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- quassatio, on 02/29/2008, -1/+15One of the problems with many sectors of the marketplace today (and in fact for more than a century) is that companies often use patent abuse to stifle competition, and thus innovation. If software patents are discontinued, consumers will have more options, and more companies will be able to make money making different and better versions of the same piece of code, which will strengthen the economy and provide more jobs in software development. This will also solve some of the computing marketplace's trust problems; when behemoths hog the pie, the economy and the consumer suffers.
Wow, I'm a lousy socialist, aren't I?
The economy is in the toilet. You want to stimulate it? Provide room for more competition. Yes, make laws to prevent people being total jerks, sure. That's easy when there's the political will. You bitch about all the jobs going to India? Well, if the behemoths didn't dominate the US market, and seek to grow their bottom lines by outsourcing, this wouldn't be so much of a problem. - joshuagay, on 02/29/2008, -0/+14Never heard anyone say "Bill Gates, what a socialist," before --- but there is a first for everything. But, besides that, the campaign is based on the fact that software patents do not spur innovation, they hinder it. This is based on economic arguments, and the goals of the campaign have been echoed in statements from people like Bill Gates (whom is quoted on the site).
- inactive, on 02/29/2008, -0/+13"So these socialists want to REMOVE ANY incentive for companies to innovate."
What an ignorant remark. ***** patents have removed the incentive (and even the ability) to innovate. Who is now willing to spend years of his life building something or writing something, only to have it rendered worthless by some ***** patent that should never have been issued?
"Business method" patents? WTF? So now you're telling me I can't have my customers click on an item on my Web site to buy it, because Amazon got a patent on that. *****.
Software is already protected by copyright. Period. - CoolWind, on 02/29/2008, -0/+9Software patents are a hindrance to progress. Abolishing them will lead to increased innovation.
- radison2, on 02/29/2008, -0/+8The idea to end patents should be patented
- GoneGreen, on 02/29/2008, -0/+6Agreed, software patents are *****. They basically are just method patents, and just because you patent a concept doesn't mean that concept can only be used by your company. What if some caveman got a method patent on the wheel, would be all be driving around with oval tires? My (small) company has been sued for a software patent which was total BS, we fought back and won, but it still cost the company 3K in legal fees.
- FreeDeb, on 02/29/2008, -3/+8"In any case, even if End Software Patents’ goals are extreme, they are not far-fetched."
translation? Even though lots of businesses make loads of money from patent-trolling, it's still unfair and the courts may be reasonable and fix this. - init100, on 02/29/2008, -0/+5@pyro789x
"then after he's only sold a few dozen copies some large corporation takes the exact same code, modifies a few lines here and there, then with its greater advertising ability and greater ability to more quickly reproduce the product they make millions off his ideas, where the original inventor doesn't break $200."
The company would still be guilty of copyright infringement. Abolishing software patents would enable competitors to write clones of other software, but they wouldn't be able to just take the original and modify it slightly. They would have to write the clone from scratch. - inactive, on 02/29/2008, -0/+5I doubt Gill Gates is really behind this. Patents are one of his great aces against Linux.
- londubh, on 02/29/2008, -1/+6Software should have never been patented in the first place. Software clearly falls under mathematical algorithms which by law cannot be patented. But the human readable code can still be copyrighted. Not only should software patent granting be ended they should all be declared null and void.
Our patent system is broken. It needs much better funding. There are too few patent officers. People don't even have to prove their patent actually works nor do they have to have an actual prototype anymore. Patents officers have no incentive to reject patents. Like many things in our constitution, we should operate the patent system as our founders intended not as a way for companies to be anti-competitive. - init100, on 02/29/2008, -0/+5That's now. When Microsoft was in the growth phase (around 1993), he made a famous statement about the dangers of software patents.
- Murdats, on 02/29/2008, -0/+4if it wasnt for a sane judge, a company would have won the right to sue because they had patented hyperlinks
think of the internet without links, that is something your precious patent system almost delivered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink#Legal_issue ... - inactive, on 02/29/2008, -0/+4I'd say yes. The idea in general of "owning" or "stealing" an idea or frivolous information defies common sense.
- cmister, on 02/29/2008, -0/+4More detail from Fortune:
http://legalpad.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/02/28/e ...
Still, Klemens expects his group to find much common ground with the more moderate IT industry reformers, as well as with those whose main bugaboo is business-methods patents. “Pretty much every argument we make, top to bottom, applies to business methods as well,” Klemens says. In addition, the group’s supporters hope that the major tech players are coming to conclude that the vast number of software patents they have accumulated is part of the problem. “There are so many rights in so many hands,” says Moglen, of the Software Freedom Law Center, “everybody is at risk all the time.”
In any case, even if End Software Patents’ goals are extreme, they are not far-fetched. The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on the patentability of software, and at one time the predominant assumption among lawyers was that it could not be, because it amounted to nothing more than mathematical algorithms, which, in turn, were considered nonpatentable “laws of nature.”
That assumption was gradually turned upside down through a series of decisions rendered in the 1990s by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a specialized court that had been set up to handle patent appeals, among other things, in 1984. Those decisions suggested that even if pure software itself was not patentable, software when loaded onto a general-purpose computer created, in effect, a new physical device that could then be patented. Some of the same rulings that opened the door to software patents effectively opened the door to “business method” patents, too.
In the past two years, however, it has become clear to all that the U.S. Supreme Court is extremely unhappy with the patent environment that the Federal Circuit has fostered in the two decades since its creation. In eBay v. MercExchange (May 2006), the Court unanimously junked one longstanding rule of that court, and last term, in KSR International v. Teleflex (April 2007), it unceremoniously dispatched another. (In eBay, the Supreme Court ruled that judges need not always enjoin defendants from infringing, even after a patent-holder has proven its case, and in KSR it made it much easier for judges and patent examiners to invalidate patents due to obviousness.)
For Klemens, however, the most encouraging ruling for his agenda was one that, technically, wasn’t. In LabCorp v. Metabolite Laboratories (June 2006), the Supreme Court had been asked to review the Federal Circuit’s precedents on patentability – the issue that ultimately also determines whether software patents and business-method patents are permissible. After hearing oral argument, the Court punted, deciding that, for technical reasons, it never should have heard the case in the first place. But three justices dissented, writing that they would have overturned the Federal Circuit and invalidated the patent in question, because it clearly amounted to an attempt to patent a nonpatentable “natural phenomenon,” though the phenomenon had been recast in the patent application as a patentable “process.” For that opinion, see here. Klemens contends that software patents amount to much the same thing.
Though only three justices signed the dissent, it does appear that it, in combination with the Supreme Court’s back-of-the-hand treatment of other key Federal Circuit precedents, has led the patent appeals court to engage in some soul-searching. Just two weeks ago, it announced, without having been spurred to do so by the parties, that it would rehear an important patentability case, In re Bilski. (See generally here.) It even asked the parties to brief whether a key ruling it rendered in 1998, State Street Bank & Trust v. Financial Signature Group – one of the pivotal ones greenlighting software and business-method patents — was correctly decided.
“There are test cases all over the place,” observes Klemens. Plainly, his timing is propitious. - HonoredMule, on 02/29/2008, -0/+3Neither do I. Maybe you could provide an example of a NON-BS software patent.
- Prosequi, on 02/29/2008, -0/+3"The original purpose of patents was to give the patent-holder breathing room to build their product.." that is not correct. Patents do not enable the patent holder to make, use or sell a patented device. Patents enable the patent holder to prevent others from making, using, or selling the patented device. This is a fine distinction, but one that recognizes that if you patent an improvement on a patented device, you will still need to license rights from the earlier patent holder before you can make, use or sell your improved device.
- SOS84, on 02/29/2008, -0/+3This patent nonsense is getting ridiculous. By law, the patent office should not be issuing patents for software. The courts need to step up and strike them all down in one swift move. By law, you cannot patent, copyright or trademark a number, mathematical equation or algorithm, and that is what is being done. There is no discussion to be had because the issue is simply absurd.
- CoolWind, on 02/29/2008, -0/+3This is not about patent trolling. It's about software patents. Congress has to fix it.
- waynetheman, on 02/29/2008, -0/+3Yes, it's time. All software patents and copyrights should be done away with. Then we can move on to all patents, and all other forms of IP.
Ending the irrational concept of "intellectual property" would be a huge net benefit for society. - deadcrickets, on 02/29/2008, -0/+3So you've proven you have multiple accounts to game Digg against TOS. Buried and reported.
- mtthwmiddleton, on 02/29/2008, -0/+3This would make sense if the "have's" came up w/the ideas in the patents in the first place. Most of the time patents are in the hands of huge companies who bought them off of the "have not's" because the "have not's" needed money. Also, just because you didn't come up w/the initial idea doesn't mean that you can improve on it, or that you are some how less than the person who came up with it. Innovation is building on others ideas to get to a better place, if everyone work individually of everyone else then nothing would ever get done in any field.
- xmlblog, on 02/29/2008, -1/+3Gee and here I thought market demand was the incentive to innovate.
- CoolWind, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2This is a reply.
- quassatio, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2Digg got rid of my edits.
When I mentioned patent abuse going back a century, I was thinking of non-software sectors of the economy---check out Edwin Black's book "Internal Combustion."
Also, a good example of stifled competition (although they are legion) is Blackboard's attempt to effectively patent the concept of an LMS; I'm not all shook up about them deciding to engage in patent warfare with D2L, although I think it is unfortunate. My worry is that they have Angel in their sights, the CODiE winners who make the best LMS money can buy. (Everyone tells me that Moodle is the best one money can't).
But I'm sure you can all think of plenty of other examples. - rnlmedia, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2Surely the issue is algorithm patents, not software. As far as I am aware, it is only possible to patent an algorithm in the U.S. I think I might patent one for adding numbers, I reckon I could make a bit.
- GoatMonkey2112, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2I'm sure you could make a bit either a 1 or a 0 with your adding algorithm.
- GoatMonkey2112, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2I hope you wrote it better than that.
- xmlblog, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2Just to clarify - we're talking about software patents in particular, not patents as a whole. Donald Knuth wrote a very thoughtful essay on this topic quite some time ago: http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt
- HonoredMule, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2Innovation builds on past innovation...most of which is inaccessible to any particular group of innovators.
- pyro789x, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2Technically it will not lead to increased innovation, as the concept has already been discovered, and innovation is defined as something new and different. Abolishing them will, however, lead to a greater variety in products that use or incorporate the same technology, without acting as a hindrance to the programmers.
- ElectricKetchup, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2To all you people who thing we should get rid of "software patents", what makes "software" less patentable than hardware or other physical systems? Normally, when people write patents, they try to make it as broad as possible, so they don't specify that their idea only applies to software systems.
Personally, the main problems I have with most patents is that they need to increase the requirement of "non-obvious", and decrease the length of the patents to a year or two.
Everything is mathematical. - HonoredMule, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2Good thing he's got copyright protection.
But what about my requested example of a non-bs patent? As in something you would submit to the patent office, not a tale of woe. - kmedlin, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2I get the feeling that software patents and supporting monopolies based on patent law for software companies. Look at Blackboard's patent on LMS' that states they invented the idea of a single user having multiple roles in a single system. Everyone who has used a content management system understands this idea was taken from years of content management system development and merely applied to learning management systems which are really just content managements systems used in an learning environment. However, Blackboard's use of this patent has been to drive commercial competition out of the market and stifle innovations that would use this ridiculously basic concept in their system.
- init100, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2"Wow, I'm a lousy socialist, aren't I?"
Of course you are. Competition is for lousy socialists, while any true capitalist wants a monopoly. /sarcasm. - HonoredMule, on 02/29/2008, -0/+2When the 'process' is software, it means nothing.
- BlackAdderIII, on 03/01/2008, -0/+1Let's not get too wrapped up in the idea that the "have-nots" have been given money for their ideas.
One of the many problems with software patents is that if you're a big company with lots of money, you can easily patent the concepts behind someone else's copyright works without paying them anything at all - even though you're not supposed to be able to.
Big companies are demonstrably being given patents despite pre-existing copyright works, and demonstrably being given patents that don't make any technical sense at all.
That's ignoring the obvious conceptual idiocy of software patents.
If only they were seen for what they are in the US, as they are elsewhere. - myusrnm, on 03/01/2008, -1/+2Gill Gates? It's Bill, cornswalled.
- BlackAdderIII, on 03/01/2008, -0/+1Welcome to comments on technology-related news.
- TnTBass, on 02/29/2008, -0/+1The whole problem with patents is they were never designed with a product like software in mind. A patent basically says you cannot do the same thing that someone else already did (and patented). When it comes to software, you can have 1000 different ways of doing the same thing.
Keep in mind, with patents on non software products, you can come up with the same product that has already been patented, but if you do it a unique way, your not causing any patent infringement. Ex. One person can patent a steering wheel, another person can patent a heated steering wheel. Both steer the vehicle. Another person can come along with a new method of heating that steering wheel (perhaps they use heat from the heater core, instead of a element in the steering wheel) and again not be in patent infringement.
Why is it then that coming up with a new method of drawing a window on the screen is any different than coming up with a new method of heating the steering wheel? - Murdats, on 03/01/2008, -1/+2I dont want to have to spend 15 minutes googling to understand someones contextless acronym ridden example
- inactive, on 02/29/2008, -0/+1So the little guys can keep the big guys in check.
Anyways, there are only so many ways to write a piece of software - FreeDeb, on 02/29/2008, -7/+8So these socialists want to REMOVE ANY incentive for companies to innovate.
There's a serious disincentive for companies without a huge patent portfolio to innovate now.
The original purpose of patents was to give the patent-holder breathing room to build their product, not offer a lifetime monopoly on a whole swathe of technological innovation. The patent system has been perverted to allow patents on abstract ideas and that's some serious disincentive if you ask me. - BlackAdderIII, on 03/01/2008, -0/+1Wow, almost every single sentence in that comment was a) wrong or b) silly.
That must have taken real effort. Well done. - Lunarbunny, on 02/29/2008, -0/+1I'm still waiting for Namco's loading screen minigame patent to get struck down.
- solid12345, on 03/01/2008, -0/+1Debate me on it, hobbyist programming does not mean a better piece of software.
- inactive, on 02/29/2008, -0/+1Actually my friend who works in the patent office said that it's not necessarily the idea but the "process" that is being patented... whatever that means.
- bincoder, on 02/29/2008, -1/+2The way patents are used is a disaster. The entire software program should be protected but not each and every little function it contains. That is like claiming copyright on words such as 'and' 'or' 'is'. Every little thing is patented now on non-software items, I wish someone could build a cheap and efficient sterling engine for example. But that cannot be done because someone, somewhere owns the rights to any little piece of it. Same with solar power, fusion, and nearly everything else. That is nothing but pure greed and practically eliminates any further development or improvement in a product or idea. If a patent holder can't make a decent profit after 5 years, it's time for 'their' idea to go into public domain.
- Waterrat, on 02/29/2008, -0/+1 And let's not forget Microsoft...
- Waterrat, on 02/29/2008, -0/+1 Well said.
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