For software patents, I'm a fan of Richard Stallman's idea that software patents should require working, annotated source code be attached. I think that this would make it easier to compare ideas to those in previous patents.
If patent filers chose to obfuscate their code, ideally their patent would be rejected for being unclear, or at least, they'd have a hard time defending their patent, as the difference between it and an alleged infringer would be quite large.
Some algorithm patents do include source code but it is not that helpful. Identical algorithms can be implemented in very different ways within and across programming languages, so there is no comparative value. There are algorithmic equivalencies in implementation that look wildly different in code.
For example, in spatial indexing you can implement some widely used algorithms as either traversing the obvious space decomposition tree or doing lookups using projections onto higher dimensionality space-filling curves. The former is "obvious" but all good implementations use the latter code design because it is much more scalable in real systems even though the algorithms are equivalent.
Most algorithm patents with code go for "matches the high-level description of the algorithm" rather than "is an optimal representation of the algorithm given current computer science". That said, in my experience people are pretty good at reconstructing an algorithm implementation from patent descriptions that do not include code, assuming they have some domain expertise (i.e. in the above example, it should not be necessary to explain the representational equivalency of literal space decomposition and projections onto space-filling curves).
How would you measure the size of the difference between the source code in the patent an the source code in an alleged patent-violating piece of code?
If you were to require that the patent code and the alleged patent-violating source code were defined functionally and represented the exact same function (prove f(x) = g(x)), that would cut down the space of potential patent violations, but patent holders would scream that such a limitation is unfair. There would still be plenty of silly patents that would be patentable, and the same problems would exist as with the existing system: if you read patents to see whether your code violates one of them, you're on the hook for more damages. In any case where exact behavior is not critical, someone might be able to get around patents simply by changing the mechanism/computation slightly. I'm thinking of things like mpeg patents, where encoding and decoding techniques are constantly being tweaked, improved, and getting new settings. Would allowing an additional input to a function f(a, b, c, ..., m), i.e. f(a, b, c, ..., m, n) render it immune to a patent that hardcodes n as "5" in the function?
Fully agreed - that is what the true meaning of "a person skilled in the art" should be with regards to software patents sufficient disclosure requirements and to demonstrate that the patent is not only fiction or a minor adaptation of prior art.
At that point of course it will also be much easier to limit all those overly broad claims.
A world without software patents is a world of free and faster innovation, of equal opportunity, and of open and cheap access to technology.
Firms that have patentable knowledge are strong enough to not need governmental protection.
Inventing something before others gives one technical advantage and time to make profit ahead of others.
Too much effort is spent on the patent process, that could be spent directly on innovation.
In today's software world, 20 years of monopoly is like 100 years of monopoly when the constitution was signed.
The solution should probably come from the legislative branch.
Let's look at "abolish software patents" more deeply:
Is this retroactive, i.e., all software patents filed and granted in the past too are abolished?
If 'no', this can bring disadvantage to new comers who cannot file any new patents against those who have already have then granted.
If 'yes', what happens to all the money companies have already spent on the patents they currently have? (International filings in many different countries can set a company back by several hundred thousands of dollars.)
I am open to considering favoring abolishing patents (see also the alternative discussion on why only for software) provided it is applied uniformly to the past as well as the future without disadvantaging new comers.
I do agree that on the very least, the term of the patent should be dependent on the degree of innovation involved whether in terms of time (number of years of validity) or money (maximum amount of gain in proportion to the R&D expenditure). People on HN have generally opposed this thought due to the overheads involved, etc.
One of the main arguments for patents is just the fact that some things require a bit of capital to get going and what is to stop some venture capitalist from taking pitches, telling the person it's a rubbish idea then going off and funding the idea himself?
I have a BS patent. It's a patent on the "conceptual system" (note: not a software patent) of using a Mechwarrior/Sims/Diablo style character builder interface plus standard search engine techniques to build a fashion search engine. I refused to sign it but somehow the patent was granted anyway.
Also included in the patent is the concept of paying humans to use the system to do searches for you (i.e., email a photo of shoes you like, someone will google it for you).
Actually, what you have is a "patent application". It is not yet a patent, although according to the Patent Offices public pair system (http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair) it has had a "Non Final Action Mailed" on 2014-01-14. So it is being examined. Looking at the rejection on the pair system, all the claims of the application have been rejected during this go-round.
Come on, if you went through the process, you should know that patents (for right or wrong) can be derivative, as long as they apply the existing ideas to new/novel situations.
The granting of your patent doesn't mean you'd be able to successfully sue someone for paid searches, however you would have stronger grounds if they were executing paid searches on a fashion search engine with a character builder interface.
IP's time (if there ever was one) is over. There is no benefit for real inventors and artists anymore, merely for mega corporations to use the levers of government to maximize their profits at the expense of humanity and freedom. Nothing "intellectual" should be property.
I'm not against corporations or even mega corporations. I think they'd do better for themselves (and their users, more importantly) if they didn't waste years and $billions battling each other and bullying startups and individuals over IP. Instead, they should just focus of making better things.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. - Thomas Jefferson
Intellectual property includes trademarks and copyright.. So what you're saying here is very radical. Knockoff (not necessarily the same formula) drugs sold with pfizers trademark. Gpl'd code used in commercial programs without attribution or contribution of changes. No software licenses.. No ability to sell software at all (since anyone could copy it and give it away for free).. And consumers lose the ability to tell who is selling what (since anyone can use anyone else's trademarks).
I don't think most people would agree with such a radical change.
Edit: even saas would be a problem.. Since a competitor to Amazon aws could call themselves amazonsaws.com, and use amazons logo etc (for ex)
> IP's time (if there ever was one) is over. There is no benefit for real inventors and artists anymore, merely for mega corporations to use the levers of government to maximize their profits at the expense of humanity and freedom. Nothing "intellectual" should be property.
> I'm not against corporations or even mega corporations. I think they'd do better for themselves (and their users, more importantly) if they didn't waste years and $billions battling each other and bullying startups and individuals over IP. Instead, they should just focus of making better things.
> [Quotation]
This sounds like a noble rallying cry but is ultimately misguided. How does this system reconcile with the incentive structures inherent in pharmaceutical research and drug design?
The most important part about patents to remember why they exist.
Why would congress grant a legal monopoly to anybody? The reason is (or should be) to protect any investment that went into the invention; for the benefit of society as a whole - to make sure expensive research is still going to happen.
An idea does not cost anything. It might have some value if nobody had that idea before, but the idea would have been had anyway regardless of any legal protection. It might suck for the individual having the idea, but society is not served by protecting ideas that came without cost.
Copyright on the other hand is useful and needed, it protects a specific expression of an idea.
If you translated software patents to books, a patent would be like a legal monopoly on "science fiction stories", or "crime stories".
Whereas copyright protects a specific store - as it should. Other folks are free to write other science fiction or crime stories.
Anyway... I am not holding my breath. Also there are so many patents already out there, these will likely not be invalidated retroactively.
Patents were not there to protect investment. That is a post-hoc reason.
The original justification was to encourage inventors to share their ideas instead of hiding them.
This was at a time when reverse engineering something was a to harder, so it actually made sense.
My understanding was that the original idea of patents was to prevent inventions being lost to mankind due to their being held secret. Patents allow inventors to have a short term monopoly in return for societies long term intellectual gain. Clearly, this is NOT occurring with today's software patents.
(1) Most s/w patents are not for 'inventions' that are non-obvious and therefore not even capable of being kept secret in the first instance, and,
(2) So many patent applications are so broad as to not actually describe a system in an implementable way. End result: we offer up monopolies, benefiting the 'inventor' but end up with no knowledge added to society. A situation that impoverishes the many to pay the few for pretty much nothing.
There is clearly no reason for software patents. To look at this issue from another angle, consider the following.
What was the reason for creating the patent system in the first place? To give people an incentive to invent new things: if someone invests the time in coming up with something novel, the legal system would give a temporary monopoly in return.
But in today's world, clearly one would imagine the vast majority, if not all software would have been invented as is, without the incentives that patent protection provides. When one contrasts this with the well-known downsides of software patents, the outcome should be clear: abolish them.
I'd be pretty happy with a system that gives only short-term (two-year?) patents on the current criteria, with a 5-10 year extension awarded only after presenting evidence of significant investment or extraordinary novelty to an independent panel of experts.
Exactly. Note that opposing patents on certain inventions doesn't mean you think the inventors don't deserve to get insanely rich by commercially exploiting them; it just means you don't think they deserve a government-backed protection to do so.
So, what inventions should deserve such protection? For example, ideas which by their nature must be disclosed after a large investment in their development, but before having a chance to be placed in the market. Regulated industries like drugs come to mind. Even then, the extent of the protection should be limited to a (short) period to prepare and launch commercial exploitation of the idea. Therefore, the patent should include proof and plan for such commercialization of the idea.
I think this is true from an economic engineering perspective. If a patent doesn't require investment, it doesn't need a patent to ensure that investment can be recovered.
From an enforcement perspective it could get pretty ugly. Also, the law is at its best when it deals in definable concepts. Large is relative. For Google, an investment to large to be pursued on a whim has 4 or 5 more zeros than it does for me.
If a particular invention is created that realizes the idea, I agree that the invention should be patentable, but it sounds like your post advocates patents on scientific research.
You can already get a patent on processes that turn an abstract idea into a practical application. That leaves open the door for other applications of the abstract idea to still be used.
There's not a lot of debate about whether abstract ideas deserve patents. The consensus is that they don't. The debate is about how to figure out what is an abstract idea and what isn't. On one side, you have an abstract idea like "hedging settlement risk by using shadow accounts" (the patent at issue in CLS Bank v. Alice Corp). Almost everyone on the Fed. Cir. thought this shouldn't be patentable. On the other side, you have something like whatever algorithm is the subject of the gbatteries patent: http://www.gbatteries.com/technology/ ("Our patent-pending process maintains the lithium ion diffusion at optimal levels and eliminates concentration polarization and thus allows the Li-ions to be more uniformly extracted from or reinserted into the cathode materials."). That probably should be patentable, because while the charging algorithm might be simple to describe and could easily be reimplemented, it probably took a lot of R&D to design it in the first place.
The question is, how do you draw the line between the two?
The question is, how do you draw the line between the two?
This is what has traditionally been protected by trade secrets - the problem is that software is easier to reverse-engineer than real-life problems. The integrated circuit community has dealt with the issue ever since they were invented. My feeling is that the possibility of reverse-engineering has in fact spurred innovation in that field, and it's another reason why the no-poaching agreement between Apple and Google is so abhorrent, it did not only depress wages, it also slowed progress in the field.
On the other hand, there is the issue of "gene patents". A pharmco takes out a patent on a gene, because you cannot patent abstract ideas, but what they are really doing is protecting the relationship between a gene and a medical condition. This is early discovery, and the price tag and timeline is that of a small space mission, several hundred millions and the better part of a decade. Once something is admitted to market the project is comparable to a flagship space mission, several billions and two decades of work. Patents are the wrong tool for that kind of job.
I persist in thinking that the problem is not with the subject matter test. A computer program is obviously a machine, just as the Federal Circuit and lots of other people intuitively assume.
The problem is with the obviousness bar, which is far, far, far too low. I haven't studied the Alice patent, but let's take what the NYT says about it here:
The issue in this case, Alice Corporation Pty. v. CLS Bank International, is whether using a computer to implement a well-established economic concept can be patented. [...] Alice Corporation obtained four American patents that cover a method of settling trades between investors in currency and other financial markets. The approach depends on a neutral middleman to make sure traders complete the transactions they have agreed to. [...] Alice Corporation has argued that its patents cover a specific computer-enabled system and method, not the fundamental idea of using intermediaries in financial settlements. But CLS Bank, which first sued Alice in an attempt to have its patents invalidated, says that Alice’s system does not add anything meaningful to a basic idea.
The NYT Editorial Board is using this argument to urge the Supreme Court to rule that this patent's subject matter is inappropriate. But I think this can just as easily, if not more easily, be read as an argument that the invention in question is obvious. Taking some process that was previously done by hand and computerizing it, or some part of it, is, in this day and age, a paradigmatic example of something obvious.
Again: I haven't studied the actual patent. I just think it's unfortunate that everyone is talking about this as a subject matter problem, when we have a screaming obviousness problem that the Federal Circuit is right at the center of.
I want the Supreme Court to tell the Federal Circuit that mere novelty does not entail nonobviousness. In such a highly generative field as software, which has an uncountable number of applications, simply coming up with another one contributes little or nothing to the state of the art. If someone else who encountered the same requirements could implement a system to satisfy them just as easily before reading a putative patent as after reading it, there was no intellectual contribution and the patent should not be valid. This was clearly the intent behind the patent system at its inception. It should be restored.
The patent situation has become a circus. There's a company claiming a patent on video advertisements preceding video content, and they're suing every online media company in existence hoping for shakedowns.
I once jokingly suggested a patent about paying online, but lo and behold, someone has that too.
As a holder of a number of patents (pending and granted), I'm obviously conflicted here. My early patents came from my days at Nokia Research Centre where there was a "patent quota". Yep, we had to come up with a set number of patents per year, regardless of the quality.
My views on patents were (subsequently) very strongly influenced by this paper: "Against Intellectual Property" by Brian Martin:
I would encourage anyone with an opinion on the topic to take a look at it. I'm not sure I agree 100% with everything in there, but the reasoning is very good.
These days, I'm much more in the "abolish software patents" camp than I used to be. The only valid reason I can think to have one now is for "freedom to operate", but I can attest from bitter experience, that simply doing a defensive publication of the core idea is significantly cheaper than obtaining a patent on the pretext of freedom to operate.
In any case, a system that necessitates spending upwards of US$100k to obtain freedom to operate, has something diabolically wrong with it.
Patent systems are bad because they deal with concepts which are too vague. I don't think we can fix that.
Lets leave aside economic implications for a moment. What is an invention? Is it really different to a discovery. There is no good way to distinguish between invention and discovery because they're not distinct concepts. Distinctions are semantic, even in an archetypical example of patentable invention like Edison's lightbulb. Inventing a lightbulb is discovering that electricity can heat a filament, it emits light when hot and can be prevented from burning by placing it in a vacuum.
These are exactly the types of problems the law chokes on.
I'm against software patents, but if we must have them, can't we at least make them shorter? The software world moves too fast for these kinds of patents to have the term lengths that they do.
An important distinction here is why the alleged invention should not be patentable: 1) because it is obvious in view of what was done before; or 2) solely because it is software, regardless of whether those in the field would regard it as a significant advance. The latter is a much bigger change from the status quo, but the article sort of conflates the two.
The Court should provide machine (processor) level protection and rule that high level programming is obvious, in that it requires only routine experimentation. The challenge for the court is how to make room for machines whose novelty is a software control. I would argue that there should be a moving element test. Is there a software/hardware interface.
"Deserve" is a framing that wraps together a moral claim with what is intended to be a purely utilitarian calculus (whether a class of patent "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts"). As soon as you start framing things in terms of who "deserves" what, the side who can generate greater pathos wins.
Make it easier to find prior art and make the loser of a patent suit pay for the suit. That will prevent the most egregious practice of patent trolls bullying small companies into settling befofe the case goes to trial. If the cost of losing a patent litigation was higher, trolling would become economically riskier.
Anyone care to conjecture the practical effects of invalidating software patents beyond saving everyone involved time and money to litigate those patents? It may be valuable for that reason alone, but I'm trying to imagine a world where suddenly, overnight, all software patents are eliminated.
Except for the patents that huge organizations already own, right? So they can go on using those to beat the crap out of each other and crush threatening offerings from smaller firms. Pick up the ladder after you climb it. Sweet.
[+] [-] mindvirus|12 years ago|reply
If patent filers chose to obfuscate their code, ideally their patent would be rejected for being unclear, or at least, they'd have a hard time defending their patent, as the difference between it and an alleged infringer would be quite large.
[+] [-] jandrewrogers|12 years ago|reply
For example, in spatial indexing you can implement some widely used algorithms as either traversing the obvious space decomposition tree or doing lookups using projections onto higher dimensionality space-filling curves. The former is "obvious" but all good implementations use the latter code design because it is much more scalable in real systems even though the algorithms are equivalent.
Most algorithm patents with code go for "matches the high-level description of the algorithm" rather than "is an optimal representation of the algorithm given current computer science". That said, in my experience people are pretty good at reconstructing an algorithm implementation from patent descriptions that do not include code, assuming they have some domain expertise (i.e. in the above example, it should not be necessary to explain the representational equivalency of literal space decomposition and projections onto space-filling curves).
[+] [-] harshreality|12 years ago|reply
If you were to require that the patent code and the alleged patent-violating source code were defined functionally and represented the exact same function (prove f(x) = g(x)), that would cut down the space of potential patent violations, but patent holders would scream that such a limitation is unfair. There would still be plenty of silly patents that would be patentable, and the same problems would exist as with the existing system: if you read patents to see whether your code violates one of them, you're on the hook for more damages. In any case where exact behavior is not critical, someone might be able to get around patents simply by changing the mechanism/computation slightly. I'm thinking of things like mpeg patents, where encoding and decoding techniques are constantly being tweaked, improved, and getting new settings. Would allowing an additional input to a function f(a, b, c, ..., m), i.e. f(a, b, c, ..., m, n) render it immune to a patent that hardcodes n as "5" in the function?
[+] [-] vog|12 years ago|reply
This works very well in European Union, although this is an ongoing fight between lobbyists and civil rights defenders (such as FFII and EDRi).
(Note that there are lots of European software patents already filed, but those not legally enforcible right now.)
[+] [-] Renaud|12 years ago|reply
Why do we need software patents in the first place?
[+] [-] fpp|12 years ago|reply
At that point of course it will also be much easier to limit all those overly broad claims.
[+] [-] voicereasonish|12 years ago|reply
Source code should not be patentable.
[+] [-] sushirain|12 years ago|reply
A world without software patents is a world of free and faster innovation, of equal opportunity, and of open and cheap access to technology.
Firms that have patentable knowledge are strong enough to not need governmental protection. Inventing something before others gives one technical advantage and time to make profit ahead of others.
Too much effort is spent on the patent process, that could be spent directly on innovation.
In today's software world, 20 years of monopoly is like 100 years of monopoly when the constitution was signed.
The solution should probably come from the legislative branch.
[+] [-] alok-g|12 years ago|reply
Is this retroactive, i.e., all software patents filed and granted in the past too are abolished?
If 'no', this can bring disadvantage to new comers who cannot file any new patents against those who have already have then granted.
If 'yes', what happens to all the money companies have already spent on the patents they currently have? (International filings in many different countries can set a company back by several hundred thousands of dollars.)
I am open to considering favoring abolishing patents (see also the alternative discussion on why only for software) provided it is applied uniformly to the past as well as the future without disadvantaging new comers.
I do agree that on the very least, the term of the patent should be dependent on the degree of innovation involved whether in terms of time (number of years of validity) or money (maximum amount of gain in proportion to the R&D expenditure). People on HN have generally opposed this thought due to the overheads involved, etc.
[+] [-] qq66|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javindo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|12 years ago|reply
Also included in the patent is the concept of paying humans to use the system to do searches for you (i.e., email a photo of shoes you like, someone will google it for you).
http://www.google.com/patents/US20130166591
If a patent is granted in spite of being obviously derivative to the point that the inventor refuses to sign it, something is broken.
[+] [-] pwg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novaleaf|12 years ago|reply
The granting of your patent doesn't mean you'd be able to successfully sue someone for paid searches, however you would have stronger grounds if they were executing paid searches on a fashion search engine with a character builder interface.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] argumentum|12 years ago|reply
IP's time (if there ever was one) is over. There is no benefit for real inventors and artists anymore, merely for mega corporations to use the levers of government to maximize their profits at the expense of humanity and freedom. Nothing "intellectual" should be property.
I'm not against corporations or even mega corporations. I think they'd do better for themselves (and their users, more importantly) if they didn't waste years and $billions battling each other and bullying startups and individuals over IP. Instead, they should just focus of making better things.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. - Thomas Jefferson
[+] [-] rgbrenner|12 years ago|reply
I don't think most people would agree with such a radical change.
Edit: even saas would be a problem.. Since a competitor to Amazon aws could call themselves amazonsaws.com, and use amazons logo etc (for ex)
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Snail_Commando|12 years ago|reply
> IP's time (if there ever was one) is over. There is no benefit for real inventors and artists anymore, merely for mega corporations to use the levers of government to maximize their profits at the expense of humanity and freedom. Nothing "intellectual" should be property.
> I'm not against corporations or even mega corporations. I think they'd do better for themselves (and their users, more importantly) if they didn't waste years and $billions battling each other and bullying startups and individuals over IP. Instead, they should just focus of making better things.
> [Quotation]
This sounds like a noble rallying cry but is ultimately misguided. How does this system reconcile with the incentive structures inherent in pharmaceutical research and drug design?
[+] [-] linuxhansl|12 years ago|reply
The most important part about patents to remember why they exist.
Why would congress grant a legal monopoly to anybody? The reason is (or should be) to protect any investment that went into the invention; for the benefit of society as a whole - to make sure expensive research is still going to happen.
An idea does not cost anything. It might have some value if nobody had that idea before, but the idea would have been had anyway regardless of any legal protection. It might suck for the individual having the idea, but society is not served by protecting ideas that came without cost.
Copyright on the other hand is useful and needed, it protects a specific expression of an idea.
If you translated software patents to books, a patent would be like a legal monopoly on "science fiction stories", or "crime stories". Whereas copyright protects a specific store - as it should. Other folks are free to write other science fiction or crime stories.
Anyway... I am not holding my breath. Also there are so many patents already out there, these will likely not be invalidated retroactively.
[+] [-] grandinj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterashford|12 years ago|reply
(1) Most s/w patents are not for 'inventions' that are non-obvious and therefore not even capable of being kept secret in the first instance, and,
(2) So many patent applications are so broad as to not actually describe a system in an implementable way. End result: we offer up monopolies, benefiting the 'inventor' but end up with no knowledge added to society. A situation that impoverishes the many to pay the few for pretty much nothing.
[+] [-] kenster07|12 years ago|reply
What was the reason for creating the patent system in the first place? To give people an incentive to invent new things: if someone invests the time in coming up with something novel, the legal system would give a temporary monopoly in return.
But in today's world, clearly one would imagine the vast majority, if not all software would have been invented as is, without the incentives that patent protection provides. When one contrasts this with the well-known downsides of software patents, the outcome should be clear: abolish them.
[+] [-] ithkuil|12 years ago|reply
The magnitude of the investment is one of the reasons people tend to accept the concept of patents more in some field than in others.
[+] [-] TillE|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jare|12 years ago|reply
So, what inventions should deserve such protection? For example, ideas which by their nature must be disclosed after a large investment in their development, but before having a chance to be placed in the market. Regulated industries like drugs come to mind. Even then, the extent of the protection should be limited to a (short) period to prepare and launch commercial exploitation of the idea. Therefore, the patent should include proof and plan for such commercialization of the idea.
[+] [-] netcan|12 years ago|reply
From an enforcement perspective it could get pretty ugly. Also, the law is at its best when it deals in definable concepts. Large is relative. For Google, an investment to large to be pursued on a whim has 4 or 5 more zeros than it does for me.
[+] [-] bo1024|12 years ago|reply
If a particular invention is created that realizes the idea, I agree that the invention should be patentable, but it sounds like your post advocates patents on scientific research.
[+] [-] Ilmesnkie_Jones|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
The question is, how do you draw the line between the two?
[+] [-] HarryHirsch|12 years ago|reply
This is what has traditionally been protected by trade secrets - the problem is that software is easier to reverse-engineer than real-life problems. The integrated circuit community has dealt with the issue ever since they were invented. My feeling is that the possibility of reverse-engineering has in fact spurred innovation in that field, and it's another reason why the no-poaching agreement between Apple and Google is so abhorrent, it did not only depress wages, it also slowed progress in the field.
On the other hand, there is the issue of "gene patents". A pharmco takes out a patent on a gene, because you cannot patent abstract ideas, but what they are really doing is protecting the relationship between a gene and a medical condition. This is early discovery, and the price tag and timeline is that of a small space mission, several hundred millions and the better part of a decade. Once something is admitted to market the project is comparable to a flagship space mission, several billions and two decades of work. Patents are the wrong tool for that kind of job.
[+] [-] ScottBurson|12 years ago|reply
The problem is with the obviousness bar, which is far, far, far too low. I haven't studied the Alice patent, but let's take what the NYT says about it here:
The issue in this case, Alice Corporation Pty. v. CLS Bank International, is whether using a computer to implement a well-established economic concept can be patented. [...] Alice Corporation obtained four American patents that cover a method of settling trades between investors in currency and other financial markets. The approach depends on a neutral middleman to make sure traders complete the transactions they have agreed to. [...] Alice Corporation has argued that its patents cover a specific computer-enabled system and method, not the fundamental idea of using intermediaries in financial settlements. But CLS Bank, which first sued Alice in an attempt to have its patents invalidated, says that Alice’s system does not add anything meaningful to a basic idea.
The NYT Editorial Board is using this argument to urge the Supreme Court to rule that this patent's subject matter is inappropriate. But I think this can just as easily, if not more easily, be read as an argument that the invention in question is obvious. Taking some process that was previously done by hand and computerizing it, or some part of it, is, in this day and age, a paradigmatic example of something obvious.
Again: I haven't studied the actual patent. I just think it's unfortunate that everyone is talking about this as a subject matter problem, when we have a screaming obviousness problem that the Federal Circuit is right at the center of.
I want the Supreme Court to tell the Federal Circuit that mere novelty does not entail nonobviousness. In such a highly generative field as software, which has an uncountable number of applications, simply coming up with another one contributes little or nothing to the state of the art. If someone else who encountered the same requirements could implement a system to satisfy them just as easily before reading a putative patent as after reading it, there was no intellectual contribution and the patent should not be valid. This was clearly the intent behind the patent system at its inception. It should be restored.
[+] [-] MCarusi|12 years ago|reply
I once jokingly suggested a patent about paying online, but lo and behold, someone has that too.
[+] [-] ithinkso|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewsinclair|12 years ago|reply
My views on patents were (subsequently) very strongly influenced by this paper: "Against Intellectual Property" by Brian Martin:
http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/95psa.html
I would encourage anyone with an opinion on the topic to take a look at it. I'm not sure I agree 100% with everything in there, but the reasoning is very good.
These days, I'm much more in the "abolish software patents" camp than I used to be. The only valid reason I can think to have one now is for "freedom to operate", but I can attest from bitter experience, that simply doing a defensive publication of the core idea is significantly cheaper than obtaining a patent on the pretext of freedom to operate.
In any case, a system that necessitates spending upwards of US$100k to obtain freedom to operate, has something diabolically wrong with it.
[+] [-] netcan|12 years ago|reply
Lets leave aside economic implications for a moment. What is an invention? Is it really different to a discovery. There is no good way to distinguish between invention and discovery because they're not distinct concepts. Distinctions are semantic, even in an archetypical example of patentable invention like Edison's lightbulb. Inventing a lightbulb is discovering that electricity can heat a filament, it emits light when hot and can be prevented from burning by placing it in a vacuum.
These are exactly the types of problems the law chokes on.
[+] [-] RexRollman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josaka|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] md2be|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatmoney|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axman6|12 years ago|reply
How, exactly?
[+] [-] JosephHatfield|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badman_ting|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sushirain|12 years ago|reply
The solution is to make laws that forbid software patents. And if the old patents can be abolished, the better.
[+] [-] joelgrus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomasahle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aineias|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zemo|12 years ago|reply