Starts off with a good normal corporate lesson on patents, then gets into the really really really true & good stuff. > "In all cases where I have had cause to

Starts off with a good normal corporate lesson on patents, then gets into the really really really true & good stuff. > "In all cases where I have had cause to read such documents, my first reaction has been revulsion, but then revulsion is my first reaction to waking up in the morning as well. The revulsion to patents stems from the fact that all the software patents to which I have been exposed have had several things in common: They lay claim to obvious ideas that any software practitioners might come across in their working careers, and they are overly broad, rarely novel, and seem to be written by an infinite number of monkeys attempting to bang out a version of Hamlet on ancient typewriters. > > All of which is to say they are not legitimate, but you cannot get up in a court of law and say that. Instead, you must spend hours meticulously deconstructing every claim. The claims are not written in either code or plain English, but in a legal code meant to protect the lawyers and their clients' intellectual property. While you might glean an understanding of what the patent intended from reading it, it is more likely you will just wonder why anyone bothered to write the patent at all." A system so unable to discern invention from just making a random claim is immoral, busted, broken, & de-legitemizes the idea & essence of government itself. Software patents are patents on ideas, and technical society has a moral obligation to end this oppressive ridiculous system. Recently NVidia ceo Huang got a patent for screenshare document opening, but in VR[1]. This ability to just add complications, to add a clause that makes a boring idea somehow "new", is vile. Treating VR like a brand new form of computing, when Huang is just using it as another screen, is to me a key example of a system utterly unable to understand the supposed property it is supposed to be regulating & discerning. Our intellectual property regime is legally, morally, logically broken. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/nvidia_huang_patent/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/nvidia_huang_patent/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29518454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29518454