6 ms·

I agree with this, but my key question is: why stop at software patents? Many of these arguments also apply to all patents, not just software ones. Is there a

I agree with this, but my key question is: why stop at software patents? Many of these arguments also apply to all patents, not just software ones. Is there a compelling argument to keep any patents at all? They seem like a weird throwback to some past society where reclusive inventors spend all their time tinkering and inventing things.

unityByFreedom 5y ago
Patents encourage innovation by rewarding creators. We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers. The reason to ditch software patents is copyright already protects software. Copyright allows you to decide how your code is distributed. Software patents restrict innovation in a manner that was never intended to be possible.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  >We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers. Do you truly believe this? If we got rid of the patent system 5 years ago. Do you believe no vaccines for COVID would be made?
  - friedman23 5y ago
    Not who you are responding to but yes, looking at the history of MRNA vaccine research I believe that these vaccines (MRNA specifically) wouldn't exist without the massive payoff that could come from a patent. edit: my comment went against the worldview of some ideological drones and they decided to downvote me instead of actually responding. There is a reason that MRNA was developed in countries with strong IP rights and countries without those rights are relying on century old technology to develop their vaccines.
    - adam_arthur 5y ago
      Don't worry, I was downvoted too! America has produced by far the most medical advancements in the modern era. What people don't recognize about the lower cost of drugs in countries like Canada is that they effectively have government price controls. If we were to do the same here, it would greatly limit R&D into new treatments. However, there are of course other ways to reduce cost to the consumer without harming the rich ecosystem of biotech. Important to understand this dynamic when adjusting laws, because it would be very easy to totally kill medical innovation
    - burnished 5y ago
      I down voted you for the 'drone' remark.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    Patents are an exchange. I share my invention, you provide protection so I can recoup the costs of creation. Without them, there is little incentive to create, and much more incentive to rip off someone else's work. The result would be a reduction of technology that would put luddites to shame. If we got rid of the patent system today, there would probably still be vaccines 5 years from today because of the prior investment. But, in 100 years, the only people who could get vaccines would be the ultra wealthy, and 100 years after that we would lose the knowledge to create a lot of new technology because the old tech never sufficiently made it into the public sphere.
  - adam_arthur 5y ago
    Without patent protection, there's very little financial incentive to invent new pharmaceuticals. Anything you come up with could be copied and produced for pennies on the dollars by any number of companies. Of course, the cost to produce most medicines is quite low. So you have to invest a high fixed cost in R&D, at great risk of failure, and in the end you don't recoup any of that cost. When patents expire, you'll see many generics come onto the market at reduced costs, and cost to consumer goes down. Some other system could probably work, but free market R&D would fail without protections to profit from creations. I suspect trying to replace the free market system with some quasi-public one would not produce as many innovations.
    - js8 5y ago
      In the case of the pandemic, people have other incentives than financial. I don't agree, it seems to me that almost nobody who innovates does it for money, people do it for fame, curiosity, desire to fix a problem. (All progress depends on unreasonable men.) Rather, it's people who organize innovators who do it for money, and the question if they need to be renumerated in patents is legitimate.
      - johncolanduoni 5y ago
        The innovators in pharmaceutical research need large amounts of money to run the studies to show safety and effectiveness of their inventions, to say nothing of the even more hit or miss discovery process. It’s conceivable we could pay for that in a different manner than patents and high US drug prices, but that cost can’t just be handwaved away.
    - schwank 5y ago
      "When patents expire, you'll see many generics come onto the market at reduced costs, and cost to consumer goes down." This assertion is simply not true. A prime example - Insulin is 100 years old. Those who need it are paying sky high prices due to corporate greed, and many simply can't afford it. No competition, no affordable option. People are dying due to this greed.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  The polio vaccine was given away for free.
  - friedman23 5y ago
    Ok, now please elaborate on how the research and investment that was needed to develop the polio vaccine in any way resembled the amount of research and investment required for modern day vaccines?
    - SavantIdiot 5y ago
      How lazy do you have to be to ask someone else to make your argument for you? Craft your own arguments.
      - friedman23 5y ago
        As lazy as the original commenter making a statement that isn't backed by any evidence.
- knowledge-clay 5y ago
  > We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers. Pay them with public funds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_pa...
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    The difficulty with this is choosing what to fund in what amount. Bureaucracies are quite bad at this. Patents solve this by using the market. If you patent some garbage, nobody buys it and you make no money. If you invent something ingenious that everybody wants once it exists but nobody else would have thought to offer a prize for before it existed, you make a lot of money.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      If a company proves their vaccine "works" it would make sense for a government to want to buy it from them.
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        Is there is a patent for the government to have to buy? If they get to keep the patent unless the government is willing to pay the market price, you have a patent system. If not, they're doing research on faith that some unspecified money might possibly fall from the sky. Also, now there is only one buyer. Say six different companies all develop working vaccines. Is the government going to buy all of them? What about the tenth or hundredth? If not, what happens to the company that spent a billion dollars developing a working vaccine, only to have someone else beat them to the prize by a few days? And vaccines are something we know ahead of time that we want. How do you do a prize for inventing something you don't know you want because it doesn't exist yet?
        charcircuit 5y ago
        >Is there is a patent for the government to have to buy? There would be no patents. >Also, now there is only one buyer. You could also sell them to other governments, hospitals, people, etc. >what happens to the company that spent a billion dollars developing a working vaccine, only to have someone else beat them to the prize by a few days? It's possible for competing products to exist. Is yours cheaper or more effective than your competitors? If you wanted your money building a bad product then tough luck. >How do you do a prize for inventing something you don't know you want because it doesn't exist yet? How do you make a vaccine for a disease that you don't know about? You don't. I'm not sure why you are talking about prizes. Along with just selling them normally, you could also have an unlock system like kickstarter. If you raise $x then they will release the drug, or they could kickstart the entire process. Or instead of a kickstarter they could find investors.
- js8 5y ago
  I may be wrong, but I thought mRNA vaccine was only developed after key patents for it have expired. Whether patents help or hinder innovation seems to depend on how general the patented idea is. If it's really broadly applicable, they hinder it IMHO. I also don't see the patents benefiting researchers anymore, rather than some corporate middlemen.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    That patents expire is not a bug, it's a feature. Patents are an exchange for temporary protection. > I also don't see the patents benefiting researchers anymore, rather than some corporate middlemen. The researcher can't make money without some form of protection. You could spend 20 years building something and have it stolen by a huge company with no means to recoup your costs. Removing patents would immediately benefit the biggest players, entrenching existing monopolies.
    - js8 5y ago
      > You could spend 20 years building something and have it stolen by a huge company with no means to recoup your costs. Removing patents would immediately benefit the biggest players, entrenching existing monopolies. But why is the big company stealing it? Currently, it makes sense to steal it because the patent protections make it seem as if the idea itself is valuable (and can be a private property not commons). But in the world without the patents, what is valuable is the physical implementation, or rather, the coupling of both. It has been pointed out that you have many cases in free market economy with a similar problem. iPhone, for example, has very little innovation in it, it's just an idea executed well, based on past things like Palm Pilot for example. It seems to me, to have fair patents, you need to assume that value of everything can be broken to additive pieces - value of this idea, that idea, and then the value of the materials and energy from which it is built. But this is really hard, because things have value that also comes from combining these things. (In general, this is a problem with free market with respect to labor too, because you cannot really meaningfully determine what contribution of different types of labor is more valuable for the product to arise, but at the same time, the people need to be remunerated for the labor somehow.) On the other hand, in the world without patents, we assume that value of everything can be broken to little pieces (not so valuable by themselves) that are added by individuals in small amounts. So if all innovation is in the commons, no need to toil for 20 years to invent something. You build a little piece, add it to the pile, and everybody benefits because at the end of the day, you take lot more from the pile than you put in.
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  At 63–75 years, programmable general-purpose computers and networks are so new that it’s still possible to claim the most obvious solution to many problems simply by being first to think about them. USPTO’s bar for what is “obvious” is skewed towards older subjects with a lot more written and indexed prior art for an examiner to cite, and doesn’t weigh likelihood of easy reinvention. And now there’s enough money at stake to trigger a land rush to fence off entire problems using solutions that just don’t merit protection.
wavesquid 5y ago
> I agree with this, but my key question is: why stop at software patents? Because the key argument is that math is not patentable. Software patents are relatively uniquely expressible amoung patents as mathematical conjectures.
- johncolanduoni 5y ago
  Why are software patents more expressible in mathematics than e.g. mechanical ones? The physical laws that govern a mechanical device are expressed mathematically.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  I'm actually more ok with pure math patents than software patents. If someone constructively proves p=np then they deserve some term-limited profit taking. Getting a monopoly for being the first pos to mail some legalese to the right government office about clicking a button once to order something for delivery is both not math and not beneficial to society. The problem is software patents is not that software is math. The problem is software patents is that most patentable software is obvious to anyone without severe brain damage, and no one in the legal establishment has historically had any clue how to assess whether some idea in software is non-obvious.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  It is trivial to prove that all patents are theoretically equivalent. There is nothing special about algorithm or software patents in this regard.
jbay808 5y ago
There are still reclusive tinkering inventors today who need to make a living! It's very hard to otherwise compete with an established company who can copy your brilliant idea, scale, and distribute it way faster and more cheaply than you can.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  In 2013 it cost $33,000 to file a software patent: a startup I worked for was trying to file one. There's no way a starving tinkerer would be able to afford a patent. But assume s/he did afford one. Now comes the theft. Amazon steals it, and now our tinkerer needs to cough up millions of dollars to go after a one-trillion dollar company. It lingers in courts for decades. Even pro-bono legal advice would eventually give up. Futile. Patents exist only for companies to wage war for monopolies.
- _vvhw 5y ago
  You're assuming that once you have a patent, you're protected. When in fact, you still need capital to defend your patent in litigation. It's turtles all the way down.
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    Beatiful comment.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    That's better than no protection at all. If you have something really innovative you might be able to get a loan to protect it, or sell or lease it to companies that would help defend it.
    - _vvhw 5y ago
      The reality is that in software, relative to the vast armada of the patent thicket that could be employed against you, a single patent affords little protection.
_vvhw 5y ago
"A weird throwback to some past society" rings true, especially insofar as the world now has a central knowledge repository—the Internet. Stopping software patents as a first step would set a precedent and provide a beachhead.
CalChris 5y ago
The compelling argument, rewarding innovation, is the same as it was in 1789, in the United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
- burnished 5y ago
  Well, the system doesn't seem to function that way, which makes it feel less compelling.
- _vvhw 5y ago
  Except that today, the promotion of progress of software is most advanced by open-source, and most damaged by patents.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    Above comment was addressing all patents, not software patents specifically. I think everyone here is in agreement that software patents are harmful and not what was intended by the patent system. Software is already protected by copyright.
    - _vvhw 5y ago
      I understood my comment to be providing a counter-example, an exception to the rule, in the context of "all patents".
jandrewrogers 5y ago
There is no principled reason to stop at software patents, they are literally theoretically equivalent to any other patent. Industry has already abandoned them in any case. In software, we’ve already returned to the state that patents were designed to avoid. Everything of value is treated as a trade secret. In several domains of computer science, virtually everything that is state-of-the-art is never published and is instead slathered in NDAs. And for good reason, patents on computer science have been effectively unenforceable for decades. So instead, no one publishes. This isn’t speculation, it is official policy in organizations I work with. The end state is that public computer science is mediocre compute science. I’m agnostic about it since it doesn’t affect me either way, but I recognize the suboptimality.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  > There is no principled reason to stop at software patents, they are literally theoretically equivalent to any other patent. They're not. Software is already protected by copyright.
  - jandrewrogers 5y ago
    Software is not unique in this regard, all patentable subject matters work the same way. Abstract designs are patentable. A specific reduction to practice of that design is copyrightable. Both are independently licensed in practice regardless of the subject matter. It works this way in chemical engineering, for example, where I have some experience. You license the process and the implementation of the process independently, because they are not the same work; the patent in the former and the copyright in the latter.
    - unityByFreedom 5y ago
      Sure, algorithms also receive patents in other fields. The point is that algorithms were not intended to be patented, not that algorithms are unique to software. We say "End Software Patents" because that's an easy way to see how the system has gone haywire.
- 5y ago
koonsolo 5y ago
If you need to invest millions of dollars for some pharmaceutical pill, you probably want to have a return on investment for that. The only way to really have that is your exclusive right to sell it, or license it out. If you can't have that right, you won't invest those millions of dollars. But software is not like that, because innovation is mainly driven by building on top of small things, not doing a crazy expensive research project. So industries are different, and I do see the benefit for some.

unityByFreedom 5y ago

Patents encourage innovation by rewarding creators. We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers. The reason to ditch software patents is copyright already protects software. Copyright allows you to decide how your code is distributed. Software patents restrict innovation in a manner that was never intended to be possible.

charcircuit 5y ago
>We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers. Do you truly believe this? If we got rid of the patent system 5 years ago. Do you believe no vaccines for COVID would be made?
- friedman23 5y ago
  Not who you are responding to but yes, looking at the history of MRNA vaccine research I believe that these vaccines (MRNA specifically) wouldn't exist without the massive payoff that could come from a patent. edit: my comment went against the worldview of some ideological drones and they decided to downvote me instead of actually responding. There is a reason that MRNA was developed in countries with strong IP rights and countries without those rights are relying on century old technology to develop their vaccines.
  - adam_arthur 5y ago
    Don't worry, I was downvoted too! America has produced by far the most medical advancements in the modern era. What people don't recognize about the lower cost of drugs in countries like Canada is that they effectively have government price controls. If we were to do the same here, it would greatly limit R&D into new treatments. However, there are of course other ways to reduce cost to the consumer without harming the rich ecosystem of biotech. Important to understand this dynamic when adjusting laws, because it would be very easy to totally kill medical innovation
  - burnished 5y ago
    I down voted you for the 'drone' remark.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  Patents are an exchange. I share my invention, you provide protection so I can recoup the costs of creation. Without them, there is little incentive to create, and much more incentive to rip off someone else's work. The result would be a reduction of technology that would put luddites to shame. If we got rid of the patent system today, there would probably still be vaccines 5 years from today because of the prior investment. But, in 100 years, the only people who could get vaccines would be the ultra wealthy, and 100 years after that we would lose the knowledge to create a lot of new technology because the old tech never sufficiently made it into the public sphere.
- adam_arthur 5y ago
  Without patent protection, there's very little financial incentive to invent new pharmaceuticals. Anything you come up with could be copied and produced for pennies on the dollars by any number of companies. Of course, the cost to produce most medicines is quite low. So you have to invest a high fixed cost in R&D, at great risk of failure, and in the end you don't recoup any of that cost. When patents expire, you'll see many generics come onto the market at reduced costs, and cost to consumer goes down. Some other system could probably work, but free market R&D would fail without protections to profit from creations. I suspect trying to replace the free market system with some quasi-public one would not produce as many innovations.
  - js8 5y ago
    In the case of the pandemic, people have other incentives than financial. I don't agree, it seems to me that almost nobody who innovates does it for money, people do it for fame, curiosity, desire to fix a problem. (All progress depends on unreasonable men.) Rather, it's people who organize innovators who do it for money, and the question if they need to be renumerated in patents is legitimate.
    - johncolanduoni 5y ago
      The innovators in pharmaceutical research need large amounts of money to run the studies to show safety and effectiveness of their inventions, to say nothing of the even more hit or miss discovery process. It’s conceivable we could pay for that in a different manner than patents and high US drug prices, but that cost can’t just be handwaved away.
  - schwank 5y ago
    "When patents expire, you'll see many generics come onto the market at reduced costs, and cost to consumer goes down." This assertion is simply not true. A prime example - Insulin is 100 years old. Those who need it are paying sky high prices due to corporate greed, and many simply can't afford it. No competition, no affordable option. People are dying due to this greed.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
The polio vaccine was given away for free.
- friedman23 5y ago
  Ok, now please elaborate on how the research and investment that was needed to develop the polio vaccine in any way resembled the amount of research and investment required for modern day vaccines?
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    How lazy do you have to be to ask someone else to make your argument for you? Craft your own arguments.
    - friedman23 5y ago
      As lazy as the original commenter making a statement that isn't backed by any evidence.
knowledge-clay 5y ago
> We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers. Pay them with public funds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_pa...
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  The difficulty with this is choosing what to fund in what amount. Bureaucracies are quite bad at this. Patents solve this by using the market. If you patent some garbage, nobody buys it and you make no money. If you invent something ingenious that everybody wants once it exists but nobody else would have thought to offer a prize for before it existed, you make a lot of money.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    If a company proves their vaccine "works" it would make sense for a government to want to buy it from them.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      Is there is a patent for the government to have to buy? If they get to keep the patent unless the government is willing to pay the market price, you have a patent system. If not, they're doing research on faith that some unspecified money might possibly fall from the sky. Also, now there is only one buyer. Say six different companies all develop working vaccines. Is the government going to buy all of them? What about the tenth or hundredth? If not, what happens to the company that spent a billion dollars developing a working vaccine, only to have someone else beat them to the prize by a few days? And vaccines are something we know ahead of time that we want. How do you do a prize for inventing something you don't know you want because it doesn't exist yet?
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        >Is there is a patent for the government to have to buy? There would be no patents. >Also, now there is only one buyer. You could also sell them to other governments, hospitals, people, etc. >what happens to the company that spent a billion dollars developing a working vaccine, only to have someone else beat them to the prize by a few days? It's possible for competing products to exist. Is yours cheaper or more effective than your competitors? If you wanted your money building a bad product then tough luck. >How do you do a prize for inventing something you don't know you want because it doesn't exist yet? How do you make a vaccine for a disease that you don't know about? You don't. I'm not sure why you are talking about prizes. Along with just selling them normally, you could also have an unlock system like kickstarter. If you raise $x then they will release the drug, or they could kickstart the entire process. Or instead of a kickstarter they could find investors.
js8 5y ago
I may be wrong, but I thought mRNA vaccine was only developed after key patents for it have expired. Whether patents help or hinder innovation seems to depend on how general the patented idea is. If it's really broadly applicable, they hinder it IMHO. I also don't see the patents benefiting researchers anymore, rather than some corporate middlemen.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  That patents expire is not a bug, it's a feature. Patents are an exchange for temporary protection. > I also don't see the patents benefiting researchers anymore, rather than some corporate middlemen. The researcher can't make money without some form of protection. You could spend 20 years building something and have it stolen by a huge company with no means to recoup your costs. Removing patents would immediately benefit the biggest players, entrenching existing monopolies.
  - js8 5y ago
    > You could spend 20 years building something and have it stolen by a huge company with no means to recoup your costs. Removing patents would immediately benefit the biggest players, entrenching existing monopolies. But why is the big company stealing it? Currently, it makes sense to steal it because the patent protections make it seem as if the idea itself is valuable (and can be a private property not commons). But in the world without the patents, what is valuable is the physical implementation, or rather, the coupling of both. It has been pointed out that you have many cases in free market economy with a similar problem. iPhone, for example, has very little innovation in it, it's just an idea executed well, based on past things like Palm Pilot for example. It seems to me, to have fair patents, you need to assume that value of everything can be broken to additive pieces - value of this idea, that idea, and then the value of the materials and energy from which it is built. But this is really hard, because things have value that also comes from combining these things. (In general, this is a problem with free market with respect to labor too, because you cannot really meaningfully determine what contribution of different types of labor is more valuable for the product to arise, but at the same time, the people need to be remunerated for the labor somehow.) On the other hand, in the world without patents, we assume that value of everything can be broken to little pieces (not so valuable by themselves) that are added by individuals in small amounts. So if all innovation is in the commons, no need to toil for 20 years to invent something. You build a little piece, add it to the pile, and everybody benefits because at the end of the day, you take lot more from the pile than you put in.
erik_seaberg 5y ago
At 63–75 years, programmable general-purpose computers and networks are so new that it’s still possible to claim the most obvious solution to many problems simply by being first to think about them. USPTO’s bar for what is “obvious” is skewed towards older subjects with a lot more written and indexed prior art for an examiner to cite, and doesn’t weigh likelihood of easy reinvention. And now there’s enough money at stake to trigger a land rush to fence off entire problems using solutions that just don’t merit protection.

wavesquid 5y ago

> I agree with this, but my key question is: why stop at software patents? Because the key argument is that math is not patentable. Software patents are relatively uniquely expressible amoung patents as mathematical conjectures.

johncolanduoni 5y ago
Why are software patents more expressible in mathematics than e.g. mechanical ones? The physical laws that govern a mechanical device are expressed mathematically.
throwawaygh 5y ago
I'm actually more ok with pure math patents than software patents. If someone constructively proves p=np then they deserve some term-limited profit taking. Getting a monopoly for being the first pos to mail some legalese to the right government office about clicking a button once to order something for delivery is both not math and not beneficial to society. The problem is software patents is not that software is math. The problem is software patents is that most patentable software is obvious to anyone without severe brain damage, and no one in the legal establishment has historically had any clue how to assess whether some idea in software is non-obvious.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
It is trivial to prove that all patents are theoretically equivalent. There is nothing special about algorithm or software patents in this regard.

jbay808 5y ago

There are still reclusive tinkering inventors today who need to make a living! It's very hard to otherwise compete with an established company who can copy your brilliant idea, scale, and distribute it way faster and more cheaply than you can.

SavantIdiot 5y ago
In 2013 it cost $33,000 to file a software patent: a startup I worked for was trying to file one. There's no way a starving tinkerer would be able to afford a patent. But assume s/he did afford one. Now comes the theft. Amazon steals it, and now our tinkerer needs to cough up millions of dollars to go after a one-trillion dollar company. It lingers in courts for decades. Even pro-bono legal advice would eventually give up. Futile. Patents exist only for companies to wage war for monopolies.
_vvhw 5y ago
You're assuming that once you have a patent, you're protected. When in fact, you still need capital to defend your patent in litigation. It's turtles all the way down.
- reedjosh 5y ago
  Beatiful comment.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  That's better than no protection at all. If you have something really innovative you might be able to get a loan to protect it, or sell or lease it to companies that would help defend it.
  - _vvhw 5y ago
    The reality is that in software, relative to the vast armada of the patent thicket that could be employed against you, a single patent affords little protection.

_vvhw 5y ago

"A weird throwback to some past society" rings true, especially insofar as the world now has a central knowledge repository—the Internet. Stopping software patents as a first step would set a precedent and provide a beachhead.

CalChris 5y ago

The compelling argument, rewarding innovation, is the same as it was in 1789, in the United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

burnished 5y ago
Well, the system doesn't seem to function that way, which makes it feel less compelling.
_vvhw 5y ago
Except that today, the promotion of progress of software is most advanced by open-source, and most damaged by patents.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  Above comment was addressing all patents, not software patents specifically. I think everyone here is in agreement that software patents are harmful and not what was intended by the patent system. Software is already protected by copyright.
  - _vvhw 5y ago
    I understood my comment to be providing a counter-example, an exception to the rule, in the context of "all patents".

jandrewrogers 5y ago

There is no principled reason to stop at software patents, they are literally theoretically equivalent to any other patent. Industry has already abandoned them in any case. In software, we’ve already returned to the state that patents were designed to avoid. Everything of value is treated as a trade secret. In several domains of computer science, virtually everything that is state-of-the-art is never published and is instead slathered in NDAs. And for good reason, patents on computer science have been effectively unenforceable for decades. So instead, no one publishes. This isn’t speculation, it is official policy in organizations I work with. The end state is that public computer science is mediocre compute science. I’m agnostic about it since it doesn’t affect me either way, but I recognize the suboptimality.

unityByFreedom 5y ago
> There is no principled reason to stop at software patents, they are literally theoretically equivalent to any other patent. They're not. Software is already protected by copyright.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  Software is not unique in this regard, all patentable subject matters work the same way. Abstract designs are patentable. A specific reduction to practice of that design is copyrightable. Both are independently licensed in practice regardless of the subject matter. It works this way in chemical engineering, for example, where I have some experience. You license the process and the implementation of the process independently, because they are not the same work; the patent in the former and the copyright in the latter.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    Sure, algorithms also receive patents in other fields. The point is that algorithms were not intended to be patented, not that algorithms are unique to software. We say "End Software Patents" because that's an easy way to see how the system has gone haywire.
5y ago

koonsolo 5y ago

If you need to invest millions of dollars for some pharmaceutical pill, you probably want to have a return on investment for that. The only way to really have that is your exclusive right to sell it, or license it out. If you can't have that right, you won't invest those millions of dollars. But software is not like that, because innovation is mainly driven by building on top of small things, not doing a crazy expensive research project. So industries are different, and I do see the benefit for some.