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Is it too late to consider killing software patents? I guess the battle is over and we just have to bite the bullet and be happy with these half-assed "counterm

by simias 9y ago

Is it too late to consider killing software patents? I guess the battle is over and we just have to bite the bullet and be happy with these half-assed "countermeasures". I'm probably biased because I mostly read about software patent stories on HN and other similar outlets, but it seems like 99.9% of the time they're only used for patent trolling or killing the competition. Patents are supposed to protect the inventors by giving them the time to license and market them before the competition can swoop in and create a similar product without having to pay for the R&D. So do people around here have "success stories" regarding the use of software patents to actually reward creativity instead of just playing the "patent cold war" game?

rayiner 9y ago
I think the CMU hard drive patents are a good example: https://www.google.com/patents/US6201839 https://www.google.com/patents/US6201839. But ideally, a patent is never litigated. It simply allows an R&D house to exist as an independent entity without forcing it into becoming a product/manufacturing company. I don't know about SV, but outside SV, investors do care if your tiny little company has defendable IP. I worked at a startup doing cognitive radios. We were an R&D shop only--our competitors were companies like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin that had manufacturing muscle. We patented everything, and most of it was what you'd call a "software patent" (even though in the long run it would be partially implemented in an FPGA or running on a microcontroller). It was expensive to pay PhDs to spend a year doing Matlab simulations to figure out what algorithms would work.[1] Even more expensive was then spending years testing those in the field (because lots of things that work in simulation fall flat in uncontrolled real-world environments). Copyright was pointless. Writing the code was the easy part. I'm a bit on the fence--I think the problems with patents are overstated, but the benefits often are too. But carving out "software patents" from other kinds of patents strikes me as odd. There is no clean line--it's often easy to take something that might be done by an ASIC and move it into software and vice versa. [1] E.g. one project involved getting disjoint listen-before-talk networks to synchronize their "listening" periods without being able to communicate with each other directly.
beagle3 9y ago
Patents are an offensive weapon by design. Getting a patent does not allow you to make a gadget; it allows you to sue someone else so that they cannot make a gadget. It shouldn't be surprising or unexpected or frowned upon that they are used to kill competition - that's basically their raison d'être.

by simias 9y ago

rayiner 9y ago

I think the CMU hard drive patents are a good example: https://www.google.com/patents/US6201839 https://www.google.com/patents/US6201839. But ideally, a patent is never litigated. It simply allows an R&D house to exist as an independent entity without forcing it into becoming a product/manufacturing company. I don't know about SV, but outside SV, investors do care if your tiny little company has defendable IP. I worked at a startup doing cognitive radios. We were an R&D shop only--our competitors were companies like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin that had manufacturing muscle. We patented everything, and most of it was what you'd call a "software patent" (even though in the long run it would be partially implemented in an FPGA or running on a microcontroller). It was expensive to pay PhDs to spend a year doing Matlab simulations to figure out what algorithms would work.[1] Even more expensive was then spending years testing those in the field (because lots of things that work in simulation fall flat in uncontrolled real-world environments). Copyright was pointless. Writing the code was the easy part. I'm a bit on the fence--I think the problems with patents are overstated, but the benefits often are too. But carving out "software patents" from other kinds of patents strikes me as odd. There is no clean line--it's often easy to take something that might be done by an ASIC and move it into software and vice versa. [1] E.g. one project involved getting disjoint listen-before-talk networks to synchronize their "listening" periods without being able to communicate with each other directly.

beagle3 9y ago

Patents are an offensive weapon by design. Getting a patent does not allow you to make a gadget; it allows you to sue someone else so that they cannot make a gadget. It shouldn't be surprising or unexpected or frowned upon that they are used to kill competition - that's basically their raison d'être.