Never going to happen; too much investment. Not without something resetting the whole patent system all at once.
And hey, I’m not actually opposed to all patents. H.265 - if you put tens of millions into compression research, or hundreds of millions into database scaling research at PlanetScale, a temporary exclusivity period makes sense.
95% of software patents don’t reach that level.
I think some of the bad rap also comes from technology advancement. Amazon’s 1-click Checkout patent is notorious; but nobody talks about how much of an accomplishment that technology was in 1997. It actually was very impressive when that patent was granted, particularly in getting the credit card networks to agree to the security design.
Because of the nature of software patents the investment is worthless anyway.
One of the biggest problems with software patents is that they're unreasonably broad or ambiguous and then the claims read on arbitrary software the authors of which have never even heard of the patent.
Another is that companies purposely patent interfaces that are needed for compatibility, and then the patent isn't needed because it's so great, it's needed to interoperate with existing systems and thereby offers no ability for competitors to design a better alternative because better is different is incompatible. You have to license H.264 even if you build something better yourself -- or you've already licensed H.265 -- because you still have to be able to interact with media and clients that use H.264.
Then as between large companies, they all need each others' patents and just end up cross licensing everything. All the effort is for nothing because it just cancels out.
As between large companies and small companies, the large companies can sue the small one, but the small company probably doesn't have any money anyway and the suit makes the large company look like a bully and creates PR losses that likely outweigh any benefit from filing the suit. The small companies, on the other hand, can't sue the large ones because the large company would just file counterclaims and (at best) force the same cross-licensing that exists between large companies. So that's worthless.
Which leaves the only entities that really like software patents: Patent trolls. Eliminating them is a major economic benefit of eliminating software patents.
H.265 is a great example of software patents going wrong. As it was the first MPEG video standard created after the rise of widespread commercial video streaming, all the patent owners involved wanted to be able to get as much money as possible from the streaming companies. Because of this, we went from the relatively reasonable H.264 licensing terms (pay one patent pool a per-device licensing fee, capped at a total royalty payment of $14 million) to H.265 being covered by three separate patent pools. Between all of them you have to pay royalties on decoding hardware, software, and per-item encoded, and some of the pools don't have caps on royalties. Additionally, some major patent holders aren't in any pools and you have to work out deals with them individually. Here's a summary of the H.265 licensing situation: https://www.slashcam.de/images/news/HEVC-Patent-Pools-14134_...
The result is that H.265 hasn't gotten much commercial adoption (the one major use is 4K Blu-Ray). Instead, most major streaming and tech companies have been pushing AV1, which doesn't have licensing fees and takes a "mutually assured destruction" approach to patent enforcement (the AV1 patent license states that if any patent holder tries to sue an AV1 user for patent infringement, they automatically lose the rights to all AV1 patents, opening them up to a countersuit).
gjsman-1000|1 year ago
And hey, I’m not actually opposed to all patents. H.265 - if you put tens of millions into compression research, or hundreds of millions into database scaling research at PlanetScale, a temporary exclusivity period makes sense.
95% of software patents don’t reach that level.
I think some of the bad rap also comes from technology advancement. Amazon’s 1-click Checkout patent is notorious; but nobody talks about how much of an accomplishment that technology was in 1997. It actually was very impressive when that patent was granted, particularly in getting the credit card networks to agree to the security design.
AnthonyMouse|1 year ago
Because of the nature of software patents the investment is worthless anyway.
One of the biggest problems with software patents is that they're unreasonably broad or ambiguous and then the claims read on arbitrary software the authors of which have never even heard of the patent.
Another is that companies purposely patent interfaces that are needed for compatibility, and then the patent isn't needed because it's so great, it's needed to interoperate with existing systems and thereby offers no ability for competitors to design a better alternative because better is different is incompatible. You have to license H.264 even if you build something better yourself -- or you've already licensed H.265 -- because you still have to be able to interact with media and clients that use H.264.
Then as between large companies, they all need each others' patents and just end up cross licensing everything. All the effort is for nothing because it just cancels out.
As between large companies and small companies, the large companies can sue the small one, but the small company probably doesn't have any money anyway and the suit makes the large company look like a bully and creates PR losses that likely outweigh any benefit from filing the suit. The small companies, on the other hand, can't sue the large ones because the large company would just file counterclaims and (at best) force the same cross-licensing that exists between large companies. So that's worthless.
Which leaves the only entities that really like software patents: Patent trolls. Eliminating them is a major economic benefit of eliminating software patents.
ndiddy|1 year ago
The result is that H.265 hasn't gotten much commercial adoption (the one major use is 4K Blu-Ray). Instead, most major streaming and tech companies have been pushing AV1, which doesn't have licensing fees and takes a "mutually assured destruction" approach to patent enforcement (the AV1 patent license states that if any patent holder tries to sue an AV1 user for patent infringement, they automatically lose the rights to all AV1 patents, opening them up to a countersuit).
Dylan16807|1 year ago
For PlanetScale, are you sure the patents are necessary when they have copyright on all their code?
I'd say that productivity-enhancing software patents are so vanishingly rare that we barely need to consider them.
Also software is math, it's not supposed to be patentable.
cuddlyogre|1 year ago
rightbyte|1 year ago
How exactly is removing the confirmation prompt for the purchase basket a technical accomplishment?
teddyh|1 year ago