10 ms·

The supposed benefit to society from granting a monopoly on an idea is that it encourages people to invent new ideas and disclose their inventions. Neither idea

by guelo 11y ago

The supposed benefit to society from granting a monopoly on an idea is that it encourages people to invent new ideas and disclose their inventions. Neither ideas or disclosure of ideas are in short supply in the computer world today. Software patents provide no benefit to society.

kazinator 11y ago
Good point. Also, disclosure is implicit in distribution in software, so no encouragement of disclosure is needed. That is to say, if someone has some new software idea, and wants to keep it a secret, the only way is not to implement anything and not to ship anything. (Or else, ship the software on a tamper-proof black-box chip, and not in a way that actually installs on the customers' hardware.)
- eru 11y ago
  Or put it in the cloud, and only sell SaaS?
  - kazinator 11y ago
    Excellent point, indicating a clear detriment.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      I'm actually fine with that. For almost all inventions knowing something is possible is enough to be able to figure out a way to replicate the basic idea, it is rare that the patent disclosure really shows something that was thought to be infeasible (they do exist though). The problem lies in the fact that those few ideas tend to be so valuable that patents by themselves are actually useful, it is in the aggregate and with the amount of abuse of the patent system that it becomes a net negative. On the whole I believe that the world would be better off without patents but what with the developed world being less and less on the producing side of things copyright, patents and other 'intellectual property' concepts are becoming a mainstay of our economies, so expect them to be here to stay.
      - eru 11y ago
        Yes. Patents are probably a detriment to the economy. But like so many other economic rents, the benefits are concentrated, while the costs are spread out.
eru 11y ago
The key part of your comment being `supposed'. The official justification is the seldom the real cause for laws and institutions.
MichaelApproved 11y ago
> it encourages people to invent new ideas and disclose their inventions Is that really the point? I thought it was to allow you to time to profit off of the R&D investment made to develop the idea before it was freely available to the market.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- gliese1337 11y ago
  Nope. That purpose is satisfied by trade secrets. The point of a patent is specifically to incentivize disclosure- to give you a means of retaining the same economic advantage you would have if you kept it secret, so that you can recoup your investment, without having to actually keep it secret. The advantage for the patent holder of a patent over a trade secret is that, if someone finds out your secret, you're hosed; but if someone copies your patent without licensing before it expires, then you can sue them. So, you agree to disclose and then release your invention after a fixed time period in exchange for greater economic security during that period.
  - kenjackson 11y ago
    Outside of web services and food, does anyone rely on trade secrets?
    - quadrangle 11y ago
      yes
    - wongarsu 11y ago
      Lots of companies. To sue for patent infringement you first have to find out that they are infringing your patent. That's very difficult in many cases (e.g. production methods). In comparison keeping a trade secret may be much more viable. For many small companies it's often too costly to enforce their patents worldwide, while keeping secrets is easier the smaller the company is.
  - 11y ago
throwawaykf05 11y ago
> Neither ideas or disclosure of ideas are in short supply in the computer world today. Personally, I don't see much innovation in the software industry, mostly just reinvention of the same wheels over and over and over in slightly different contexts. Most of the really innovative stuff is locked away in various data centers and all we get are tantalizing glimpses when their developers deign to publish a paper or a measly blog post.
- jonesb6 11y ago
  MY REST API serves JSON. Some of us are still innovating.
  - throwawaykf05 11y ago
    Yup, a huge step up from SOAP APIs serving XML and RMI serving serialized Java objects ;-)
  - chei0aiV 11y ago
    Heh
rayiner 11y ago
It depends entirely on your field. I spent most of my career as an engineer working on R&D for software that would likely sit in a baseband in a production implementation. We spent millions of dollars building it, and nothing comparable is publicly available. The secret sauce in a baseband is definitely the sort of thing that's in short supply. And it's software. That said, the patent office may not be qualified to distinguish between something that someone whipped together and something that took a team of PhDs years to invent. And maybe that problem is an intractable one.
- dclowd9901 11y ago
  Bet my team of PhDs would come to the same solution. And there you have why your situation is no different. Software is a dish, we are chefs, and techniques are our recipes and principles. You should no sooner be able to patent a chicken casserole than a baseband. We merely discover what is already true and turn it into code.
  - chris_va 11y ago
    > Bet my team of PhDs would come to the same solution. Maybe they would, but they didn't. The point of the patent system is to incentivize people to publish their inventions. The secondary purpose is to encourage invention. Giving a temporary monopoly is not the greatest solution, but try coming up with a better one.
    - cmdrfred 11y ago
      > Bet my team of PhDs would come to the same solution. What is missed here is they might of come up with a better solution, but due to the risk of a lawsuit they never even try.
      - sgt101 11y ago
        I don't follow this - why would anyone get sued for trying to come up with a different solution?
novaleaf 11y ago
This is an argument against patents. Not software patents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
JumpCrisscross 11y ago
> Software patents provide no benefit to society Deployed correctly, they can spur competition. Finance has no concept of intellectual property. If a small shop invents a security, and it does well, the big shops copy it overnight. This is good, from a product-diversity perspective. It is bad, however, from a firm-diversity perspective. Balancing those perspectives is what this debate is about. Slanting to one extreme or another isn't helpful.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  How is it bad from a firm-diversity perspective? If multiple companies develop the same product then a diverse range of businesses sell that security. Of course, one could argue that "innovation" in financial markets has had a lot of bad consequences. There are very few truly innovative and solid ideas that don't cause huge amounts of risk. Black-Scholes algorithm is one example of good innovation that comes to mind, but even that caused problems for their inventors. Collateralised debt obligations, credit-swaps, contracts for difference, most derivatives, high-frequency trading and binary options are all hugely high risk and/or distort markets. HFTs in particular are egregious, they are hard to analyse and rely on huge numbers of transactions being made and, to my mind, allow traders to make money not on the qualities that allows commerce to do good for society, but only benefits those who aren't the first to attempt to buy or sell a share based on what others are doing, but by looking at 3hat they are doing and jumping in first. The only winners there are those looking to improve high speed Internet transactions, but even then the gains are limited.
nnq 11y ago
NO. It's the fact that the actual inventors of an idea can get some of the value from their idea instead of the one lucky company that finally manages to get an idea to market and make profit from it. Software's is full of brilliant ideas that brought close to zero benefit to their inventor. People like Alan Key or Doug Engelbart, and other much younger "idea people" that few even hear of, deserve(d) to be billionaires just as much as Mark Zuckerberg. I do believe that software patents should exist, but I believe that they should only be granted to individuals (maybe to non-profit foundations), never to companies! And they should work in a way that nobody can use a patent to prevent you from using his/her algorithm, but only to force you to pay a minimum amount (set at contract creation) per N users (if you're a P/SaaS company). The software industry is creating tons of value, but I'd argue that less than 1% of it goes to where it should: it just piles up the food chain in the hope of being later redistributed by philanthropy! And yes, writing such a law would be f HARD, you'd have to really train a new generation of software-expert-patent-clerks and software-expert-lawyers and judges for it to work and don't do stupid things like patent trivialities that would then stifle everyone else. Oh, and I really believe that patents should not even be about benefiting society. They should benefit the "idea creators", shifting some of the immense wealth from the "idea distributors" and "idea marketers". As long as there are still problems unsolved in the universe, ideas are always in short supply! A problem can only be still unsolved because: (a) we have no idea how to solve it, or (b) we have no idea how to solve it cheap enough. And the whole "we only need to sit and implement properly the ideas we already have" is crap! Idea-space is infinite, so you can always randomly come over a new idea that allows you to do the same thing you're already doing but at 0.1% of the cost and that instantly changes everything. Let's say Joe Web comes up with a new idea for building CRUD web apps 1000x faster and cheaper. The saved $$$ from this will end up being shifted to other things. And let's say that 0.01% of the saved money gets shifted to something like cancer research. (Or maybe the shift was more subtle: Joe's colleague Moe got fired from making CRUD apps and then went up to learn to program protein molecular dynamics simulation software that later enabled a breakthrough discovery in medicine.). And at some point this research produces a result. Then Joe Web absolutely deserves some 0.000000Y% of the benefit that society got from a cure for cancer. And that minuscule percent could be a lot! And we have no way of distributing this profit back to idea creators right now. Unless we grant software patents to individuals. (And no, the fact that he simply "benefited from the cure for cancer" is not enough. Maybe he was already extra lucky and neither he nor anyone who cares about would ever have been affected by this disease anyway.) Even if people create ideas even without reward, it doesn't mean they shouldn't get that reward. In the end society should serve the interests of the individual, not the other way around! This is why we've created society in the first place and why we continue to put up with it!

by guelo 11y ago

kazinator 11y ago

Good point. Also, disclosure is implicit in distribution in software, so no encouragement of disclosure is needed. That is to say, if someone has some new software idea, and wants to keep it a secret, the only way is not to implement anything and not to ship anything. (Or else, ship the software on a tamper-proof black-box chip, and not in a way that actually installs on the customers' hardware.)

eru 11y ago
Or put it in the cloud, and only sell SaaS?
- kazinator 11y ago
  Excellent point, indicating a clear detriment.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    I'm actually fine with that. For almost all inventions knowing something is possible is enough to be able to figure out a way to replicate the basic idea, it is rare that the patent disclosure really shows something that was thought to be infeasible (they do exist though). The problem lies in the fact that those few ideas tend to be so valuable that patents by themselves are actually useful, it is in the aggregate and with the amount of abuse of the patent system that it becomes a net negative. On the whole I believe that the world would be better off without patents but what with the developed world being less and less on the producing side of things copyright, patents and other 'intellectual property' concepts are becoming a mainstay of our economies, so expect them to be here to stay.
    - eru 11y ago
      Yes. Patents are probably a detriment to the economy. But like so many other economic rents, the benefits are concentrated, while the costs are spread out.

eru 11y ago

The key part of your comment being `supposed'. The official justification is the seldom the real cause for laws and institutions.

MichaelApproved 11y ago

> it encourages people to invent new ideas and disclose their inventions Is that really the point? I thought it was to allow you to time to profit off of the R&D investment made to develop the idea before it was freely available to the market.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gliese1337 11y ago
Nope. That purpose is satisfied by trade secrets. The point of a patent is specifically to incentivize disclosure- to give you a means of retaining the same economic advantage you would have if you kept it secret, so that you can recoup your investment, without having to actually keep it secret. The advantage for the patent holder of a patent over a trade secret is that, if someone finds out your secret, you're hosed; but if someone copies your patent without licensing before it expires, then you can sue them. So, you agree to disclose and then release your invention after a fixed time period in exchange for greater economic security during that period.
- kenjackson 11y ago
  Outside of web services and food, does anyone rely on trade secrets?
  - quadrangle 11y ago
    yes
  - wongarsu 11y ago
    Lots of companies. To sue for patent infringement you first have to find out that they are infringing your patent. That's very difficult in many cases (e.g. production methods). In comparison keeping a trade secret may be much more viable. For many small companies it's often too costly to enforce their patents worldwide, while keeping secrets is easier the smaller the company is.
- 11y ago

throwawaykf05 11y ago

> Neither ideas or disclosure of ideas are in short supply in the computer world today. Personally, I don't see much innovation in the software industry, mostly just reinvention of the same wheels over and over and over in slightly different contexts. Most of the really innovative stuff is locked away in various data centers and all we get are tantalizing glimpses when their developers deign to publish a paper or a measly blog post.

jonesb6 11y ago
MY REST API serves JSON. Some of us are still innovating.
- throwawaykf05 11y ago
  Yup, a huge step up from SOAP APIs serving XML and RMI serving serialized Java objects ;-)
- chei0aiV 11y ago
  Heh

rayiner 11y ago

It depends entirely on your field. I spent most of my career as an engineer working on R&D for software that would likely sit in a baseband in a production implementation. We spent millions of dollars building it, and nothing comparable is publicly available. The secret sauce in a baseband is definitely the sort of thing that's in short supply. And it's software. That said, the patent office may not be qualified to distinguish between something that someone whipped together and something that took a team of PhDs years to invent. And maybe that problem is an intractable one.

dclowd9901 11y ago
Bet my team of PhDs would come to the same solution. And there you have why your situation is no different. Software is a dish, we are chefs, and techniques are our recipes and principles. You should no sooner be able to patent a chicken casserole than a baseband. We merely discover what is already true and turn it into code.
- chris_va 11y ago
  > Bet my team of PhDs would come to the same solution. Maybe they would, but they didn't. The point of the patent system is to incentivize people to publish their inventions. The secondary purpose is to encourage invention. Giving a temporary monopoly is not the greatest solution, but try coming up with a better one.
  - cmdrfred 11y ago
    > Bet my team of PhDs would come to the same solution. What is missed here is they might of come up with a better solution, but due to the risk of a lawsuit they never even try.
    - sgt101 11y ago
      I don't follow this - why would anyone get sued for trying to come up with a different solution?

novaleaf 11y ago

This is an argument against patents. Not software patents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

JumpCrisscross 11y ago

> Software patents provide no benefit to society Deployed correctly, they can spur competition. Finance has no concept of intellectual property. If a small shop invents a security, and it does well, the big shops copy it overnight. This is good, from a product-diversity perspective. It is bad, however, from a firm-diversity perspective. Balancing those perspectives is what this debate is about. Slanting to one extreme or another isn't helpful.

chris_wot 11y ago
How is it bad from a firm-diversity perspective? If multiple companies develop the same product then a diverse range of businesses sell that security. Of course, one could argue that "innovation" in financial markets has had a lot of bad consequences. There are very few truly innovative and solid ideas that don't cause huge amounts of risk. Black-Scholes algorithm is one example of good innovation that comes to mind, but even that caused problems for their inventors. Collateralised debt obligations, credit-swaps, contracts for difference, most derivatives, high-frequency trading and binary options are all hugely high risk and/or distort markets. HFTs in particular are egregious, they are hard to analyse and rely on huge numbers of transactions being made and, to my mind, allow traders to make money not on the qualities that allows commerce to do good for society, but only benefits those who aren't the first to attempt to buy or sell a share based on what others are doing, but by looking at 3hat they are doing and jumping in first. The only winners there are those looking to improve high speed Internet transactions, but even then the gains are limited.

nnq 11y ago

NO. It's the fact that the actual inventors of an idea can get some of the value from their idea instead of the one lucky company that finally manages to get an idea to market and make profit from it. Software's is full of brilliant ideas that brought close to zero benefit to their inventor. People like Alan Key or Doug Engelbart, and other much younger "idea people" that few even hear of, deserve(d) to be billionaires just as much as Mark Zuckerberg. I do believe that software patents should exist, but I believe that they should only be granted to individuals (maybe to non-profit foundations), never to companies! And they should work in a way that nobody can use a patent to prevent you from using his/her algorithm, but only to force you to pay a minimum amount (set at contract creation) per N users (if you're a P/SaaS company). The software industry is creating tons of value, but I'd argue that less than 1% of it goes to where it should: it just piles up the food chain in the hope of being later redistributed by philanthropy! And yes, writing such a law would be f HARD, you'd have to really train a new generation of software-expert-patent-clerks and software-expert-lawyers and judges for it to work and don't do stupid things like patent trivialities that would then stifle everyone else. Oh, and I really believe that patents should not even be about benefiting society. They should benefit the "idea creators", shifting some of the immense wealth from the "idea distributors" and "idea marketers". As long as there are still problems unsolved in the universe, ideas are always in short supply! A problem can only be still unsolved because: (a) we have no idea how to solve it, or (b) we have no idea how to solve it cheap enough. And the whole "we only need to sit and implement properly the ideas we already have" is crap! Idea-space is infinite, so you can always randomly come over a new idea that allows you to do the same thing you're already doing but at 0.1% of the cost and that instantly changes everything. Let's say Joe Web comes up with a new idea for building CRUD web apps 1000x faster and cheaper. The saved $$$ from this will end up being shifted to other things. And let's say that 0.01% of the saved money gets shifted to something like cancer research. (Or maybe the shift was more subtle: Joe's colleague Moe got fired from making CRUD apps and then went up to learn to program protein molecular dynamics simulation software that later enabled a breakthrough discovery in medicine.). And at some point this research produces a result. Then Joe Web absolutely deserves some 0.000000Y% of the benefit that society got from a cure for cancer. And that minuscule percent could be a lot! And we have no way of distributing this profit back to idea creators right now. Unless we grant software patents to individuals. (And no, the fact that he simply "benefited from the cure for cancer" is not enough. Maybe he was already extra lucky and neither he nor anyone who cares about would ever have been affected by this disease anyway.) Even if people create ideas even without reward, it doesn't mean they shouldn't get that reward. In the end society should serve the interests of the individual, not the other way around! This is why we've created society in the first place and why we continue to put up with it!