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> There's nothing objectionable about obtaining a patent--it's all about how you use it. I disagree violently. You have to consider the enormous total mass of

> There's nothing objectionable about obtaining a patent--it's all about how you use it. I disagree violently. You have to consider the enormous total mass of patents in effect. The fear, uncertainty and doubt resulting from a patent being on the books is the primary drag on entrepreneurship and individual programmer freedom. Even if the current patent holder has a history of non-enforcement, I cannot assume that policy will continue in the future, or that its patents won't be bought up by the Nathan Myhrvolds of the world when the company defaults. Now, if the patent was held by a non-profit organization with an ironclad charter that grants free and unrestricted licenses to all comers, that's much better than the alternative. But it's still far from ideal. Assuming such a trojan horse strategy actually worked on a large scale, it could deter real patent reform. Stopgap measures have a way of doing that. That's what happened with the patent cross-licensing between large companies; they're only starting to complain because cross-licensing is useless with patent trolls.

dpark 15y ago
It's not immoral to obtain a patent. Sure, your company's patent portfolio might end up in the hands of a patent troll. On the other hand, your company might be sued into oblivion in a year because you didn't obtain your patent. In that tradeoff, I'd file the patent. The fact that something can be used for immoral purposes does not make that thing immoral. Your slavery comparison is also ridiculous. It is only valid to someone who already believes patents are terribly immoral. To anyone else, it comes off as Godwin-lite. I think a more apt analogy would be if you know that a university was a paper mill, but the accreditation board refused to revoke its accreditation. What would you do in that situation? You might obtain your own degree from the institution so that you can say with certainty and with credibility that the university is a sham. It would indeed be immoral to obtain a fake degree for the purpose of defrauding an employer. It would not be immoral to obtain a fake degree to strengthen your argument.
- psykotic 15y ago
  > It is only valid to someone who already believes patents are terribly immoral. It doesn't assume you believe patents are as immoral as slavery; I already made that specific disclaimer. It assumes that, yes, you do take strong moral exception to software patents. I work for a small company that is vehemently anti-patent even though we do enough novel work that we could file hundreds of patents each year that would fall in the top percentile of innovation among patents. The company has been around for a long time and some of our products are in very patent-encumbered areas like video and audio codecs. We do license patents from others where necessary; for example, every Miles license we sell includes licenses for Thompson's MP3-related patents.
  - monochromatic 15y ago
    > We do license patents from others where necessary Why is this level of complicity ok with you, but obtaining a patent for defensive purposes is not?
    - psykotic 15y ago
      If you're asking me personally, it's because in the first case you're adding to the ever-burgeoning sea of patents and thereby increasing drag on innovation and curtailing programmer freedom. I don't think the kind of sublicensing we do with Thompson is totally without negative consequences in terms of complicity, but it's of much lesser concern to me.
      - monochromatic 15y ago
        If you say so. Anyway, I guess I'll get back to my day job of writing patents.
        psykotic 15y ago
        Are you a patent lawyer? A programmer? Both? I'd love to hear your own perspective on this. For background, my previous job was in a small group of researchers and programmers at NVIDIA. The company had a history of hardware patents but had been pushing more and more for supposedly defensive software patents when I joined. Partly in response to the infamous Creative patent on a robust technique for stencil shadows which had "coincidentally" been filed right after NVIDIA's Cass Everitt had given an invited talk at Creative on that very technique which he had discovered (and John Carmack later independently rediscovered). Anyway, for most of us in DevTech, at least half our time was spent on pure research and prototyping. A colleague in that group, Ignacio Castano, wrote a blog post on programmer responsibility and software patents that you might find interesting: http://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/2010/11/software-patents-are-programmers-responsibility/ http://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/2010/11/software-patents...
        15y ago

dpark 15y ago

It's not immoral to obtain a patent. Sure, your company's patent portfolio might end up in the hands of a patent troll. On the other hand, your company might be sued into oblivion in a year because you didn't obtain your patent. In that tradeoff, I'd file the patent. The fact that something can be used for immoral purposes does not make that thing immoral. Your slavery comparison is also ridiculous. It is only valid to someone who already believes patents are terribly immoral. To anyone else, it comes off as Godwin-lite. I think a more apt analogy would be if you know that a university was a paper mill, but the accreditation board refused to revoke its accreditation. What would you do in that situation? You might obtain your own degree from the institution so that you can say with certainty and with credibility that the university is a sham. It would indeed be immoral to obtain a fake degree for the purpose of defrauding an employer. It would not be immoral to obtain a fake degree to strengthen your argument.

psykotic 15y ago
> It is only valid to someone who already believes patents are terribly immoral. It doesn't assume you believe patents are as immoral as slavery; I already made that specific disclaimer. It assumes that, yes, you do take strong moral exception to software patents. I work for a small company that is vehemently anti-patent even though we do enough novel work that we could file hundreds of patents each year that would fall in the top percentile of innovation among patents. The company has been around for a long time and some of our products are in very patent-encumbered areas like video and audio codecs. We do license patents from others where necessary; for example, every Miles license we sell includes licenses for Thompson's MP3-related patents.
- monochromatic 15y ago
  > We do license patents from others where necessary Why is this level of complicity ok with you, but obtaining a patent for defensive purposes is not?
  - psykotic 15y ago
    If you're asking me personally, it's because in the first case you're adding to the ever-burgeoning sea of patents and thereby increasing drag on innovation and curtailing programmer freedom. I don't think the kind of sublicensing we do with Thompson is totally without negative consequences in terms of complicity, but it's of much lesser concern to me.
    - monochromatic 15y ago
      If you say so. Anyway, I guess I'll get back to my day job of writing patents.
      - psykotic 15y ago
        Are you a patent lawyer? A programmer? Both? I'd love to hear your own perspective on this. For background, my previous job was in a small group of researchers and programmers at NVIDIA. The company had a history of hardware patents but had been pushing more and more for supposedly defensive software patents when I joined. Partly in response to the infamous Creative patent on a robust technique for stencil shadows which had "coincidentally" been filed right after NVIDIA's Cass Everitt had given an invited talk at Creative on that very technique which he had discovered (and John Carmack later independently rediscovered). Anyway, for most of us in DevTech, at least half our time was spent on pure research and prototyping. A colleague in that group, Ignacio Castano, wrote a blog post on programmer responsibility and software patents that you might find interesting: http://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/2010/11/software-patents-are-programmers-responsibility/ http://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/2010/11/software-patents...
        15y ago