15 ms·

An argument that's rarely made: Almost everyone whose work would be protected by software patents, is fervently opposed to them. Except patent lawyers and multi

• CalChris 7y ago
  Ask Larry Page if he is fervently opposed to software patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en
  • opportune 7y ago
    >multinationals Also the nature of patents incentivizes you to claim patents even if you fundamentally disagree with the patent system, if you want to continue doing business. Otherwise a troll or competitor could try to shut you down
  • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    It's years since it was his work. Now it's protecting the turf of the large corporate, from any whiff of competition by fair means and foul.
    • CalChris 7y ago
      About 20 years. In fact it expired on June 2 and you’re free to use it. You are free to use the work that he was incented to do. His work is now our work.
  • cameronbrown 7y ago
    The alternative is being defenceless when a patent troll comes around. Hate the game not the players. I'd be 100% for ending software patents. We already ban patents on mathematics.
    • mcny 7y ago
      Why not ban all patents altogether?
      • cameronbrown 7y ago
        Because that's a silly idea? Because people will horde their inventions to themselves and reduce the rate of progression of civilisation?
        • mcny 7y ago
          > Because people will horde their inventions to themselves and reduce the rate of progression of civilisation? I bet someone else who isn't silly like that will rediscover likely within twenty years of the hypothetical hoarder. Also, you can hoard it under the current regime anyway: > WD-40's formula is a trade secret, and has not changed over the years, according to historian Iris Engstrand. To avoid disclosing its composition, the product was not patented in 1953, and the window of opportunity for patenting it has long since closed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WD-40 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WD-40
          • cameronbrown 7y ago
            Within 20 years, sure. But extrapolate that for any invention which has significant commercial value, and you've got a problem. This why patents exist in the first place.
            • mcny 7y ago
              > Within 20 years, sure. But extrapolate that for any invention which has significant commercial value, and you've got a problem. This why patents exist in the first place. I didn't think of that. I don't think the situation is quite so cut and dry though. Imagine how many patents like one click [1][2] we can avoid if there simply was no patent. I am not convinced that patents have an overwhelmingly positive effect on society at this point in history. We have to consider that communication (both one to one and one to many) is a lot cheaper today than even two hundred years ago. I think reasonable people should push for an end to all patents. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en
  • dboreham 7y ago
    Patents are behind a kind of shell game played with the investor class: investors like to think they own "assets". So entrepreneurs have over time decided to play a game where patents are treated as assets. They tell the investors that they own these nice valuable assets called patents. Both sides probably know the whole thing is BS, but they play along. In this context, _nobody_ is going to stand up and call BS on the game. Certainly not Larry. Senior engineers in BigTechCo get paid bonuses for patent filings so they're unlikely to speak up for fear of those bonuses. I feel a bit nervous posting this to be honest, but hey..
  • SeanAppleby 7y ago
    Google only uses their patents defensively when sued for patent infringment. A world without patents would result in the same result for them but with less overhead. In this landscape where it's almost impossible to build products without stepping on patents, the only way to defend a large company against being bled to the bone by patent lawsuits is to have a deep warchest of patents to file countersuits, basically just MAD for software.
• ken 7y ago
  What is your basis for this claim? Was there a survey?
  • deogeo 7y ago
    Just the impression I got from the general developer community, and articles such as https://www.infoworld.com/article/2619609/why-software-patents-are-evil.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2619609/why-software-paten...
    • jacques_chester 7y ago
      The exposure to the patent system for most developers is seeing egregious examples being used by patent trolls. Then there's the confusion between design patents and utility patents. So yes, I would say most folks find them distasteful, for the same reason that most folks overestimate crime rates.
      • dboreham 7y ago
        Most developers I know (at least the senior ones) are named inventors on several patents so I doubt your theory that engineers don't understand the space.
        • jacques_chester 7y ago
          Most developers I know are not named inventors on any patents. It's not so much about understanding the space, it's about the mental availability of examples used to estimate the general state of the world. People who watch TV news regularly overestimate the crime rate. Why? Because TV media focuses on the dramatic and attention-grabbing -- "if it bleeds, it leads". No effort is made to present a statistically valid sample of reality. Nobody is publishing "little old lady walks home safely for two thousandth time". Similarly for patents. There are millions. Which ones get press? It's not a perfectly random sample, what we see is the absurd and outrageous examples, ones which deserve criticism and anger. But if you base your estimate of the entire system on examples chosen specifically because they will arouse anger, then you have an inaccurate estimate. Because "patent for neat idea lives quiet life until expiry" or "patent amicably licensed on reasonable terms" or "patent application invalidated by prior art during examination" don't make it to the front page of HN.
• sterileopinions 7y ago
  >Almost everyone whose work would be protected by software patents, is fervently opposed to them. Please provide some kind of basis to this claim.
  • deogeo 7y ago
    I'll repeat my other comment: Just the general impression I got from the developer community, and articles such as https://www.infoworld.com/article/2619609/why-software-patents-are-evil.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2619609/why-software-paten...
  • dboreham 7y ago
    >Please provide some kind of basis to this claim. Well...I think all the basis is likely to be anecdotal unless someone performs a survey. One data point: I've been doing this stuff for decades and I have never had reason to _read_ a patent filing. That has to indicate something, no? If they were so "inventive" wouldn't we need to read them to find out about new inventions. The only patents I've read were a) ones where I was the named inventor (even then I didn't understand them) and b) where I was employed as an expert by lawyers fighting trolls in litigation.
    • kemitchell 7y ago
      I'd venture to guess you've read several "white papers" or even academic papers describing inventions claimed by patents.
    • kstrauser 7y ago
      This exactly. The point of patents is to encourage people to publish their research, but I've literally never heard of anyone reading through software patents to get ideas. The entire putative reason for their existence is basically mythical. Furthermore, our company lawyer would probably choke me if he caught me reading patents, as then we'd be subject to much higher damages if we were ever claimed to be infringing something.
    • ehvatum 7y ago
      >I've been doing this stuff for decades and I have never had reason to _read_ a patent filing Knowing of a software patent exposes you to willful infringement, and you'd need a lawyer to understand what the bloody hell most software patents are even claiming to patent.
• jmpman 7y ago
  I like software patents. Made tens of thousands off of them, and then used those same patents at another company when the first company forced a cross lic agreement. First company ultimately lost millions and didn’t realize why. But, their lawyers probably got a bonus.
  • human20190310 7y ago
    I don't understand this story at all.
    • dboreham 7y ago
      jmpman developed some tech at BigCo A. Their lawyers filed patents for that tech, naming jmpman as the inventor. jmpman got bonuses from BigCo A for those filings (typically O($10k)/patent). jmpman then moved to BigCo B, continuing to work on same tech. Meanwhile BigCo A demanded that BigCo B enter into a patent cross-license agreement, presumably with the goal to gain free-of-charge licenses to use BigCo B's patent portfolio. BigCo B agreed. Result was that while BigCo A thought they had made a sweet deal, in fact they licensed foc the tech jmpman had previously developed to BigCo B which went on to make $$$ exploiting it. If they hadn't pulled the cross license stunt, BigCo A would have made $$$ in royalties form B's use of jmpman's tech. But, this is why historically patents were not a big deal: all tech companies (this is before software patents were even allowed, so we're talking hardware patents) all entered into cross licensing agreements and everyone used each other's inventions mostly without royalties paid.
      • jmpman 7y ago
        Glad someone understands me.... nice summary.
• jacques_chester 7y ago
  > Except patent lawyers and multinationals. That should tell you everything on whether they're a good idea. I know you're implying "no, it's a bad idea". But doesn't the involvement of the individuals who do patent law as their sole job qualify them to know more about it then "almost everyone"?
  • deogeo 7y ago
    If 'it' is patent law, then yes. If 'it' is software development, then no. Do we want to encourage the development of patent law, or of software?
    • jacques_chester 7y ago
      Patent law is pretty well-developed at this point. And patent lawyers typically have degrees and relevant experience in the field they focus on. So most software patent lawyers know as much about software as you or I do.
      • justinclift 7y ago
        > ... most software patent lawyers know as much about software as you or I do. Please provide evidence.
        • jacques_chester 7y ago
          I've worked with several. Computer science degrees, publications, time working at Microsoft and IBM, etc. All of them were as qualified or more qualified than I am. As it happens one of them left his law firm and founded a software company.
          • Supermancho 7y ago
            > most software patent lawyers know as much about software as you or I do. > I've worked with several To be fair, that's not a compelling answer. Given the outrageous cases that are publicized, I can understand how there is an incentive to NOT know (or act as if) in an exploitative manner. According to a razor, it's less likely that the competence is a standard or relevant.
• Despegar 7y ago
  It'd be extremely foolish for any advanced economy to give up on intellectual property, including software patents. Which is why it's not going to happen.
  • deogeo 7y ago
    Foolish for the companies currently on top, yes. Not necessarily foolish for consumers, that are harmed by competition being stifled by patents.
    • jacques_chester 7y ago
      By itself, knowledge is a public good. It's not excludable (I can't block non-payers from getting it) and it's not rivalrous (your use doesn't reduce its value for someone else). Public goods are chronically undersupplied in a normal market situation. Providing them imposes a cost on the provider, but because the good is non-excludable you're relying on the goodness of consumers to pay for it. Some will, some won't, but the net amount recovered will be less than it would be otherwise. So what do we do about the undersupply of public goods? There are a variety of options. Taking knowledge as a particular example, one option is the patent system, which grants a temporary legal monopoly on the claims in the patent. It creates an artificial excludability that allows the provider of the knowledge to recover more of the cost of providing it. Overall that should raise the production of knowledge. But, you say, that reduces competition. And sometimes it will. But many ideas can be substituted and so the competitors will patent different things. In fact the monopoly of the competitor gives them an incentive to find new ideas that the competitor hasn't found yet, an incentive which was weaker in the original situation. The alternative is provision through a central supplier, typically: government. But it turns out that the costs of developing knowledge still remain, so how are they paid for? Taxes, essentially. Generally speaking the costs work out to be about the same, but become differently distributed. Instead of knowledge being created by active, incentivised parties who can then get a return from those who value the knowledge most, the incidence of cost falls on everyone. Someone who doesn't value that knowledge gets ripped off, and someone who values it very highly gets subsidised. That said: pure research almost always needs to be publicly subsidised because, by very sensible policy, the laws of nature can't be patented. And representatives passing public budgets can give consideration to which public goods ought to be subsidised, beyond the cold light of economics, as a principle of fairness or morality or furthering humankind. But most knowledge is not pure research. So either we pay for it with taxes, or we pay for it with patents, or we pay for it by getting less common knowledge. Nothing comes for free. Not even ideas.
• egdod 7y ago
  > multinationals What is that supposed to tell me?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• skybrian 7y ago
  Did you mean patent trolls? At least some multinationals would benefit from software patents going away, since they are often used defensively.
• rayiner 7y ago
  It depends on the kind of software. Patents protect capital intensive innovation that’s hard to figure out but easy to copy once you figure it out. That doesn’t describe most software. But it describes a lot of things that are software. I spent an entire summer working on network formation algorithms for cognitive radios. Aside from Matlab simulations I didn’t even write any code. My employer applied for a lot of patents on what was basically software (though commercially it’d be embedded on a baseband processor and you could put it in hardware if you wanted). If you’re a company that paid a room full of PHDs tens of millions of dollars over many years to write code, and could throw the code away and it’d still be worthwhile as long as you had the spec, then that’s the sort of thing where patent protection makes sense. Most software developers have no experience with such work however. Intellectual property is a thing that exists. Somehow Apple’s Ax processors are several times faster than the best Qualcomm can do. That’s intellectual property. Given that, I’m not sure it makes sense to divide up patentability based on whether it’s software or something else. (At the same time, I’d probably say that nothing bad would happen if we simply banned advertising. Since my paycheck never depended on ads I have to admit I don’t really get why it’s necessary, beyond the abstract intellectual arguments. People’s world views are limited by their direct experience.)
  • deogeo 7y ago
    I spent a long time writing advanced code as part of a PhD as well. It relied heavily on existing FOSS code and patent-free work, and would never have been possible if I had had to seek permission for each patentable element used. There is hardly any field where you can improve the state of the art, without stepping on dozens of patents. Of course you can ignore those patents if you don't care about making any money off your work. But if that's the case, you don't need patents in the first place.
    • rayiner 7y ago
      YMMV. Unpopular opinion: I don’t really like open source. I like patents and copyrights because they’re property rights you can use as the basis for markets. Markets are good. It’s hard to build markets with open source. Open source has resulted in a world where you can’t make money just selling software, you have to lock people into ecosystems and services to monetize your work. Symbian used to sell you an OS in return for a cash payment. That was it. Now, you get Android for “free” but only by turning your customers into the product. Same thing with web standards. With video coding standards, you just pay some money and you get the necessary patent licenses. But web standards are “free.” In practice that means just two companies (Apple and Google) get to control the standard by fiat. Is this better?
• woliveirajr 7y ago
  In some countries, ideas aren't patentable, just products are. Software might have some kind of protection, even how you design your DB is protected, but you can't forbid someone to make a similar software that does the same thing.
• mch82 7y ago
  I’d argue software should be patentable, but not copyrightable. Patents last up to 15 years, copyrights last life + 70 years. Software is engineering, not art. It should be protected like technology, not art.
  • bluecalm 7y ago
    I very strongly disagree. If I spend years to develop software and someone copied the code and sells it then I think it will be almost universally perceived as unfair enrichment by others. If I come up with a clever solution to do voice calls and then another person comes up with the same solution in their app then it's tough luck but there aren't many people who would feel it's unfair. After all we both based our work on existing knowledge and our ingenuity unlike in the previous case where people copying didn't do any work themselves. There is strong moral argument for copyright, a sentiment most people at least in Western culture agree with: you shouldn't be able to take work of others without doing any yourself.
  • cyphar 7y ago
    The problem is that patenting a kind of screw is not the same as patenting an algorithm or field of computer science. Software uses many more kinds algorithms than any physical product uses screws. It's impossible to avoid minefields for any reasonably large project. Let's not forget that for quite a few years, asymmetric cryptography was patented and you couldn't implement any kind of cryptosystem that used it. God knows what the state of cryptography would be today if we didn't have our equivalent of a "dark age" thanks to fears over patent litigation.