>If “the patent system is broken” is a lazy rhetorical cheat, then “software patents shouldn’t be allowed” is the most completely vacuous intellectual cop-out possible.
What an insulting and unfounded statement. The arguments against software patents are strong and coherent. Intelligent people can disagree in good faith about the issue, but labeling the anti-software patent position a "completely vacuous cop-out" is unjustified rhetoric. So far as I can see, he doesn't really provide anything other than "math is hard, companies spend money on it" to support a contrary position, and the philosophical point that physical inventions are based on mathematical physics is true but outside the scope of legal reasoning.
The whole piece irritates me, because it is really just repeating the standard arguments for the utility of the patent system in general which all serious participants in the debate already know. The implication is that opponents of software patents are just too ignorant to know the basic issues - which may be true enough of Random Internet Commentators, but is certainly not true of the many experts who are opposed to software patents.
I don't think his piece was intended to be a rebuttal to serious informed analysts so much as an attempt to discredit the naive abolitionists who frequently know little or nothing about patent law and who fix on edge cases and abuse as if they are the norm and declare 'off with his head.'
If you are irritated by such standard arguments, which I respect, bear in mind that there are those of us who are frustrated by endless statements about how 'obvious' software patents are and how the edge cases demonstrate the whole system is broken and hence must be abandoned which is as coherent a position as proposing to do away with criminal law because of high profile miscarriages of justice. The law is an ass. Duh.
Agreed. He seems wowed by the Greek letters and radical signs that he quotes from the PageRank and Apple patents, thinking it is some precious knowledge that we public would be lucky to (eventually) be able to use. In truth, by the time people can use the knowledge, unencumbered (even with a proposed shorter patent timespan), it is obsolete and/or obvious. So the whole too-long article is built on a questionable premise, that software patents are worth preserving.
I particularly enjoyed the bit where he starts with, "What we keep calling 'software patents' are just regular old patents", then spends several paragraphs discussing the history of software patents and how they've been treated differently than others.
Another dubious aspect is linking to PG's essay with the implication it's a slam dunk argument for software patents. While PG may come out in favor of software patents, he readily admits that the issue is difficult.
PG does make a good argument that abolition of software patent would be a step in the abolition of all patents (and the incentivation of companies to hide all profitable innovations). Yes, but the further institutionalization of software patents could just as easily result in a limited number of large companies owning the right to innovate in any fashion. Pick your poison.
One thing to consider here is that GPL's software provides a similar incentive system to the patent system. In exchange for releasing its algorithms, a company gets to distribute a huge store of existing software. Letting that arrangement replacement the patent system seems like a fine approach to me.
This is a rubbish article. It attempts to paper over obvious, horrible problems by blaming the people who try to game the system. It also attempts to marginalize objections to the current patent system by blaming people.
For starters, the anti-patent (or even anti-"Intellectual Property") position is not a default mindset, even today. The anti-patent viewpoint is not an "intellectual cheat", if the arguers back up the position with research, facts and examples, which, oddly, this article even gives.
Secondarily, the article even raises the basis for patents in the USA: to promote progress in science and engineering. If the patent system doesn't do that, then what is it's purpose? If the patent system just ends up giving incumbents in the market ways to limit competition,the it is indeed well and truly broken.
Very well said, this article is misleading to say the least.
I take issue with article suggesting that all anti-patent views want that patent system abolished. That is absolutely not the case. The patent system should be brought into line with the rate at which industry is capable of innovating today. Furthermore, software patents need special treatment in their own right. They are simply not specific enough, and it is the generalisation that stifles innovation.
Can someone summarize what the hell this guy's point is? I read 5 different paragraphs closely and skimmed the rest (he needs an editor) and can't figure out what he's saying, besides calling people who have a beef with software patents "lazy".
What's his solution to Intellectual Ventures, et al? One of the paragraphs I did read compared them to buying up land in the middle of town and setting up a strip mine. Which isn't a favorable comparison and, incidentally, we have zoning laws against that.
I've read it twice in it's entirety, and his main point is that he believes we would be better off changing patent law to create an explicit category for software patents and have different rules for those patents, rather than simply abolishing software patents (or all patents). This strikes me as not a horrible idea, but his argument sucks. (Primarily because it is predicated on the idea that everyone who disagrees with him is essentially a retard, but also because a lot of his points are hand-wavy or just don't make sense).
I particularly disagree with his between-the-lines assertion that nobody other than Larry Page would've figured out the Page Rank formula by 2018. If that assertion isn't true then he fails to establish that patents have any value to society, and there is no reason (provided by the article) to think we shouldn't just get rid of them.
His main idea is that the way software patents are classified now does not make sense. He then suggests that a new class of patents be created just for software with special rules and regulation.
I'm not too sure why his title blames people because in the end he ends up blaming the current laws.
I recently asked a patent lawyer acquaintance of mine the question: "Do you think patents encourage innovation?"
His answer was: "There's absolutely no question at all whatsoever."
Which I was certainly a bit suprised by.
Maybe the truest conclusion I can come to is that, well, because he's a patent lawyer and his livelihood is based on that being true, he has every incentive to believe it.
I think it's worth pointing out that Nilay Patel is a laywer. [EDIT: non-practicing lawyer, never a patent lawyer] It's clear to me when I read his writing on the subject as well as when I hear him talk about it on the podcast that he's so far from my own thinking on this as to be almost incomprehensible.
But it seems to be light on data. Seems to me that theoretical arguments are well established and fairly strong on both sides at this point. Does anyone know of any empirical studies that have been done on the subject? Is that even possible? Any strong natural experiments?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
--Upton Sinclair
My own observation is that "The Law" (that class of people in charge of creating, extending and defending laws and legal systems) in the USA has crawled inside itself. The legalists like your patent lawyer and others will give very persuasive and logical arguments for laws and the current implementaton of laws. Unfortunately, the non-logical axioms and symbols they start with are all legal. The Law has come unstuck from reality. This un-reality is a bit more subtle than trying to legislate the numerical value of Pi, probably because they've dropped the axiom that The Law exists to serve society.
Hmmm, "There's absolutely no question at all whatsoever." is a statement about the certainty of his answer, but it doesn't seem to be an answer to your question. Was the answer yes?
I think the occupation of lawyers and programmers are oddly similar. Both are paid for precise analysis and generation detailed interpretations. They just happen to speak different languages and their implementations run on vastly different platforms.
Just to clarify, Nilay was a lawyer prior to Engadget, but he's no longer practicing.
Also, I believe his specialty was copyright, not patent, law.
Based on what I've heard him say on the podcast and read in this essay, it seems to me that his main objective is to show that this is a complex issue that can't be simplified down to "good" or "bad".
Seems like the time to bring out the old Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Look at countries with strong patent protection - the US.
Look at the EU (which is less patent friendly).
Which has more innovation in software? OK, the US. But that's mostly the result Silicon Valley. And there are a lot of non-US tech companies - Nokia (Finland), RIM (Canada - not sure where they stand), SAP (Germany).
Then there's the open source stuff. Linux (Finland), MySQL (Sweden), PHP (Greenland / Canada), Python (Holland), HTML (from CERN), Pascal, ... lots of innovative stuff gets made in the EU, but the profits tend to be less concentrated.
Well, in fairness: Fortran, C, UNIX, Apache, Perl, and PostGres are basically from US. Also, the GNU movement, but why would the EU need a free software revolution when they didn't have the stifling and secretive culture of the US?
Nilay, I think your patent exchange misses a key point in software. No one reads them. Nobody reads patents. In fact, go talk to a Microsoft and Apple engineer about patents and they'll tell you that not only do they not read them, their corporate policy does NOT allow engineers to read patents. Apparently it drastically increases the likelihood of treble damages for the company.
You give the PageRank example, missing though that there was work from IBM that was very similar. See this classic paper, "Authorative Sources in a HyperLinked Environment" from 1997(http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home.... The genius/luck of Google was continuing to push this idea of search, when no one else seemed all that interested (recall AltaVista, Yahoo, and Lycos had all seen Google's results and were offered a chance to buy the company -- they all passed. Their genius was in persisting and not giving up and getting their PhD.)
The Apple patent you show is an example of what I call, "Being the first to ask the question". I'm not sure how else you'd solve the problem besides how they did it. It's the obvious way to do it. They probably lucked out because they were the first company to be faced with the question. This has become rampant in the mobile industry. Whenever you have a new form factor, there are new problems. They aren't necessarily hard, but they're new. And the fact that they're new problems means there's no prior art. You can suddenly file a bunch of patents based on your solutions, 99% of whcih are the same solutions the guy across the street would come up with in six months when he happens to hit the same problem. That's not innovation -- that's blocking innovation as it ensures your six month advantage becomes a 15 year advantage (or however long patents expire).
Nobody in SW reads patents. Furthermore patents are actually very hard for those in the field to follow. They use non-standard jargon. I'd much rather read source code or a CS paper to get the ideas -- as those are usually written just by the actual developer, and not translated by the lawyer.
And an unrelated, but important point, IMO. SW, unlike most other endeavors, is something that people rapidly build on. People still take aspirin today, in the exact same form as 50 years ago. No one uses a piece of software in the exact same form as 50 years ago. The closest is probably vi, but even vi has had significant code churn over the past 30 years -- it's quite possible that it currently shares no lines of code from the original version. SW evolves rapidly. Patents seem much better suited for fields where inventions can stand on their own for significant periods of time.
> both researchers and companies in component industries simply ignore patents. Virtually everyone does it. They do it at all stages of endeavor. From the perspective of an outsider to the patent system, this is a remarkable fact. And yet it may be what prevents the patent system from crushing innovation in component industries like IT.
I do. I do with some regularity, and each time I come away more convinced that the majority of the press and discussion on the subject is complete garbage precisely because people don't bother to read them.
You give the PageRank example, missing though that there was work from IBM that was very similar.
There was a lot of similar work. There is always similar work. You'll find examples of it in the references section of the patent that nobody reads. Including:
'Jon M. Kleinberg, "Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment," 1998, Proc. Of the 9.sup.th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pp. 668-677.'
Besides the fact that they're written by lawyers, a major reason software patents use such odd, useless jargon is because algorithms aren't actually meant to be patentable, but the PTO will let them through if they sufficiently submerge the algorithm in a sea of other gunk.
Declaring opposing opinions to be knee-jerk must be the oldest trick in the world.
Phrases like these infuriate me: "lazy conventional wisdom that the patent system is broken beyond repair". No, it's not lazy. Smart people have devoted a lot of thought to this, and while some arrive at the conclusion that patents are a net benefit, that is far from the only conclusion that thinking people would be able to reach.
In addition, those phrases just make it difficult for the people who you are trying to persuade to listen to you. I really struggled to read this article, but it's hard to think clearly when the author is constantly calling you a lazy moron.
In the end, the only people who finish the article are the people who already agree with you, now even more confident that they are right and the opposition are all idiots.
What is broken beyond repair about the patent system as it stands today? As far as I am aware there are two problems patent length is too long, and the patent office is approving things they shouldn't. Both are easily fixable. First shorten patent terms to say 5 years. Second revamp the patent office so that fewer bullshit patents get through, perhaps a filing fee instead of an issue fee among other things.
Sure easier said than done but no harder than convincing the country to do away with patents altogether.
Apple's patent on "hand scaling velocity" simply gives a mathematical formula for the sentence: "scale at a speed proportional to how fast the fingers are moving."
There is nothing groundbreaking or advanced about the math here, or the idea behind it. Anyone implementing a multi-touch screen is likely to come to discover that a fixed scaling speed sometimes feels sluggish or awkwardly fast, and so that speed should adjust based on user input. And now, without realizing it, they've infringed on Apple's IP and are open to being sued.
Yes, the math he shows there from Apple's patent looks very obvious. Anyone looking to implement detection of multiple touches on a touchscreen would end up with basically those equations, or others that are functionally equivalent to them.
I want to give TFA's author more credit, but I worry that he is just copy-pasting some math, in hopes that math will just look incomprehensible and hence novel. But that a patent has some equations in it doesn't make it novel. This math certainly isn't.
If you want an example of a patent that actually does have nontrivial math, then the MP3 patents for example qualify. (Whether you think even that should be patentable is of course still an open question - but at least the math in the MP3 patents isn't obvious.)
For a lot of people, 'simple' and 'mathematical formula' is practically an oxymoron. I know, I know, it's a cliche to point it out, but it also illuminates the heart of the problem: The patent examiners are too overworked to pick up on the obviousness, and it doesn't look obvious to most people. It looks densely complex and inscrutable to most people. (The notion of whether we need to allow patents to be densely complex and inscrutable in the first place is another issue.)
Therefore, it's difficult to communicate just how bad the patent is to enough people to convince lawmakers to change the system.
An interesting article, but I think its main point can be summed up as "Look at all these dumbos holding signs saying to end slavery, when interviewed they can't even give good reasons! Haha, here's a few reasons why slavery is actually good!"
Nearly every big cause, right or wrong, has its supporters that may have just happened to be on that side, or thought about it seriously once and have since forgotten the details, or indeed have written many essays or books about the subject. I'm sure there are pieces more elegant and detailed than this that argue for abolishing the patent system; characterizing a position by the existence of uninformed supporters seems useless to me since pretty much all positions have those. The sentiment of educating the masses is nice, and I can agree with it, but on the other hand this is why we have skill specialization--I can give some money to someone who has spent lots and lots of time on the issues to continue their fight, I don't have to spend the same amount of time myself.
I know basic algebra looks brilliant to most ordinary people scared of math but I thought "Patents publicly disclose some of the most advanced work ever done by some of the most creative and resourceful people in history, and it’ll all be free for the taking in several years" particularly amusing after the Apple screenshot. For startups and other companies outside the Valley (where there's a strong sense of sharing), how often do actual game-changing things get patented instead of made into a trade secret?
> [disclosure is] an important way the patent system encourages innovation, actually: it forces inventors to build alternative ways to do things
Are you sure it is not just a way of forcing people to waste effort making something different when there is a perfectly good solution ready to use? Is it not better to be building on things rather than around them? and having invention driven primarily by demand not by obstacles?
> Stop offering patent protection and there’s no more required disclosure -- all this stuff stays locked up as trade secrets
Are you sure it is not the likeliness of keeping the secret that dominates here? That is, if you think you can keep an invention secret for longer than a patent term, you will choose that instead of a patent -- since it will give you a longer monopoly. And if you think you cannot keep the secret, patent disclosure does not help anyone else that much, since the secret was going to leak anyway.
The supposed rational is one thing. Whether it actually works that way is another -- and there is no clear proof that it does work.
"Because getting a patent means accepting a time-limited monopoly on your invention, anyone will be able to use this specification to build their own search engine when the patent expires in 2018."
This paragraph from the article points out one of the larger issues I have with patents in high-tech, which is the length of the grant. Even ignoring the fact that simply reading patent claims is a VERY long way away from working code and related infrastructure, the lapse of the patent plus the knowledge from the patent would only be good for helping you to implement Google's algorithm as it existed in 1998(!). Forget about 2018, Google's algorithms (while still built on similar concepts) are known to be very different today or even 4 years ago than they were in 1998.
By granting such a long term to patents you are not just blocking competitors from the core claim, but also any innovations you make while the patent is active, assuming enough of the original invention remains that anything else that uses your non-filed tweaks would still be in violation of the original process.
Result? You could (assuming reading a patent magically allowed you to actually recreate the system) recreate 1998 Google in 2018. Approximate value of that 'knowledge gift to society' IN 2018? $0! You're 2 decades behind where you need to be if you're starting at the original core invention.
BTW, I don't mean for any of this to be a knock on Google, PageRank is simply the example the original article decided to use. Google remains one of the only big software-related corporations whose patent usage/enforcement hasn't yet been destructive to the industry as a whole.
Thank god someone is actually thinking about it in an informed way and fighting back against a dogmatic (and frequently extremely poorly informed) abolitionist position.
This is an extremely well-thought-out defense of the value of patents, and it presents the issues as nuanced problems that need to be resolved with careful thought.
I have long thought, as the author does, that a ban on "software patents" is extremely short-sighted, given that pretty much any physical object can be represented by equations or software. I really love his example of a beer bottle with a particular neck shape dictated by fluid mechanics equations.
His thoughts on patent trolls are also very welcome -- if we truly believe that intellectual property has value, then we have to allow it to be bought, sold and asserted. But, it does seem reasonable to tie damages to lost revenue or other actual business costs, which non-practicing entities would not have.
I'm not sure what the title is supposed to mean. FTA "The solution is simple, of course: we just have to add a real software patent section to Title 35. " I guess he's trying to say the patent system isn't broken, but here's how I would go about fixing it.
> most important and disruptive inventions in the history of the world
Hyperbole much? PageRank, really? The Internet, yes is one of the most important and disruptive inventions. One companies algorithm for sorting search results. A company that's only been around for a decade or so. Search is huge, Google is huge, but they and esp their pagerank agol ain't close to being one of the most important and disruptive inventions in the world.
Summary by one sentence of the article: "Now, I’m not a software developer, mathematician, or patent expert". That reads in other parts of the text... and even in the poor choice of patent excerpts.
Some parts are naive at a rare level, e.g.:
"Those rules might actually solve the software patent dilemma for us if we just wait long enough: the gold rush to patent all these fundamental software technologies means that they’ll all be public domain prior art in a few years, and any obvious improvements won’t be patentable. The pendulum swings both ways."
And the long rant about software patent not being explicitly defined in the law and that fact being considered as an important advance in the discussion -- well did anybody did not know that? And even if it was the case, does that make the general discussion about the goodness or badness of patenting software irrelevant in any way?
If a system does not work for the population it is intended for, who
is to blame? The population, or the system?
It does not matter. In any case, to make it work, you need to change
either the system or the population. I am quite sure that changing
the population is not realistic at all.
Note that this leaves aside the concrete issue, in which I believe
that the blame rests mostly on the system, which failed to understand
the motivation of people. It does not matter, though (see above).
"is broken" equates to "allows or encourages something that wasn't originally intended". That's an apt description of the patent system and the current situation.
[+] [-] mycroftiv|14 years ago|reply
What an insulting and unfounded statement. The arguments against software patents are strong and coherent. Intelligent people can disagree in good faith about the issue, but labeling the anti-software patent position a "completely vacuous cop-out" is unjustified rhetoric. So far as I can see, he doesn't really provide anything other than "math is hard, companies spend money on it" to support a contrary position, and the philosophical point that physical inventions are based on mathematical physics is true but outside the scope of legal reasoning.
The whole piece irritates me, because it is really just repeating the standard arguments for the utility of the patent system in general which all serious participants in the debate already know. The implication is that opponents of software patents are just too ignorant to know the basic issues - which may be true enough of Random Internet Commentators, but is certainly not true of the many experts who are opposed to software patents.
[+] [-] petegrif|14 years ago|reply
If you are irritated by such standard arguments, which I respect, bear in mind that there are those of us who are frustrated by endless statements about how 'obvious' software patents are and how the edge cases demonstrate the whole system is broken and hence must be abandoned which is as coherent a position as proposing to do away with criminal law because of high profile miscarriages of justice. The law is an ass. Duh.
[+] [-] astangl|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|14 years ago|reply
PG does make a good argument that abolition of software patent would be a step in the abolition of all patents (and the incentivation of companies to hide all profitable innovations). Yes, but the further institutionalization of software patents could just as easily result in a limited number of large companies owning the right to innovate in any fashion. Pick your poison.
One thing to consider here is that GPL's software provides a similar incentive system to the patent system. In exchange for releasing its algorithms, a company gets to distribute a huge store of existing software. Letting that arrangement replacement the patent system seems like a fine approach to me.
[+] [-] bediger|14 years ago|reply
For starters, the anti-patent (or even anti-"Intellectual Property") position is not a default mindset, even today. The anti-patent viewpoint is not an "intellectual cheat", if the arguers back up the position with research, facts and examples, which, oddly, this article even gives.
Secondarily, the article even raises the basis for patents in the USA: to promote progress in science and engineering. If the patent system doesn't do that, then what is it's purpose? If the patent system just ends up giving incumbents in the market ways to limit competition,the it is indeed well and truly broken.
[+] [-] johnpapps|14 years ago|reply
I take issue with article suggesting that all anti-patent views want that patent system abolished. That is absolutely not the case. The patent system should be brought into line with the rate at which industry is capable of innovating today. Furthermore, software patents need special treatment in their own right. They are simply not specific enough, and it is the generalisation that stifles innovation.
Again, I refer to Martin Fowler's excellent blog post on the subject of software patents http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SoftwarePatent.html
[+] [-] jbooth|14 years ago|reply
What's his solution to Intellectual Ventures, et al? One of the paragraphs I did read compared them to buying up land in the middle of town and setting up a strip mine. Which isn't a favorable comparison and, incidentally, we have zoning laws against that.
[+] [-] ajscherer|14 years ago|reply
I particularly disagree with his between-the-lines assertion that nobody other than Larry Page would've figured out the Page Rank formula by 2018. If that assertion isn't true then he fails to establish that patents have any value to society, and there is no reason (provided by the article) to think we shouldn't just get rid of them.
[+] [-] crxpandion|14 years ago|reply
I'm not too sure why his title blames people because in the end he ends up blaming the current laws.
[+] [-] joebadmo|14 years ago|reply
His answer was: "There's absolutely no question at all whatsoever."
Which I was certainly a bit suprised by.
Maybe the truest conclusion I can come to is that, well, because he's a patent lawyer and his livelihood is based on that being true, he has every incentive to believe it.
I think it's worth pointing out that Nilay Patel is a laywer. [EDIT: non-practicing lawyer, never a patent lawyer] It's clear to me when I read his writing on the subject as well as when I hear him talk about it on the podcast that he's so far from my own thinking on this as to be almost incomprehensible.
I've slowly been reading this: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
But it seems to be light on data. Seems to me that theoretical arguments are well established and fairly strong on both sides at this point. Does anyone know of any empirical studies that have been done on the subject? Is that even possible? Any strong natural experiments?
[+] [-] bediger|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digikata|14 years ago|reply
I think the occupation of lawyers and programmers are oddly similar. Both are paid for precise analysis and generation detailed interpretations. They just happen to speak different languages and their implementations run on vastly different platforms.
[+] [-] berberich|14 years ago|reply
Also, I believe his specialty was copyright, not patent, law.
Based on what I've heard him say on the podcast and read in this essay, it seems to me that his main objective is to show that this is a complex issue that can't be simplified down to "good" or "bad".
[+] [-] MartinCron|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wisty|14 years ago|reply
Look at the EU (which is less patent friendly).
Which has more innovation in software? OK, the US. But that's mostly the result Silicon Valley. And there are a lot of non-US tech companies - Nokia (Finland), RIM (Canada - not sure where they stand), SAP (Germany).
Then there's the open source stuff. Linux (Finland), MySQL (Sweden), PHP (Greenland / Canada), Python (Holland), HTML (from CERN), Pascal, ... lots of innovative stuff gets made in the EU, but the profits tend to be less concentrated.
Well, in fairness: Fortran, C, UNIX, Apache, Perl, and PostGres are basically from US. Also, the GNU movement, but why would the EU need a free software revolution when they didn't have the stifling and secretive culture of the US?
[+] [-] kenjackson|14 years ago|reply
Nilay, I think your patent exchange misses a key point in software. No one reads them. Nobody reads patents. In fact, go talk to a Microsoft and Apple engineer about patents and they'll tell you that not only do they not read them, their corporate policy does NOT allow engineers to read patents. Apparently it drastically increases the likelihood of treble damages for the company.
You give the PageRank example, missing though that there was work from IBM that was very similar. See this classic paper, "Authorative Sources in a HyperLinked Environment" from 1997(http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home.... The genius/luck of Google was continuing to push this idea of search, when no one else seemed all that interested (recall AltaVista, Yahoo, and Lycos had all seen Google's results and were offered a chance to buy the company -- they all passed. Their genius was in persisting and not giving up and getting their PhD.)
The Apple patent you show is an example of what I call, "Being the first to ask the question". I'm not sure how else you'd solve the problem besides how they did it. It's the obvious way to do it. They probably lucked out because they were the first company to be faced with the question. This has become rampant in the mobile industry. Whenever you have a new form factor, there are new problems. They aren't necessarily hard, but they're new. And the fact that they're new problems means there's no prior art. You can suddenly file a bunch of patents based on your solutions, 99% of whcih are the same solutions the guy across the street would come up with in six months when he happens to hit the same problem. That's not innovation -- that's blocking innovation as it ensures your six month advantage becomes a 15 year advantage (or however long patents expire).
Nobody in SW reads patents. Furthermore patents are actually very hard for those in the field to follow. They use non-standard jargon. I'd much rather read source code or a CS paper to get the ideas -- as those are usually written just by the actual developer, and not translated by the lawyer.
And an unrelated, but important point, IMO. SW, unlike most other endeavors, is something that people rapidly build on. People still take aspirin today, in the exact same form as 50 years ago. No one uses a piece of software in the exact same form as 50 years ago. The closest is probably vi, but even vi has had significant code churn over the past 30 years -- it's quite possible that it currently shares no lines of code from the original version. SW evolves rapidly. Patents seem much better suited for fields where inventions can stand on their own for significant periods of time.
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=999961
> both researchers and companies in component industries simply ignore patents. Virtually everyone does it. They do it at all stages of endeavor. From the perspective of an outsider to the patent system, this is a remarkable fact. And yet it may be what prevents the patent system from crushing innovation in component industries like IT.
[+] [-] GHFigs|14 years ago|reply
I do. I do with some regularity, and each time I come away more convinced that the majority of the press and discussion on the subject is complete garbage precisely because people don't bother to read them.
You give the PageRank example, missing though that there was work from IBM that was very similar.
There was a lot of similar work. There is always similar work. You'll find examples of it in the references section of the patent that nobody reads. Including:
'Jon M. Kleinberg, "Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment," 1998, Proc. Of the 9.sup.th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pp. 668-677.'
[+] [-] chc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jholman|14 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_%28text_editor%29#Release_h...
[+] [-] kubrickslair|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] aristidb|14 years ago|reply
Phrases like these infuriate me: "lazy conventional wisdom that the patent system is broken beyond repair". No, it's not lazy. Smart people have devoted a lot of thought to this, and while some arrive at the conclusion that patents are a net benefit, that is far from the only conclusion that thinking people would be able to reach.
[+] [-] jessriedel|14 years ago|reply
In the end, the only people who finish the article are the people who already agree with you, now even more confident that they are right and the opposition are all idiots.
[+] [-] stonemetal|14 years ago|reply
Sure easier said than done but no harder than convincing the country to do away with patents altogether.
[+] [-] djackson|14 years ago|reply
Apple's patent on "hand scaling velocity" simply gives a mathematical formula for the sentence: "scale at a speed proportional to how fast the fingers are moving."
There is nothing groundbreaking or advanced about the math here, or the idea behind it. Anyone implementing a multi-touch screen is likely to come to discover that a fixed scaling speed sometimes feels sluggish or awkwardly fast, and so that speed should adjust based on user input. And now, without realizing it, they've infringed on Apple's IP and are open to being sued.
[+] [-] azakai|14 years ago|reply
I want to give TFA's author more credit, but I worry that he is just copy-pasting some math, in hopes that math will just look incomprehensible and hence novel. But that a patent has some equations in it doesn't make it novel. This math certainly isn't.
If you want an example of a patent that actually does have nontrivial math, then the MP3 patents for example qualify. (Whether you think even that should be patentable is of course still an open question - but at least the math in the MP3 patents isn't obvious.)
[+] [-] derleth|14 years ago|reply
For a lot of people, 'simple' and 'mathematical formula' is practically an oxymoron. I know, I know, it's a cliche to point it out, but it also illuminates the heart of the problem: The patent examiners are too overworked to pick up on the obviousness, and it doesn't look obvious to most people. It looks densely complex and inscrutable to most people. (The notion of whether we need to allow patents to be densely complex and inscrutable in the first place is another issue.)
Therefore, it's difficult to communicate just how bad the patent is to enough people to convince lawmakers to change the system.
[+] [-] Jach|14 years ago|reply
Nearly every big cause, right or wrong, has its supporters that may have just happened to be on that side, or thought about it seriously once and have since forgotten the details, or indeed have written many essays or books about the subject. I'm sure there are pieces more elegant and detailed than this that argue for abolishing the patent system; characterizing a position by the existence of uninformed supporters seems useless to me since pretty much all positions have those. The sentiment of educating the masses is nice, and I can agree with it, but on the other hand this is why we have skill specialization--I can give some money to someone who has spent lots and lots of time on the issues to continue their fight, I don't have to spend the same amount of time myself.
I know basic algebra looks brilliant to most ordinary people scared of math but I thought "Patents publicly disclose some of the most advanced work ever done by some of the most creative and resourceful people in history, and it’ll all be free for the taking in several years" particularly amusing after the Apple screenshot. For startups and other companies outside the Valley (where there's a strong sense of sharing), how often do actual game-changing things get patented instead of made into a trade secret?
[+] [-] hxa7241|14 years ago|reply
Are you sure it is not just a way of forcing people to waste effort making something different when there is a perfectly good solution ready to use? Is it not better to be building on things rather than around them? and having invention driven primarily by demand not by obstacles?
> Stop offering patent protection and there’s no more required disclosure -- all this stuff stays locked up as trade secrets
Are you sure it is not the likeliness of keeping the secret that dominates here? That is, if you think you can keep an invention secret for longer than a patent term, you will choose that instead of a patent -- since it will give you a longer monopoly. And if you think you cannot keep the secret, patent disclosure does not help anyone else that much, since the secret was going to leak anyway.
The supposed rational is one thing. Whether it actually works that way is another -- and there is no clear proof that it does work.
[+] [-] georgemcbay|14 years ago|reply
This paragraph from the article points out one of the larger issues I have with patents in high-tech, which is the length of the grant. Even ignoring the fact that simply reading patent claims is a VERY long way away from working code and related infrastructure, the lapse of the patent plus the knowledge from the patent would only be good for helping you to implement Google's algorithm as it existed in 1998(!). Forget about 2018, Google's algorithms (while still built on similar concepts) are known to be very different today or even 4 years ago than they were in 1998.
By granting such a long term to patents you are not just blocking competitors from the core claim, but also any innovations you make while the patent is active, assuming enough of the original invention remains that anything else that uses your non-filed tweaks would still be in violation of the original process.
Result? You could (assuming reading a patent magically allowed you to actually recreate the system) recreate 1998 Google in 2018. Approximate value of that 'knowledge gift to society' IN 2018? $0! You're 2 decades behind where you need to be if you're starting at the original core invention.
BTW, I don't mean for any of this to be a knock on Google, PageRank is simply the example the original article decided to use. Google remains one of the only big software-related corporations whose patent usage/enforcement hasn't yet been destructive to the industry as a whole.
[+] [-] Symmetry|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petegrif|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] URSpider94|14 years ago|reply
I have long thought, as the author does, that a ban on "software patents" is extremely short-sighted, given that pretty much any physical object can be represented by equations or software. I really love his example of a beer bottle with a particular neck shape dictated by fluid mechanics equations.
His thoughts on patent trolls are also very welcome -- if we truly believe that intellectual property has value, then we have to allow it to be bought, sold and asserted. But, it does seem reasonable to tie damages to lost revenue or other actual business costs, which non-practicing entities would not have.
[+] [-] arcdrag|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njharman|14 years ago|reply
Hyperbole much? PageRank, really? The Internet, yes is one of the most important and disruptive inventions. One companies algorithm for sorting search results. A company that's only been around for a decade or so. Search is huge, Google is huge, but they and esp their pagerank agol ain't close to being one of the most important and disruptive inventions in the world.
[+] [-] xilun0|14 years ago|reply
Some parts are naive at a rare level, e.g.: "Those rules might actually solve the software patent dilemma for us if we just wait long enough: the gold rush to patent all these fundamental software technologies means that they’ll all be public domain prior art in a few years, and any obvious improvements won’t be patentable. The pendulum swings both ways."
And the long rant about software patent not being explicitly defined in the law and that fact being considered as an important advance in the discussion -- well did anybody did not know that? And even if it was the case, does that make the general discussion about the goodness or badness of patenting software irrelevant in any way?
[+] [-] serichsen|14 years ago|reply
It does not matter. In any case, to make it work, you need to change either the system or the population. I am quite sure that changing the population is not realistic at all.
Note that this leaves aside the concrete issue, in which I believe that the blame rests mostly on the system, which failed to understand the motivation of people. It does not matter, though (see above).
[+] [-] chromic|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njharman|14 years ago|reply