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> Oil companies do not drill on land where they don’t have the rights. Movies aren’t released that don’t clear all the music rights. Clothing manufacturers li

by maqr 15y ago

> Oil companies do not drill on land where they don’t have the rights. Movies aren’t released that don’t clear all the music rights. Clothing manufacturers license logos from Disney or the NFL to include them in their product. It's pretty hard to drill on someone else's land, use someone else's music in a production, or use someone else's logo without realizing it. Software patents are nothing like this. Software patents would be more akin to it being patented for an oil company to drill with a very hard diamond bit, or a guitarist to hold their guitar a certain way during a solo, or perhaps a clothing manufacturer to wash their jeans for a more rugged look. Maybe other industries do have patents like these, but I certainly never hear about them.

adestefan 15y ago
Please don't think that this is only a software issue. There's patent abuse in every industry. The problem is with the implementation of the patent system, not the idea.
- adamc 15y ago
  If the idea can't be implemented with the kind of patent examiners we are likely to get, or with the resources one could reasonably expect, then there's a problem with the idea.
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    It's the implementation of patents that has legal and monetary implications, not the idea/ideals of patents.
bruce511 15y ago
>> Oil companies do not drill on land where they don’t have the rights. Movies aren’t released that don’t clear all the music rights. Clothing manufacturers license logos from Disney or the NFL to include them in their product. > Software patents would be more akin to it being patented for an oil company to drill with a very hard diamond bit It's even worse than that. If you want to drill for oil on some land, then you need to get rights to drill on _that land_. A software patent though prevents you from drilling on _any_ land. It's not a right to the oil that's in question, it's a right to drill at all. A software patent is akin to "we've patented searching for oil". No wait, why stop there, let's patent "Digging a hole in the ground". You wanna plant a tree over there? Yeah, sure, digging a hole to put it in is kinda obvious, but I've got the patent on digging holes. The problem with patents is when they move from patenting a "true invention" (and yes, that could be software, like say a better compression algorithm) to patenting the "obvious". therein lies the rub - who determines the legal standard for "obvious". Is Bitblt'ing obvious? Is Public-Private-Keys? Is buying-something-with-a-click? Given the impossibility of defining the "obvious" I'm in favor of just dropping the whole sorry mess, and going back to the days when _machines_ were protected, the implementation of ideas, not the ideas themselves. Yes programs are copyrighted, but not code-snippets.
- anamax 15y ago
  > A software patent is akin to "we've patented searching for oil". No wait, why stop there, let's patent "Digging a hole in the ground". You wanna plant a tree over there? Yeah, sure, digging a hole to put it in is kinda obvious, but I've got the patent on digging holes. Actually, it's not, and that's the sort of thing that makes folks who actually know about patents dismiss much of the software patent rants. Take the RSA patent. It just covers the use of a specific set of algorithms to do a specific task. It does not cover using those algorithms to do other tasks or other algorithms for doing said task. In that, the RSA patent just like the Viagra patent. If you can figure out how to use the Viagra compound to shine shoes, you can patent that, and the pharma patent doesn't apply.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    If you can figure out how to use the Viagra compound to shine shoes, you can patent that, and the pharma patent doesn't apply. Not if Pfizer files a lawsuit about it and you run out of money before you ever see the inside of a courtroom.
  - jerf 15y ago
    Yes, it is like that. Consider when Amazon successfully sued Barnes and Noble for the One-Click patent. In what way did Barnes and Noble infringe? They do not share databases. They do not share implementations. They do not share architectures. They each independently had to implement it, and given the systems we can safely assume a minimum of hundreds of manhours of implementation each, with the bulk of those hundreds of manhours not actually being the "single click" implementation but drudgery of making it work with their unique system. In each case I guarantee the relevant code in both implementations is orders of magnitude larger than the patent itself, which by simple information theory means that the patent is only a small part of the whole. And yet, the patent is violated, and they had to stop. Amazon does not have a patent on the implementation they have for One-Click purchasing. They have a patent on the idea of One-Click shopping. There apparently exists no alternate implementation of One-Click shopping that will not violate the patent, because by any remotely sensible standard that would permit such an alternate implementation, Barnes and Noble must be able to meet it. (If somebody had cracked into Amazon's system and sold Barnes and Noble the one-click implementation, it would have been useless to them.) This is a fundamental perversion of the system. Patents are supposed to encourage innovation by enticing people to create their own alternate solutions, but in software, and more or less only in software, you can patent ideas. And if you want to claim that this is not true, I would ask you to explain exactly how Barnes and Noble violated the patent in any other manner, given what I've said above. I'd also observe that this patent probably falls under this rubric, too. There's no way to implement "buying from within an app" that will not trigger litigation. This is ridiculous. As I said yesterday, maybe programmers overreact to patents vs. most other industries because we are being abused by them, but I'm willing to try living without them and worry about any problems that result later.

by maqr 15y ago

adestefan 15y ago

Please don't think that this is only a software issue. There's patent abuse in every industry. The problem is with the implementation of the patent system, not the idea.

adamc 15y ago
If the idea can't be implemented with the kind of patent examiners we are likely to get, or with the resources one could reasonably expect, then there's a problem with the idea.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  It's the implementation of patents that has legal and monetary implications, not the idea/ideals of patents.

bruce511 15y ago

>> Oil companies do not drill on land where they don’t have the rights. Movies aren’t released that don’t clear all the music rights. Clothing manufacturers license logos from Disney or the NFL to include them in their product. > Software patents would be more akin to it being patented for an oil company to drill with a very hard diamond bit It's even worse than that. If you want to drill for oil on some land, then you need to get rights to drill on _that land_. A software patent though prevents you from drilling on _any_ land. It's not a right to the oil that's in question, it's a right to drill at all. A software patent is akin to "we've patented searching for oil". No wait, why stop there, let's patent "Digging a hole in the ground". You wanna plant a tree over there? Yeah, sure, digging a hole to put it in is kinda obvious, but I've got the patent on digging holes. The problem with patents is when they move from patenting a "true invention" (and yes, that could be software, like say a better compression algorithm) to patenting the "obvious". therein lies the rub - who determines the legal standard for "obvious". Is Bitblt'ing obvious? Is Public-Private-Keys? Is buying-something-with-a-click? Given the impossibility of defining the "obvious" I'm in favor of just dropping the whole sorry mess, and going back to the days when _machines_ were protected, the implementation of ideas, not the ideas themselves. Yes programs are copyrighted, but not code-snippets.

anamax 15y ago
> A software patent is akin to "we've patented searching for oil". No wait, why stop there, let's patent "Digging a hole in the ground". You wanna plant a tree over there? Yeah, sure, digging a hole to put it in is kinda obvious, but I've got the patent on digging holes. Actually, it's not, and that's the sort of thing that makes folks who actually know about patents dismiss much of the software patent rants. Take the RSA patent. It just covers the use of a specific set of algorithms to do a specific task. It does not cover using those algorithms to do other tasks or other algorithms for doing said task. In that, the RSA patent just like the Viagra patent. If you can figure out how to use the Viagra compound to shine shoes, you can patent that, and the pharma patent doesn't apply.
- jrockway 15y ago
  If you can figure out how to use the Viagra compound to shine shoes, you can patent that, and the pharma patent doesn't apply. Not if Pfizer files a lawsuit about it and you run out of money before you ever see the inside of a courtroom.
- jerf 15y ago
  Yes, it is like that. Consider when Amazon successfully sued Barnes and Noble for the One-Click patent. In what way did Barnes and Noble infringe? They do not share databases. They do not share implementations. They do not share architectures. They each independently had to implement it, and given the systems we can safely assume a minimum of hundreds of manhours of implementation each, with the bulk of those hundreds of manhours not actually being the "single click" implementation but drudgery of making it work with their unique system. In each case I guarantee the relevant code in both implementations is orders of magnitude larger than the patent itself, which by simple information theory means that the patent is only a small part of the whole. And yet, the patent is violated, and they had to stop. Amazon does not have a patent on the implementation they have for One-Click purchasing. They have a patent on the idea of One-Click shopping. There apparently exists no alternate implementation of One-Click shopping that will not violate the patent, because by any remotely sensible standard that would permit such an alternate implementation, Barnes and Noble must be able to meet it. (If somebody had cracked into Amazon's system and sold Barnes and Noble the one-click implementation, it would have been useless to them.) This is a fundamental perversion of the system. Patents are supposed to encourage innovation by enticing people to create their own alternate solutions, but in software, and more or less only in software, you can patent ideas. And if you want to claim that this is not true, I would ask you to explain exactly how Barnes and Noble violated the patent in any other manner, given what I've said above. I'd also observe that this patent probably falls under this rubric, too. There's no way to implement "buying from within an app" that will not trigger litigation. This is ridiculous. As I said yesterday, maybe programmers overreact to patents vs. most other industries because we are being abused by them, but I'm willing to try living without them and worry about any problems that result later.