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The incredible irony is one of the major benefits of patents is "openness" and public disclosure of techniques. The alternative to patents is massive secrecy,
by Steko 15y ago
The incredible irony is one of the major benefits of patents is "openness" and public disclosure of techniques.
The alternative to patents is massive secrecy, sorta like Google's search algorithm.
- ericd 15y agoOpenness + death by a thousand papercut licensing fees whenever you try to write any piece of software. I'll take secrecy and copyright, thanks.
- kelnos 15y agoIsn't PageRank patented and therefore public? I believe the patent is held by Stanford and exclusively licensed to Google. Of course, Google's search algo has evolved considerably from the early Stanford days and is secret. I'd prefer that to patents in most cases, though. Trade secret law should be good enough for most things. And I think if it's not, then it shouldn't be patentable. If I can figure out how to make a decent multi-touch UI just by taking 10 minutes and playing with a device that has one, that feels unpatentable to me.
- aristidb 15y agoCan you actually read software patents? To me they're undecipherable. "Openness" isn't worth a lot if it's all written in a language that no actual software developer understands.