declare something patentable.
Patents are economic tools. You should only apply them where strictly necessary, since they introduce waste/overhead in the system (every dollar spent on acquiring patents, litigation, ... cannot be spent on useful stuff). Theoretical thought experiments likening the nature of abstract algorithms to physical transformations are not really relevant (and sound really strange to me as a doctor in computer science).
What are the logical transforms and the input and output bit set pattern for one-click shopping?
The one-click shopping patent basically claims the concept of storing customer data on the server and using (e.g.) a cookie to keep track of the customer, so that when he comes on the website you can immediately look up their data so that they do not have to explicitly log in before they can buy anything (or add things first to a shopping cart).
Of course, this can be implemented in many ways, but so can any software claimed in broader terms than exact source code (including compression algorithms). And even the above succinct description would be enough for any programmer worth their salt to implement one-click shopping. The patent description obviously goes into much greater detail.
What is a universal boolean logic for selling pet food on the Internet?
That's akin to asking what the universal chemical process is for "producing hydrogen". A claim phrased like that is a wish list patent, and you can give examples of those in any patent category.
The very reason business method patents are being questioned is because no such specification exists or can exist for a useful implementation; any specification strict enough to be reducible to a machine would also be too narrow to have any value.
I think it is wrong to state that in general no such specifications can exist. That statement also suggests to me that the claims and description are combined, while the claims are a lot broader than the description (which describes a "preferred embodiment" of the invention, rather than the only possible way). So while the claims may not be specification enough by themselves, the description may very well be (once you translate the barely readable legalese to something that's usable by a software designer).
Yes, but it refutes GP's argument that software patents are bad per se.
No, it only proves that they (or at least the way they are used by the majority of patent holders at this time) are not bad enough to kill off the industry. It does not in any way refute the argument that they are bad.
It's equivalent to an assertion that if we didn't have the death penalty, there would be a thousand-fold increase in the murder rate. Sure, that's an interesting thought, but there's no evidence whatsoever, so on its own, it doesn't really mean much.
There are many countries without a death penalty and with lower murder rates, which is an indication that this would be an incorrect assumption. The same goes for software patents: economic studies (Bessen&Hunt, also in the overview I gave in my previous post) show that companies investing more in patents, invest less in R&D (the rest is spent on patenting and subsequently regained via rent seeking). They also show that the number of court cases is exploding (last slide).
An important fact to also keep in mind is that having patents an sich causes overhead. All money spent by the industry as a whole on obtaining patents, licensing negotiations, court cases, legal counsel regarding patents, etc is money that cannot be spent on R&D, customer service, etc. So having patents starts out at a loss, and it has to have really large positive effects to end up in the black again.
It's however doubly so applicable to software, because software innovation requires much less investment in materials, works with an idealised abstraction (rather than with finicky physical bits), and consists almost exclusively of incremental innovation. A.o., the FTC report and the report by the National Research Council cited above go into more detail.
Sure, but this goes to my later statement that software patents may deserve a shortened term. It doesn't support GP's argument that software needs no patent protection because, after all, it would get invented eventually.
It does support that argument, though it obviously cannot conclusively prove it. Where is your evidence that a shorter term is required rather than no possible patent attacks on re-inventors at all?
They are (correctly) viewed as strict abstractions of circuit designs, circuit designs being unambiguously patentable subject matter.
And as I mentioned in previous post, so are pianos. You can also make a dedicated piano or hand-crancked organ that only plays that piece of music (a "dedicate circuit"). That does not make "this piece of music when played by an organ/piano" any more patentable though. At most, the specially constructed organ/piano could be patentable, but that does not confer any extra rights to the music, even when someone else plays it on another piano.
Business method patents are not an abstraction of a circuit design
They are when implemented using a computer algorithm. There is no inherent difference between, e.g., a computer program that implements one-click shopping and a computer program that compresses data. You can also turn both into dedicated circuit designs, should you want to.
No, he's not.
Yes, he is, at least in the EU. Reverse-engineering is forbidden by software copyright law here, except if all of the following conditions are true:
See article 6 of the EU software copyright directive.
The output of his reverse engineering will be the abstract method that can be covered by a patent, but not by copyright. For example, after looking at the disassembly for X, and performing more analysis using a debugger, he figures out the steps to perform X are:
At the very least, you are tainted when you do stuff like this. Phoenix didn't do clean room reverse-engineering for nothing when they re-implemented IBM's BIOS.
Right, but competition usually means performing to equal or exceed your competitor.
And this can be in many ways: customer service, price, time to market, branding, offered products etc.
If you simply sit by and wait, then copy (steal) something innovative created by your competitor, that's not performing at all.
Actually, that is exactly how competition works. You take what already exists, duplicate it and presumably add value in one way or another (from the list above). A certain amount of imitation is mandatory to have a competitive market.
Thanks to copyright and to the complexity of making well-working and polished software, innovators automatically have a limited lead-time advantage. Artificially extending this by many years using patents is only justifiable if otherwise the entire innovation of the industry would collapse. And there are simply no indications that this is the case, on the contrary.
It's just leeching off someone else's work to profit yourself. Soon inventors will get tired of getting taken advantage of, and only pursue inventions that take little time and money. That way, if someone copies their ideas, the loss won't be much. But society, as a general, will suffer more because many good inventions take more time and money, and those won't be created without sufficient protection.
It turns out that the above is simply not true in case of the software world. Competition (i.e., what you call copying, stealing and whatnot) is what drives innovation in the software industry, and the traditionally mild IP-regimes have been very conductive to this. See the overview of studies I posted in a previous comment.
Patent attorney here. Yes, software patents shouldn't be there. Patents are there to stop people from sitting on their ideas. Stopping people from sitting on their ideas helps society, because it give society more knowledge. However, for software there is no need for this mechanism.
[Citation needed].
Here's a bunch of citations I once collected (note that it also includes a few opinions of political committees, but those are clearly marked).
Since State Street, there has been immeasurable innovation in the field of software. You've got nothing to back up this assertion.
I think we can indeed agree that software patents have not killed the software industry. That's however not a very strong argument if you claim that software patents are necessary or even helpful.
There is no shortage of innovation because of lack of progress. If one person doesn't think of it, another one will.
The same could be said about any field of invention, including machines and compositions of matter.
It's however doubly so applicable to software, because software innovation requires much less investment in materials, works with an idealised abstraction (rather than with finicky physical bits), and consists almost exclusively of incremental innovation. A.o., the FTC report and the report by the National Research Council cited above go into more detail.
Well, you could read the claims of the patent. That would make it very easy to figure out whether your program is off the hook.
Of "the" patent? You mean of all the granted patents, right?
And actually, the risk of whether or not you infringe on a patent (software or otherwise) is simply not manageable in practice. How do I know? Because you cannot insure yourself against such risks. AIG, Lloyds and others have tried for a short while to offer such policies, and suffered losses up to 3000%! So if even those guys specialised in risk management can't determine the risk of infringing on a patent, what makes you think Joe the Programmer can do so with any degree of accuracy?
Copyrights are not enough. If X is the new innovative piece of code within a program, a competitor can buy the program, fire up a debugger, and look at the disassembled code for X.
At this point he's infringing copyright just as much as when he'd making unlicensed copies.
Then there are cases where the code is not that hard, and you can copy the idea by just looking at the end product. Therefore having patents is necessary.
Well, no. It's only necessary if the competition stemming from this imitation kills the market rather than stimulate it. In general, more competition is better.
The reason algorithm patents (also part of the "software" patent suitcase) have long been acceptable just about everywhere
Well, no. The real software patents have only been acceptable in the US since State Street (Diamond vs. Diehr was about curing rubber, except that the rubber curing was software-controlled; i.e., the patent claimed a process for curing rubber, the fact that it was computer-controlled was just an aside and not central to the patentability). State Street was in 1998.
Both in the US and in Europe, there is still a lot of controversy about software patents till today (this paper only confirms that). India didn't go exactly all the way either during its last patent reform. Except among patent attorneys (although amongst them you also have excetions), I'm not sure where this general acceptance would be.
is that they are strict abstractions of novel circuits (patentable material in virtually every country).
Biochemical processes are also patentable material in virtually any country, but that does not mean that anything you can do with your brain automatically is a patentable process. Mechanical devices are patentable material in (virtually?) any country, but that does not mean that the abstractions of what you do with a piano (music) automatically is a patentable process.
The whole point is that these generic circuits indeed don't do anything but perform some abstract algorithm. Adding the generic circuit shouldn't suddenly make the novel algorithm patentable, not any more than a "piano + sheet music" becomes a "new, patentable piano" because the sheet music is just an abstraction of a mechanical process. But I guess I shouldn't give the RIAA new ideas...
As a general observation, most proponents of software patents are thinking of algorithm patents while most opponents of software patents are thinking of business method patents.
I think you observed that wrongly. Most opponents I know are opposed to claims on stuff that is normally not patentable, but suddenly does become patentable by adding "performed by a computer". Compare to the rubber curing from Diamond vs. Diehr: rubber curing is also patentable subject matter by itself.