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There is no principled reason to stop at software patents, they are literally theoretically equivalent to any other patent. Industry has already abandoned them

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.
technol0gic 5y ago
you might say theyre...patently unenforceable

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.

technol0gic 5y ago

you might say theyre...patently unenforceable