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> 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 ma

> 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...
      - monochromatic 15y ago
        Patent lawyer, yes. Programmer, not really, just sort of a tinkerer. That blog post is of course right that a patent attorney can't really write a patent without the help of the inventor. So if you're against software patents, I think it makes sense to put some responsibility on the inventors who help attorneys write them. But I think this line hits the nail on the head: "It’s the benefit of being a good corporate employee, not being considered a trouble maker, not loosing opportunities for promotion, not bringing negative attention to yourself, not going against the tide." Most people are not willing to put their careers on the line over principles, and that's not going to change. Maybe a handful of the most vehement will, and maybe they're good enough at their jobs to get away with it... but mostly, no. People just go along with what their bosses tell them to do. The idea about the anti-patents is interesting, but (with that implementation) probably not particularly useful at preventing bad patents from issuing. Patent examiners don't search wikis for prior art--they mostly search the patent literature, and to some extent scholarly articles, textbooks, and things like that. So while a wiki article might be helpful at invalidating a patent in litigation years down the road (assuming the defendant found it and could prove when it was written), it's tough to imagine the circumstances where it gets on an examiner's desk and helps him do his job.
        psykotic 15y ago
        You misunderstand. Ignacio's anti-patents wiki was internal-only and meant to discourage other NVIDIA employees from filing patents for ideas he had already discovered. He was the main (and for a long time the only) software guy working on the tessellation architecture and associated algorithms for DirectX 11 and NVIDIA's Fermi chip. Thus he was something of a vanguard; other internal researchers working on the same front would be likely to make very similar discoveries even if working independently. After all, that's the nature of the overwhelming majority of patents and perhaps the single biggest reason they're a bad idea in practice even if you have no issue with them in principle.
        monochromatic 15y ago
        I see. I imagine it did serve his purpose then. > that's the nature of the overwhelming majority of patents and perhaps the single biggest reason they're a bad idea in practice even if you have no issue with them in principle I disagree with this (and I have no idea if it's true in the majority of cases, but let's stipulate to that for the sake of argument). If it's a common occurrence that independent researchers tend to invent similar things around the same time, then it strikes me as a positive thing for the law to bestow some advantage on whoever was first. That would tend to spur innovation and patent disclosures, which is the whole point of the patent system.
dpark 15y ago
I didn't say that you had to believe that patents are as immoral as slavery. But you already have to believe that patents are intrinsically terribly immoral before your metaphor makes sense. And as I said, just because something is sometimes or even often used for immoral purposes does not mean it is intrinsically immoral.

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...
    - monochromatic 15y ago
      Patent lawyer, yes. Programmer, not really, just sort of a tinkerer. That blog post is of course right that a patent attorney can't really write a patent without the help of the inventor. So if you're against software patents, I think it makes sense to put some responsibility on the inventors who help attorneys write them. But I think this line hits the nail on the head: "It’s the benefit of being a good corporate employee, not being considered a trouble maker, not loosing opportunities for promotion, not bringing negative attention to yourself, not going against the tide." Most people are not willing to put their careers on the line over principles, and that's not going to change. Maybe a handful of the most vehement will, and maybe they're good enough at their jobs to get away with it... but mostly, no. People just go along with what their bosses tell them to do. The idea about the anti-patents is interesting, but (with that implementation) probably not particularly useful at preventing bad patents from issuing. Patent examiners don't search wikis for prior art--they mostly search the patent literature, and to some extent scholarly articles, textbooks, and things like that. So while a wiki article might be helpful at invalidating a patent in litigation years down the road (assuming the defendant found it and could prove when it was written), it's tough to imagine the circumstances where it gets on an examiner's desk and helps him do his job.
      - psykotic 15y ago
        You misunderstand. Ignacio's anti-patents wiki was internal-only and meant to discourage other NVIDIA employees from filing patents for ideas he had already discovered. He was the main (and for a long time the only) software guy working on the tessellation architecture and associated algorithms for DirectX 11 and NVIDIA's Fermi chip. Thus he was something of a vanguard; other internal researchers working on the same front would be likely to make very similar discoveries even if working independently. After all, that's the nature of the overwhelming majority of patents and perhaps the single biggest reason they're a bad idea in practice even if you have no issue with them in principle.
        monochromatic 15y ago
        I see. I imagine it did serve his purpose then. > that's the nature of the overwhelming majority of patents and perhaps the single biggest reason they're a bad idea in practice even if you have no issue with them in principle I disagree with this (and I have no idea if it's true in the majority of cases, but let's stipulate to that for the sake of argument). If it's a common occurrence that independent researchers tend to invent similar things around the same time, then it strikes me as a positive thing for the law to bestow some advantage on whoever was first. That would tend to spur innovation and patent disclosures, which is the whole point of the patent system.

dpark 15y ago

I didn't say that you had to believe that patents are as immoral as slavery. But you already have to believe that patents are intrinsically terribly immoral before your metaphor makes sense. And as I said, just because something is sometimes or even often used for immoral purposes does not mean it is intrinsically immoral.