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posted by martyb on Sunday November 25 2018, @03:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the copyrights-patents-and-trademarks-oh-my dept.

Cisco VP/CTO Jonathan Rosenberg has written a blog post about how harmful software patents are to industry. On top of being vague but also transferrable, they can be used offensively by grantees which are not involved in any aspect of making or using the technologies to which the patents apply, an aspect which has caused ongoing, grievous harm to computer-using companies for a long time now. Something needs to change and, so, after outlining the nature of the problem, he closes with two brief solutions.

Friends and relatives who are not in the technology industry always ask me if I've ever gotten a patent. For them, a patent has this sheen of accomplishment. They believe it means you invented something, that you are an innovator, that you've done something no one has done before. I give a little chuckle, tell them that yes, I have a few patents (I actually have 90 issued U.S. patents), but that it's not really a big deal, and thank you for asking. In reality, I'm being polite. I don't want to burst their bubble, nor do I want to launch into a long tirade. Because, the reality is, that patents — and in particular — software patents — are a plague upon the industry. They hamper innovation. They cost companies millions and millions of dollars in frivolous law suits. They waste time and energy from people who just want to build products. They are anathema to the Internet. Software patents are harmful.

Software patents have three key characteristics which have resulted in their harmfulness. They are vague in terms of what is actually invented. They can be passed along as property. You can sue for infringement without making the product to which the patent applies. Lets cover each in turn.

Software remains covered by copyright, as a form of creative expression. Again, while software patents is a problem mostly contained to the US, they are becoming a threat for the EU. Even as the European Patent Convention specifically exempts software from patentability, there remain prolonged efforts to circumvent the law and establish software patents in effect. After all, what do laws matter if companies can be convinced to universally ignore them?


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  • (Score: 2) by prospectacle on Monday November 26 2018, @04:46AM (1 child)

    by prospectacle (3422) on Monday November 26 2018, @04:46AM (#766369) Journal

    Good take. People often forget or deny that patents are state monopolies for private profit, as if they're naturally arising property rights (like simply owning a tool you built yourself).

    The great benefit to those who have the money and size to successfully abuse the patent system, is that they can cast it as "property rights", as if owning a single, rivalrous piece of land or equipment, to use how you wish, is the same as owning an easily reproducible method, design, or productive process, and being allowed to tell others, throughout the country (or world) whether and how they can use the same process, whether they learned it from you or not.

    Metaphorically we can talk about patentable methods in similar ways to actual physical property, so why should they be any different under the law?

    Of course, what's usually left out of the discussion, is that metaphorically we can also talk about patentable things as if they're recipes, which by the way can't be patented or copyrighted, or abstract ideas, which also can't be patented, or game rules, mental procedures, or mathematical formulae.

    I would venture to say things in this second group are far closer in origin, nature, and economic impact to patentable processes, than those in the first group (real estate, physical materials, etc).

    Patents were themselves invented, and are explicitly intended, to promote invention and scientific progress, and through added costs that are passed on down the chain we all pay for them one way or another, so I agree that another method (such as subsidies) that takes a similar amount of our money and directly purchases inventions and procedures that are then in the public domain, is worth considering.

    However may I suggest incentive-prizes, instead. Then you only pay for the results, and still have the benefit of multiple players competing to get the reward, as you do with the private competition for making and selling patentable inventions.

    One way in incentive-prizes would be far superior to patents is that each round can accept far more entrants that have built on the winners of the previous round, because those entrants don't have to first buy a license to copy the previous winners (or wait for their patents to expire).

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  • (Score: 2) by Rich on Monday November 26 2018, @11:02AM

    by Rich (945) on Monday November 26 2018, @11:02AM (#766402) Journal

    through added costs that are passed on down the chain we all pay for them one way or another

    Indeed, good point. I didn't really think about that myself in the context. I did for the legal system as such, or large-scale advertising, which we all pay for in a hidden way. And which doesn't even look bad as long as we measure the public welfare in gross revenues (including all the broken windows) instead of balance sheet difference as any business would do.