1.0.0.0/8 is actually reserved by IANA for no particular use (so I guess you're simply not supposed to use those addresses, indeed also not for private networks).
Bare with me here. These guys have pattended a licensing method that does not conflict in any way with the licensing methodes used to promote free exchanges of information. The only people this affects is other proprietary information horders.
Speaking for FFII (I'm board member of FFII), we have absolutely nothing against proprietary information producers or holders. In fact, we believe that some form of exclusion rights are beneficial to stimulate the production of more information and information processing means. We do think patents are completely unfit for this purpose however, and that copyright or possibly a third paradigm between patents and copyright is more suited. I personally subscribe to this view as well.
Anyway, I think this kind of waste of money is never good. First you have Sun spending money on trying to get thispatent, and if they get it, someone else may try to destroy it again. This is all money that is simply wasted. It does not help the economy to go around, except for the lawyer-economy. It's money that's diverted from tech to some non-producing entities, which is not good.
I think we're better off if Sun invests more money in cool projects like DTrace than in silly patent applications like this, regardless of whether you like Sun or not. The former may at least result in usable functionality for their customers (and may even be open sourced so it becomes available to many more people). The latter only results in money for the USPTO and lawyers.
Most of what people call "obvious" patents are also allowed under (US and other) patent law. As a law scholar once told me (in a discussion on the European directive on software patnets):
"The law clearly says that inventions must be "non-obvious to a person skilled in the art". If you take those words literally, than that is a VERY LOW threshold: this "person skilled in the art" doesn't mean anything, of course you don't go from a layman's point of view, and obvious does mean obvious! I have even once heard the reasoning: if an invention is new (another requirement for patentability), then CONSEQUENTLY it is "not obvious", otherwise it would have been invented already! The law is only a split hair away from literally stating that trivial patents are allowed. Another illustration of the fact that the directive does not change anything to a recognised weak point of the patent system."
Given that this obviousness stuff is literally written into the law and, more importantly, is basically a foundation of the patent system, I think it's more useful to show people the extension of patentable subject matter is much more important. It's also much more harmful.
You can complain all you want about obviousness, but do we really want patents on non-obvious business methods? What's in it for the economy as a whole?
Or do you really think that it's the lawyers telling the commpanies what to patent?
I definitely do think that in a lot of cases, lawyers simply try to make their department as important as possible to the company. Getting a lot of (software) patents and consequent licensing revenue and negotiation power is one way to do this. For example in Europe, a lot of corporate lobbying for software patents is coordinated by Tim Frain, the head of Nokia's patent department. Another active player is Fritz Teufel, patent department head of IBM in Germany and Europe.
Then again, there are also some heads of IPR departments who readily concede their patenting bonanza has nothing to do with investment protection or innovation, such as Robert Barr of Cisco during the FTC 2002 hearings.
there is NO SUCH THING AS A DEFENSIVE PATENT!!!! If you don't want someone to come along behind you and patent what you do, then you publish it and establish authorship/inventorship
Sure there is. A defensive patent is simply a patent you do not intend to enforce, except if someone else sues you over something else. You can then look which of your defensive patents the other party infringes on, and countersue (which usually results in a cross licensing deal in which only the lawyers of both parties are winners).
I don't think that will happen any time soon, because the lawyers won't shoot themselves in their feet. Generally they argue for patents on everything and anything, but you don't hear them arguing for patents on legal strategies, argumentation tactics or juri observation methods. In fact, they publish a lot about court cases, analysing them to the bone and sharing their experiences with colleagues.
For some reason, they understand that in their own profession they have nothing to gain from monopolising general methods, but they generally seem to assume it's necessary everywhere else.
... which should have failed the "not innovative because it's obvious" test.
Actually, it should have failed the patentable subject matter test (which is performed before they look at novelty or obviousness), because it's either a business method or a computer program, neither of which is patentable according to the European Patent Convention.
Bad patent laws are like all other laws. If there are enough bad laws, it brings all law into disrepute, and people no longer feel obliged to obey them. We're seeing this with both patents and abusive copyright extensions.
The problem with being an outlaw is that it immediately weakens your position, even if you're "right". We need at least some respect for the law (even if it doesn't suit you), otherwise society as we know it would disolve into total anarchy. It's very hard to make it objectively clear that the law is plain wrong in a certain case as far as the general interest in concerned, and that you're not just promoting your personal (or small lobby group's) interests.
Historically, the best example of this was probably Prohibition. It resulted in criminals becoming folk heroes (Bonny and Clyde, Al Capone, etc)... And we're going to see the same effect with patent laws. People WILL ignore them, because there will be so many bad patents, that there will be no moral imperative to toe the line.
I hope that in Europe, we can prevent the legalisation of patents on software-implemented mathmatics and business methods so it doesn't have to come this far. And just maybe, it may help the push for a real reform in the US as well.
If that flies, next I'll patent discounts off MSRP, that'll be really slick.
You're too late, sort of. In Europe, there is already a patent on using rebate codes in Internet stores to give people discounts (see patent 19 of the FFII webshop).
Who cares about obviousness here? The problem here is not in the first place novelty or obviousness, but subject matter. Why on earth should one be allowed to patent a licensing method? What's in that for the economy as a whole? Are companies not going to create new licensing methods if they can't "protect their investments" in "inventing" new licensing methods?
How far are we still away from patents on investment methods, savings formulas of banks, etc? Patents were never intended for things like this. Not everything you do has to be monopolisable. A monopoly per definition has negative effects, so it's only justifiable to voluntarily give one if the positive effects of what you ask in exchange outweigh it.
There is not even a hint of proof they do so in case of patents like this one.
Even with the reduced costs, it's still a huge waste: first you have the company spending time and money on getting the patent, then the public or another company spends time and money to defeat it. This is not a structural solution, in fact it's some patch work that spends even more resources in order to keep an obviously non-working system afloat (by curbing its most perceived excesses).
It would be much better to simply properly reform the patent system and to limit it again to what is was originally designed for in the 15th century, instead of keeping these artificial extensions (by courts, not by lawmakers!) into fields it was never intended to cover and for which it simply does not work.
It is not a problem of examination, it is a problem of subject matter with which the patent system simply cannot deal. The European Patent Offices tries to deal with software patents by demanding "further technical effects" in the "technical contribution" of the "inventive step", but it results in almost exactly the same patents as in the US, just slightly differently worded.
The claims in this patent are typical in that they start out with a very broad characterization of the system and then narrow down to what the invention really consists of. These are what are called "dependent claims", which you can tell by the references back to previous claims. They are not completely independent monopolies.
They are as far as the need to separately overturn each and everyone of them in court.
The key thing is that the early, very broad claims are almost surely invalid, since as the original poster pointed out, the prior art goes back to the 1950s. That leaves only the much more specific subsequent claims as likely having any validity. The upshot is that the only people who really need to worry about this patent are people implementing memory management systems for parallelizing supercomputers that avoid swapping.
If those people have at least about US$ 1,500,000 to US$ 2,000,000 available, they may not have to worry I suppose. And even with proper prior art, you're not sure you will win (that message is from a rabid pro-software person who is a "prior art bounty hunter").
If you reduce any machine or process to inputs, *a function* and outputs, you could say they're all mathematics.
You cannot reduce everything to mathematics. You can approximate a lot of stuff, but not accurately describe it. The fact is that in software, we are actually living in an idealised world. As far as your software itself is concerned, you do not have to care about all those exceptions and annoying side effects from the real world (even not when your software is used to search for brain tumors in images).
Of course, if you use your software executed by a computer to steer an external device, then you may have to take into account the physical properties of this device. But that is completely independent from the fact that you use software. You'd have to take into account exactly the same things if you steered it mechanically or manually.
My point is that whether or not you use software should be completely irrelevant as far as patentability is concerned. If people think that great mathematical algorithms should be patentable because they can be used to find tumors in medical images, then why on earth only make them patentable when implemented in software? Where is the difference in investment or the beneficial effect to the economy that suddenly warrants the patent monopoly?
Either you think they should be patentable, or you don't, but the fact is that software automagically makes a lot of otherwise unpatentable stuff (such as business methods and mathematics) suddenly patentable.
But the difference in function has meaning to us, practical meaning, as humans. Software that can reliably pinpoint tumors in medical images is not "just mathematics." It has meaning and it has social ramifications.
When I write a technical manual about how to perform a chemical reaction, then if people follow that manual, this also has meaning and social/real world ramifications. That does not mean my manual is patentable, nor that the potential owner of a patent on the reaction can forbid me to publish and sell my book. The chemical reaction itself could be patentable, but that's completely separate from whether or not it's written down in a manual or described using software to steer a machine.
Software is also merely a description of something, just like the technical manual. It does not make sense to allow patents on descriptions (although software patents do forbid certain forms of descriptions, which is probably one of the reasons software patents do not include source code: otherwise, a patent itself could infringe on other patents!). It also does not make sense to change the patentability of something depending on whether it's described in non-technical English or in C. There are no economical arguments for such a differentiation.
According to this logic, you might argue that all english textual trademarks are just letters, and letters are just information which can be represented in binary, which means they are all just numbers, so there's no reason to prefer any one number over another.
That's a false analogy. A computer program nothing but a description in another (mathematical) language. The translation investments are covered by copyright. What you describe, may or may not be patentable. Some things are on purpose not patentable, because such patents are considered to do more harm than good (there is no economical law that states that patents per definition have a positive overall effect).
I think the only argument one could possibly make to justify software patents, would be in case they demonstrably would have lead to more innovation and a healthier economical situation in the software sector (or even in the economy as a whole, since software is not just used by software developers). They don't.
The fact is however that the abstract doesn't matter, and that each claim on its own is a separate monopoly. It doesn't matter much if you do not infringe on e.g. claims 10-14, because you still can be sued for infringing on claims 1-9 (and if you want to overturn the patent, you have to overturn each claim individually).
There is nothing you cannot overcome. People also laughed at FFII when it first went to war against software patents in Europe:
Software patents were introduced by the people ruling the European Patent Office, which are in practice totally independent.
Proponents of software patents had the responsible people of the Commission in their pocket.
Pretty much all key positions in the European Parliament as far as the directive was concerned were given to pro-software patent people.
In the Council, the working party which had to write the Council text consists of exactly the same people that lead the European Patent Office, and on top of that they are also the advisors of the ministers on how they should vote.
Really.
Now, what happened? We found some people in the European Parliament which did care. We managed to create small resistance groups in all large political groups. We spread tons of paper with information. We protested in front of the Parliament. And again. And again. And we organised conferences, at which even people from the Commission and the European Patent Office spoke. We managed to get a quite good text from the European Parliament.
In the Council, it currently looks bad (they reached an informal agreement on a very bad text in May), but now they've had to delay the formal adoption on that text because national campaigns are now also getting up to speed and some governments are having second thoughts (the main problem is not convincing them, but taking away their fear of doing something which is politically not done).
Today, FFII is a respected force. People don't laugh at us anymore (not as much anyway:). They've tried to make us seem like extremists by spreading fake statements we supposedly made, they've tried to paint us as software pirates and Stallman hippies with no idea of economy or the real world. It did not work. If you can explain your cause and have factual information to back it up, some people are bound to listen to you. You build credibility, and in the end the desperate attacks from the other side only make you stronger.
You don't start by convincing "the Democrats" or "the Republicans". You have to start with one person, and then you grow. Yes, it's a huge amount of work (I can tell you that it's no fun to spend the whole night awake in the European Parliament writing a voting list for the next day, hoping you won't be thrown out by a guard). It's also very difficult, and you need at least one sort of leader figure, someone who knows all details inside out.
And you'll have setbacks, people lying to you etc. But it is not impossible. Not at all. I can understand you do not feel like doing it, especially on your own, but do not believe it cannot be done. It's just very unlikely to succeed as long as you can't get a small (yes, small) hard working core group together to start it and get somewhere. A bit like with an open source project, I suppose:)
I disagree - patents provide protection to the inventor.
One person's protection is another person's limitations. Software patents are only defensible if on the whole, they would have a positive effect. They don't.
They prevent your idea being ripped off.
No, patents are for inventions, not for ideas. However software patents are indeed often used to monopolise mere ideas. That's ripping off everyone else. Great protection of your investment in spending 10 man years to write a program, if after you bring it on the market one other person can single handedly forbid you from selling it because you used "one of his ideas".
There is no difference between software and hardware (you can design hardware using the VHDL programming language) - so you either accept patents or you dont.
Your argument perfectly shows that whether what you want to patent is described/implemented in hardware or software should indeed be completely and utterly irrelevant. However, just because something is a new hardware chip it shouldn't be per definition patentable subject matter either.
You have to look at the actual achievement that the patent is monopolising. When considering software, that achievement is not the software (that part is protected by copyright), but often either plain mathematics or a business method. Similar with most semiconductors (except for the business method part I suppose).
For some reason, when written down in plain English in a non-machine understandable form, these things are not patentable. But when you write them down in C or VHDL, they do become patentable. That does not make sense. Either you are in favor of mathematics and business method patents (regardless of how they are formulated), or you aren't.
It's plain silly to only allow them on those things when they are described in a way that a computer can understand. The difference in investment between the two is already covered by copyright. Some things you simply cannot monopolise, because that's deemed to be bad for the economy. Tough luck, you'll have to try your chances at this new fangled thing they call "competition" based on arcane concepts such as "quality", "brand recognition", "human capital", "customer satisfaction" etc.
And that's why software patents are perverted: they allow you to patent stuff which normally is not patentable, but which suddenly does become patentable if you say that you describe it in a machine-understandable form.
Have you ever actually had a discussion with or have you seen a standpoint from lawyers on this? These people are completely opposed to any kind of change that might reduce the power of patents (and thus of the patent establish.
Just a small note: there actually are IP lawyers who are opposed to the patent inflation stemming from allowing software patents. One reason is that it devaluates their work (if there are tons and tons of patents, a single patent becomes much less valuable), another is that they see that overregulation and over-litigation in the long run is not good for them either, etc. But the above does seem to be the general case, unfortunately.
You say that like America doesn't ignore international treaties all the time.
No, I say that like America is putting very high pressure on Europe (and Australia) to introduce software patents by using that part of the TRIPs treaty. It's an American "tool". Just read e.g. this page on the USPTO's website (emphasis mine):
Promote
harmonization in the framework of the World Intellectual Property Organization and its Standing Committee on the Law of Patents; resolve major issues in a broader context and pursue substantive harmonization goals that will strengthen the rights of American intellectual property holders by making it easier to obtain international protection for their invention and creations.
Of course, the details of this master plan are confidential, though it's not that hard to find documents showing its results.
Perhaps the treaty should be amended as well. I'm sure any third world signatory who has had to sit and watch its citizens die waiting for medicine to become affordable would be more than happy to sign off any amendment weakening it.
You are assuming that the US would want to amend it. US companies own about 50% of all already granted (but as of yet largely unenforceable) software patents in Europe. The US is not going to shoot itself in the foot this way. FWIW, 25% more are owned by Japanese companies, and of the rest only about 15% or so is owned by European companies.
If TRIP says all patents should be treated in the same way - well lets do so - just say that the term of _any_ patent is dependent on the time taken to develop/implement the idea (this would require you to submit some evidence with the application)... then apply a fixed multiplyer. Why should an idea developed in an afternoon get the same protection as one that took 5 years of development and trials?
Because that is simply how the patent system works, it's in fact one of its basic principles that "the small inventor who had to invest almost nothing but had a brilliant idea one afternoon which lead to a great invention" in theory has the same chances as a "huge multinational which just invested 50 years in the development of a cure for cancer".
If you want something different, you need a different regime. It does not make sense to first apply some system from the 15th century to all sorts of new stuff it was never designed for, and then to bolt on all kinds of extra rules because -surprise- it simply doesn't work as intended when used to monopolise that new stuff. You should instead look at new paradigms, if you think copyright is not sufficient for the protection investments of computer programs.
As to your second point, you are saying nothing can be changed!
As far as "improving the system so that it becomes beneficial when applied to software", that indeed seems to be the case. Do you have any proof (or even indications) to the contrary?
Well thats just not true, plenty of laws beneficial to some (and not to others) have been repealed or superceded (for example the community-charge in the UK). I think there is a much stronger argument for reduction than abolition, so instantly you will get less opposition.
That's what you think. Have you ever actually had a discussion with or have you seen a standpoint from lawyers on this? These people are completely opposed to any kind of change that might reduce the power of patents (and thus of the patent establish. Just read this response from the IPO to the FTC report (which suggest *very* mild changes, despite some quite strong conclusions regarding software patents.) Look at points 6 and 10. Isn't that just plain horrible?
Anyway, since you appear to be from Europe, here we're in a better situation, since here at least software patents aren't legalised yet.
How can anyone effectively argue against a patent term dependant on the effort put into developent of an idea - the only effective argument I can see would be to question the ability of the patent office to determine the novelty/difficaulty of the patent - that argument also criticises the current system too.
Heh, and you called me naive:) Simply read this dialog between a programmer and a deputy director of the UK Patent Office.
Here is an overview of studies which explain what is so different about software. And FWIW, many scholars (and people from the field) also have doubts whether the patent system is still useful elsewhere.
It has nothing to do with "technical fields", except in the TRIPs treaty (which is why the European Parliament simply stated that "data processing does not belong to a field of technology", although of course the means with which you perform data processing can).
Shorter term software patents are just as impossible as no software patents in your view, because the TRIPs treaty requires that all patents are treated the same way. Changing that would also mean "turning back the tide", as it would result all owners of software patents to be stuck with patents which suddenly are no longer valid (instead of for 15 more years or so).
FWIW, asking for software patents to be abolished in the US is at least as realistic in my eyes as proposing yet another reform which is supposed to automagically make the patent system more beneficial. Proponents of software patents keep saying that if only "good" software patents were granted, they would have a beneficial effect. But they've been saying that for the last 20 years or so, and the situation only gets worse.
Certainly it can be argued that software code source instructions is not a result of creative, abstract, thought processes, in any other way than a steam engine, girdle, or anything else patentable could be considered.
The point is simply that writing code is the same as writing down a description of something (just in a language which can be translated to something which can be interpreted by a machine). How you describe something (in C or in English) should be a completely irrelevant as far as patentability is concerned. It should be about what you describe.
Nevertheless, lots of things which are normally not patentable (such as mathematics and business methods) do become suddenly patentable if you describe them in a way that can be interpreted by a computer.
I'm not sure why the bearded-terminal-hacker-set seem to think that the creation of software is in any way more of an artform than any other kind of invention.
People don't invent software, they write it. You don't write a steam engine or a lava lamp. This has nothing to do with art or creativity, but simply with the fact that software is a literary work (not just in practice, but even juridically, even in TRIPs).
If you write a technical manual on how to perform a (possibly patented) chemical reaction, that does not make the book patentable nor can publishing it constitute patent infringement. But for some reason when you describe it in software, that software itself does become patentable.
Slashdot Mirror
1.0.0.0/8 is actually reserved by IANA for no particular use (so I guess you're simply not supposed to use those addresses, indeed also not for private networks).
You could see it as an alternative to patents, without the harmful monopoly effects.
Anyway, I think this kind of waste of money is never good. First you have Sun spending money on trying to get thispatent, and if they get it, someone else may try to destroy it again. This is all money that is simply wasted. It does not help the economy to go around, except for the lawyer-economy. It's money that's diverted from tech to some non-producing entities, which is not good.
I think we're better off if Sun invests more money in cool projects like DTrace than in silly patent applications like this, regardless of whether you like Sun or not. The former may at least result in usable functionality for their customers (and may even be open sourced so it becomes available to many more people). The latter only results in money for the USPTO and lawyers.
You can complain all you want about obviousness, but do we really want patents on non-obvious business methods? What's in it for the economy as a whole?
Then again, there are also some heads of IPR departments who readily concede their patenting bonanza has nothing to do with investment protection or innovation, such as Robert Barr of Cisco during the FTC 2002 hearings.
I don't think that will happen any time soon, because the lawyers won't shoot themselves in their feet. Generally they argue for patents on everything and anything, but you don't hear them arguing for patents on legal strategies, argumentation tactics or juri observation methods. In fact, they publish a lot about court cases, analysing them to the bone and sharing their experiences with colleagues.
For some reason, they understand that in their own profession they have nothing to gain from monopolising general methods, but they generally seem to assume it's necessary everywhere else.
This reminds me of the stealing with a further ethical effect analogy to the granting of software patents in Europe.
How far are we still away from patents on investment methods, savings formulas of banks, etc? Patents were never intended for things like this. Not everything you do has to be monopolisable. A monopoly per definition has negative effects, so it's only justifiable to voluntarily give one if the positive effects of what you ask in exchange outweigh it.
There is not even a hint of proof they do so in case of patents like this one.
It would be much better to simply properly reform the patent system and to limit it again to what is was originally designed for in the 15th century, instead of keeping these artificial extensions (by courts, not by lawmakers!) into fields it was never intended to cover and for which it simply does not work.
It is not a problem of examination, it is a problem of subject matter with which the patent system simply cannot deal. The European Patent Offices tries to deal with software patents by demanding "further technical effects" in the "technical contribution" of the "inventive step", but it results in almost exactly the same patents as in the US, just slightly differently worded.
Absolutely.
Of course, if you use your software executed by a computer to steer an external device, then you may have to take into account the physical properties of this device. But that is completely independent from the fact that you use software. You'd have to take into account exactly the same things if you steered it mechanically or manually.
My point is that whether or not you use software should be completely irrelevant as far as patentability is concerned. If people think that great mathematical algorithms should be patentable because they can be used to find tumors in medical images, then why on earth only make them patentable when implemented in software? Where is the difference in investment or the beneficial effect to the economy that suddenly warrants the patent monopoly?
Either you think they should be patentable, or you don't, but the fact is that software automagically makes a lot of otherwise unpatentable stuff (such as business methods and mathematics) suddenly patentable.
When I write a technical manual about how to perform a chemical reaction, then if people follow that manual, this also has meaning and social/real world ramifications. That does not mean my manual is patentable, nor that the potential owner of a patent on the reaction can forbid me to publish and sell my book. The chemical reaction itself could be patentable, but that's completely separate from whether or not it's written down in a manual or described using software to steer a machine.Software is also merely a description of something, just like the technical manual. It does not make sense to allow patents on descriptions (although software patents do forbid certain forms of descriptions, which is probably one of the reasons software patents do not include source code: otherwise, a patent itself could infringe on other patents!). It also does not make sense to change the patentability of something depending on whether it's described in non-technical English or in C. There are no economical arguments for such a differentiation.
That's a false analogy. A computer program nothing but a description in another (mathematical) language. The translation investments are covered by copyright. What you describe, may or may not be patentable. Some things are on purpose not patentable, because such patents are considered to do more harm than good (there is no economical law that states that patents per definition have a positive overall effect).I think the only argument one could possibly make to justify software patents, would be in case they demonstrably would have lead to more innovation and a healthier economical situation in the software sector (or even in the economy as a whole, since software is not just used by software developers). They don't.
The fact is however that the abstract doesn't matter, and that each claim on its own is a separate monopoly. It doesn't matter much if you do not infringe on e.g. claims 10-14, because you still can be sued for infringing on claims 1-9 (and if you want to overturn the patent, you have to overturn each claim individually).
- Software patents were introduced by the people ruling the European Patent Office, which are in practice totally independent.
- Proponents of software patents had the responsible people of the Commission in their pocket.
- Pretty much all key positions in the European Parliament as far as the directive was concerned were given to pro-software patent people.
- In the Council, the working party which had to write the Council text consists of exactly the same people that lead the European Patent Office, and on top of that they are also the advisors of the ministers on how they should vote.
Really.Now, what happened? We found some people in the European Parliament which did care. We managed to create small resistance groups in all large political groups. We spread tons of paper with information. We protested in front of the Parliament. And again. And again. And we organised conferences, at which even people from the Commission and the European Patent Office spoke. We managed to get a quite good text from the European Parliament.
In the Council, it currently looks bad (they reached an informal agreement on a very bad text in May), but now they've had to delay the formal adoption on that text because national campaigns are now also getting up to speed and some governments are having second thoughts (the main problem is not convincing them, but taking away their fear of doing something which is politically not done).
Today, FFII is a respected force. People don't laugh at us anymore (not as much anyway :). They've tried to make us seem like extremists by spreading fake statements we supposedly made, they've tried to paint us as software pirates and Stallman hippies with no idea of economy or the real world. It did not work. If you can explain your cause and have factual information to back it up, some people are bound to listen to you. You build credibility, and in the end the desperate attacks from the other side only make you stronger.
You don't start by convincing "the Democrats" or "the Republicans". You have to start with one person, and then you grow. Yes, it's a huge amount of work (I can tell you that it's no fun to spend the whole night awake in the European Parliament writing a voting list for the next day, hoping you won't be thrown out by a guard). It's also very difficult, and you need at least one sort of leader figure, someone who knows all details inside out.
And you'll have setbacks, people lying to you etc. But it is not impossible. Not at all. I can understand you do not feel like doing it, especially on your own, but do not believe it cannot be done. It's just very unlikely to succeed as long as you can't get a small (yes, small) hard working core group together to start it and get somewhere. A bit like with an open source project, I suppose :)
You have to look at the actual achievement that the patent is monopolising. When considering software, that achievement is not the software (that part is protected by copyright), but often either plain mathematics or a business method. Similar with most semiconductors (except for the business method part I suppose).
For some reason, when written down in plain English in a non-machine understandable form, these things are not patentable. But when you write them down in C or VHDL, they do become patentable. That does not make sense. Either you are in favor of mathematics and business method patents (regardless of how they are formulated), or you aren't.
It's plain silly to only allow them on those things when they are described in a way that a computer can understand. The difference in investment between the two is already covered by copyright. Some things you simply cannot monopolise, because that's deemed to be bad for the economy. Tough luck, you'll have to try your chances at this new fangled thing they call "competition" based on arcane concepts such as "quality", "brand recognition", "human capital", "customer satisfaction" etc.
And that's why software patents are perverted: they allow you to patent stuff which normally is not patentable, but which suddenly does become patentable if you say that you describe it in a machine-understandable form.
If you want something different, you need a different regime. It does not make sense to first apply some system from the 15th century to all sorts of new stuff it was never designed for, and then to bolt on all kinds of extra rules because -surprise- it simply doesn't work as intended when used to monopolise that new stuff. You should instead look at new paradigms, if you think copyright is not sufficient for the protection investments of computer programs.
As far as "improving the system so that it becomes beneficial when applied to software", that indeed seems to be the case. Do you have any proof (or even indications) to the contrary? That's what you think. Have you ever actually had a discussion with or have you seen a standpoint from lawyers on this? These people are completely opposed to any kind of change that might reduce the power of patents (and thus of the patent establish. Just read this response from the IPO to the FTC report (which suggest *very* mild changes, despite some quite strong conclusions regarding software patents.) Look at points 6 and 10. Isn't that just plain horrible?Anyway, since you appear to be from Europe, here we're in a better situation, since here at least software patents aren't legalised yet.
Heh, and you called me naiveIt has nothing to do with "technical fields", except in the TRIPs treaty (which is why the European Parliament simply stated that "data processing does not belong to a field of technology", although of course the means with which you perform data processing can).
Shorter term software patents are just as impossible as no software patents in your view, because the TRIPs treaty requires that all patents are treated the same way. Changing that would also mean "turning back the tide", as it would result all owners of software patents to be stuck with patents which suddenly are no longer valid (instead of for 15 more years or so).
FWIW, asking for software patents to be abolished in the US is at least as realistic in my eyes as proposing yet another reform which is supposed to automagically make the patent system more beneficial. Proponents of software patents keep saying that if only "good" software patents were granted, they would have a beneficial effect. But they've been saying that for the last 20 years or so, and the situation only gets worse.
Nevertheless, lots of things which are normally not patentable (such as mathematics and business methods) do become suddenly patentable if you describe them in a way that can be interpreted by a computer.
People don't invent software, they write it. You don't write a steam engine or a lava lamp. This has nothing to do with art or creativity, but simply with the fact that software is a literary work (not just in practice, but even juridically, even in TRIPs).If you write a technical manual on how to perform a (possibly patented) chemical reaction, that does not make the book patentable nor can publishing it constitute patent infringement. But for some reason when you describe it in software, that software itself does become patentable.