4 ms·

> Perhaps it's time for the law to adjust to the point where the stakes for the troll are high enough to make it less appealing as a business? No, that's just

by jmyeet 5y ago

> Perhaps it's time for the law to adjust to the point where the stakes for the troll are high enough to make it less appealing as a business? No, that's just polishing the brass on the Titanic. Patents on software just shouldn't exist. At all. We already have established laws where you can't patent maths. An algorithm is just a function. It should be covered by the maths disqualifier. The fact that a smartphone could could contain and potentially violate literally thousands of patents is a complete anathema to the original intent of the system and it should be a huge red flag to the entire idea of software patents.

thechao 5y ago
If IP is real property, it should be taxed. The tax system I like for IP works for hire is this: each year you owe 1/4% * N (where N is the age of the IP) in taxes on the IP. Whatever you pay, the "public" (anyone/everyone else) can pay the balance to the USPTO (or LoC) to move that IP in to the public domain. Non-works-for-hire last for some fixed time, or until all the authors/inventors are dead, whichever comes first. A principal distinction between "works-for-hire" and "private works" is that a private owned work gives any of the authors/inventors unilateral rights to rescind contracts without contractual repercussion.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  This leads to the notion of being taxed for having a brain. Software patents shouldn't exist. The concept is patently absurd.
  - rhizome 5y ago
    >This leads to the notion of being taxed for having a brain Isn't this the same logic as used in the US against capital gains taxes, that a person is being punished for being successful?
    - cascom 5y ago
      Ehh - the more typical one is that the person already paid tax on it when they made the money the first time
  - thechao 5y ago
    I fucking hate software patents. The best part about taxing them, like this, is that SW patents become a major financial liability.
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      If we're doing something stupid, the correct course of action is to stop doing the stupid thing, not to refine the stupidity. Software patents are stupid.
  - tepitoperrito 5y ago
    I agree that software patents shouldn't exist. I think the taxation is on leveraging your brain to prevent others from using concepts you've learned to be useful. With some clever legalese it should even be possible to minimally harm individuals with brains while adding a non negligible cost to those who would (and are) abuse the system
- dpacmittal 5y ago
  That's how you get lead inventors dying mysteriously
  - gerdesj 5y ago
    Pb is poisonous. No mystery.
  - michaelbrave 5y ago
    Or best case the large company waits it out like RCA did for the TV with Philo Farnsworth
- zamalek 5y ago
  > If IP is real property, it should be taxed. As someone who thinks that the underlying concept of a patent is worthwhile (giving an independant inventor a bit of lead time for their invention against huge companies who could easily copy-cat), I seriously love that idea! Bonus point for somehow scaling the taxation based on real sales vs. lawsuits.
- jdsully 5y ago
  Income from patent licensing is already taxed. We don’t tax assets for existing except for land. This would be a form of wealth tax. That said I don’t agree with software patents as a concept.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  "If IP is real property, it should be taxed." Surely it is taxed already by profit related taxation eg corporation tax in the UK and I'm sure most other countries have a similar one. Also any sales tax or VAT will capture some loot back to your friendly local Exchequer or equivalent. OK let's get down to brass tacks: What you seem to be asking for is that if someone can be allowed exclusive rights to something then they should pay for that privilege in some way. That seems fair enough to me but you need to define what exclusivity really means and what sort of return should be sought by the authority involved. If we look a little deeper still: what on earth is IP? You also seem to advocate that if the IP is important enough then it can be purchased by the authority and that authority could release the IP to the commons or a form of commons. You give away where you are from with the abbreviation USPTO. So we are going to need an internationally agreed definition of IP, if we are even going to begin this discussion (which has already happened and is enshrined in ... some international agreement that I can't recall). Back in the day there was a somewhat backward colony belonging to a super power, located to the left of the Atlantic ocean. That colony grew, expanded and exploited its natural resources. That colony also had a pretty fast and loose approach to notions like copyright and patents. That colony only acknowledged their own local notion of patent and largely ignored any objections from the right hand side of the Atlantic for quite a while. OK, I'm taking the piss but not much. There's another modern equivalent to my "left pond country" these days - more than one. So, let's start again: What exactly is IP and how does it get enforced, paid for or protected or whatever?
  - thechao 5y ago
    In the US, IP rights are not a natural right. Instead, they are a limited monopoly granted by the people through their agent (the US government) to inventors and authors. The problem is that there are bad actors "patent trolls" (formally: NPEs: non-practicing entities) who use the court system to make money by suing real companies. There is no income that can be taxed by the government: there's only legal settlements. The problem is that the monopoly is "very cheap" — think of it as analogous to email being free? By adding a very modest tax to the IP we force NPEs to pony up (make a product) or drop the patent into the public domain. Notice that it is the owner who determines the IP's value.
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  This is insane, and we should just not tax property instead :)
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    If you're asking the government to protect your property from people encroaching on it, provide court systems to address disputes over it, or accept other government services to maintain it, you should be taxed on it.
    - rubyist5eva 5y ago
      I didn’t ask the government for anything.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Darn straight. IP values could be self-assessed: you tell the IRS (or equivalent) how much they're worth. However, if you're suing over a violation, that's the official value of the asset. You can't claim $100M in damages on an asset if you're only paying taxes on $30,000 worth of property.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- linuxhansl 5y ago
  This! I love this!! Either patents have a place and value, and they should be taxed (even when you are not using them to actually build anything). Or they shouldn't exist.
kajaktum 5y ago
What isn't math tho? A lawnmower is just an assemblage of laws of physics. In this case, software is just an assemblage of laws of boolean algebra or something.
- jmyeet 5y ago
  Why should the idea of a lawnmower be patented? There are already enough protections for IP. Design patents, trademarks and copyright (to some degree). Giving an inventor of something a monopoly on its creation should be extremely limited. Quite famously, the Wright Brothers original patent on the flight control mechanism successfully stifled any American company from making a plane, which became a real issue when the US entered World War One. The US quite famously had to buy planes from Europeans. This was such a huge problem that Congress passed laws to create a patent pool for aviation to stop this happening again. Patents are unnecessary and they stifle innovation in almost all cases.
  - dismalpedigree 5y ago
    This is interesting. Can you recommend a link to read more about this?
    - garaetjjte 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
- Forgeties79 5y ago
  I’m really scratching my head over this one not gonna lie. Are you being serious or being somewhat provocative with an example designed to take the logic to an illogical extreme?
  - kajaktum 5y ago
    > Patents on software just shouldn't exist. At all. > We already have established laws where you can't patent maths. > An algorithm is just a function. OP seems to suggest that software is "just math". Everything is "just math".
mistrial9 5y ago
the penitent of the 21st century.. zero income and rightous statements to the other miscreants.. MSFT took in nine figures this year on software patents alone? while they re-process GPL code and sell it? where are the market forces for individual authors? death by starvation with a tombstone that says "I was right" I am still looking for realistic responses here, two+ decades later
pitaj 5y ago
Patents shouldn't exist at all.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  That's going way too far.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  Patents have served society significantly. Without them, companies would develop new technology and keep it secret, forcing others to guess or reverse-engineer the process -- at which point they would likely keep it secret as well. So many governments give people a limited (usually <20 year) guaranteed monopoly on an idea in exchange for a full, public description of what the new idea is. If you look through the US patent archives, there are instructions for all sorts of manufacturing and construction technologies that would have never become public knowledge had patents not existed. The problem comes when a company successfully patents an idea that's already publicly known, or an idea that is strictly mathematical or abstract enough to be used against others but not concrete enough to be turned into a successful product.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    They still keep it secret though. The patent system didn't allow us to work out how all the proprietary microcontrollers and SoCs work so we have projects like the one trying to reverse engineer the M1. And the publish this reverse engineering for free without the help of the patent system. Half of the patents are on absolutely trivial stuff that reverse engineering means looking at it for 1 minute.
    - TimTheTinker 5y ago
      Early US patents weren't like this. The major problems we're dealing with today didn't appear until later.
    - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
      This is basically the entire raison d'être for GPLv3. It doesn't matter much if the source code is available, or if the specification is available, if you can't actually write code to use it.
riazrizvi 5y ago
Algorithms are not patentable. Alice v. CLS Bank Int’l, Supreme Court 2014, holds that abstract ideas "merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention.” But at the same time, just because a patent includes an algorithm, it is not necessarily invalidated.
- puffoflogic 5y ago
  Alice only matters if you can afford to get your case before SCOTUS (i.e., both money and political influence). The federal circuit has demonstrated they have no problem whatsoever with ignoring Alice and thumbing their nose at SCOTUS.
- activitypea 5y ago
  tell that to John Carmack
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Nearly all of those histories about patent trolling are for code running in a general purpose computer, with your standard I/O peripherals and the only effect on the real world being changing pixels on a screen. AFAIK those patents are illegal on every single country. But it doesn't stop honest people from losing fortunes over them.
tepitoperrito 5y ago
I need to investigate this "maths disqualifier" because it completely blows my mind that companies are actively patenting the application of statistical machine learning models to their domain. For example Xometry has successfully patented "METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR MACHINE LEARNING PREDICTIONS OF MANUFACTURING PROCESSES"[0]. To me there is literally nothing novel here, they are just describing the results of using an existing stats tool in the "manufacturing" domain, preventing other companies from sharing how they do stuff like this for fear of being sued. I read that patent as saying if you work for a CNC machine shop you can't run random forest on a CSV of your own data unless you get granted a license to by a potential competitor. [0] https://patents.justia.com/assignee/xometry-inc https://patents.justia.com/assignee/xometry-inc edit:fixed link
- extropy 5y ago
  Currently there exists a widely used "being used with hardware" hoophole that allows taking pure maths and adding a bit of hardware in there "a memory unit" "a processing unit" "I/O unit" and have a valid patent.
  - TimTheTinker 5y ago
    Just like "on a computer", which allowed many previously unpatentable ideas to be patented (even potentially in previously expired patents).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

by jmyeet 5y ago

thechao 5y ago

If IP is real property, it should be taxed. The tax system I like for IP works for hire is this: each year you owe 1/4% * N (where N is the age of the IP) in taxes on the IP. Whatever you pay, the "public" (anyone/everyone else) can pay the balance to the USPTO (or LoC) to move that IP in to the public domain. Non-works-for-hire last for some fixed time, or until all the authors/inventors are dead, whichever comes first. A principal distinction between "works-for-hire" and "private works" is that a private owned work gives any of the authors/inventors unilateral rights to rescind contracts without contractual repercussion.

robbedpeter 5y ago
This leads to the notion of being taxed for having a brain. Software patents shouldn't exist. The concept is patently absurd.
- rhizome 5y ago
  >This leads to the notion of being taxed for having a brain Isn't this the same logic as used in the US against capital gains taxes, that a person is being punished for being successful?
  - cascom 5y ago
    Ehh - the more typical one is that the person already paid tax on it when they made the money the first time
- thechao 5y ago
  I fucking hate software patents. The best part about taxing them, like this, is that SW patents become a major financial liability.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    If we're doing something stupid, the correct course of action is to stop doing the stupid thing, not to refine the stupidity. Software patents are stupid.
- tepitoperrito 5y ago
  I agree that software patents shouldn't exist. I think the taxation is on leveraging your brain to prevent others from using concepts you've learned to be useful. With some clever legalese it should even be possible to minimally harm individuals with brains while adding a non negligible cost to those who would (and are) abuse the system
dpacmittal 5y ago
That's how you get lead inventors dying mysteriously
- gerdesj 5y ago
  Pb is poisonous. No mystery.
- michaelbrave 5y ago
  Or best case the large company waits it out like RCA did for the TV with Philo Farnsworth
zamalek 5y ago
> If IP is real property, it should be taxed. As someone who thinks that the underlying concept of a patent is worthwhile (giving an independant inventor a bit of lead time for their invention against huge companies who could easily copy-cat), I seriously love that idea! Bonus point for somehow scaling the taxation based on real sales vs. lawsuits.
jdsully 5y ago
Income from patent licensing is already taxed. We don’t tax assets for existing except for land. This would be a form of wealth tax. That said I don’t agree with software patents as a concept.
gerdesj 5y ago
"If IP is real property, it should be taxed." Surely it is taxed already by profit related taxation eg corporation tax in the UK and I'm sure most other countries have a similar one. Also any sales tax or VAT will capture some loot back to your friendly local Exchequer or equivalent. OK let's get down to brass tacks: What you seem to be asking for is that if someone can be allowed exclusive rights to something then they should pay for that privilege in some way. That seems fair enough to me but you need to define what exclusivity really means and what sort of return should be sought by the authority involved. If we look a little deeper still: what on earth is IP? You also seem to advocate that if the IP is important enough then it can be purchased by the authority and that authority could release the IP to the commons or a form of commons. You give away where you are from with the abbreviation USPTO. So we are going to need an internationally agreed definition of IP, if we are even going to begin this discussion (which has already happened and is enshrined in ... some international agreement that I can't recall). Back in the day there was a somewhat backward colony belonging to a super power, located to the left of the Atlantic ocean. That colony grew, expanded and exploited its natural resources. That colony also had a pretty fast and loose approach to notions like copyright and patents. That colony only acknowledged their own local notion of patent and largely ignored any objections from the right hand side of the Atlantic for quite a while. OK, I'm taking the piss but not much. There's another modern equivalent to my "left pond country" these days - more than one. So, let's start again: What exactly is IP and how does it get enforced, paid for or protected or whatever?
- thechao 5y ago
  In the US, IP rights are not a natural right. Instead, they are a limited monopoly granted by the people through their agent (the US government) to inventors and authors. The problem is that there are bad actors "patent trolls" (formally: NPEs: non-practicing entities) who use the court system to make money by suing real companies. There is no income that can be taxed by the government: there's only legal settlements. The problem is that the monopoly is "very cheap" — think of it as analogous to email being free? By adding a very modest tax to the IP we force NPEs to pony up (make a product) or drop the patent into the public domain. Notice that it is the owner who determines the IP's value.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
This is insane, and we should just not tax property instead :)
- kstrauser 5y ago
  If you're asking the government to protect your property from people encroaching on it, provide court systems to address disputes over it, or accept other government services to maintain it, you should be taxed on it.
  - rubyist5eva 5y ago
    I didn’t ask the government for anything.
kstrauser 5y ago
Darn straight. IP values could be self-assessed: you tell the IRS (or equivalent) how much they're worth. However, if you're suing over a violation, that's the official value of the asset. You can't claim $100M in damages on an asset if you're only paying taxes on $30,000 worth of property.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
linuxhansl 5y ago
This! I love this!! Either patents have a place and value, and they should be taxed (even when you are not using them to actually build anything). Or they shouldn't exist.

kajaktum 5y ago

What isn't math tho? A lawnmower is just an assemblage of laws of physics. In this case, software is just an assemblage of laws of boolean algebra or something.

jmyeet 5y ago
Why should the idea of a lawnmower be patented? There are already enough protections for IP. Design patents, trademarks and copyright (to some degree). Giving an inventor of something a monopoly on its creation should be extremely limited. Quite famously, the Wright Brothers original patent on the flight control mechanism successfully stifled any American company from making a plane, which became a real issue when the US entered World War One. The US quite famously had to buy planes from Europeans. This was such a huge problem that Congress passed laws to create a patent pool for aviation to stop this happening again. Patents are unnecessary and they stifle innovation in almost all cases.
- dismalpedigree 5y ago
  This is interesting. Can you recommend a link to read more about this?
  - garaetjjte 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
Forgeties79 5y ago
I’m really scratching my head over this one not gonna lie. Are you being serious or being somewhat provocative with an example designed to take the logic to an illogical extreme?
- kajaktum 5y ago
  > Patents on software just shouldn't exist. At all. > We already have established laws where you can't patent maths. > An algorithm is just a function. OP seems to suggest that software is "just math". Everything is "just math".

mistrial9 5y ago

the penitent of the 21st century.. zero income and rightous statements to the other miscreants.. MSFT took in nine figures this year on software patents alone? while they re-process GPL code and sell it? where are the market forces for individual authors? death by starvation with a tombstone that says "I was right" I am still looking for realistic responses here, two+ decades later

pitaj 5y ago

Patents shouldn't exist at all.

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
That's going way too far.
TimTheTinker 5y ago
Patents have served society significantly. Without them, companies would develop new technology and keep it secret, forcing others to guess or reverse-engineer the process -- at which point they would likely keep it secret as well. So many governments give people a limited (usually <20 year) guaranteed monopoly on an idea in exchange for a full, public description of what the new idea is. If you look through the US patent archives, there are instructions for all sorts of manufacturing and construction technologies that would have never become public knowledge had patents not existed. The problem comes when a company successfully patents an idea that's already publicly known, or an idea that is strictly mathematical or abstract enough to be used against others but not concrete enough to be turned into a successful product.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  They still keep it secret though. The patent system didn't allow us to work out how all the proprietary microcontrollers and SoCs work so we have projects like the one trying to reverse engineer the M1. And the publish this reverse engineering for free without the help of the patent system. Half of the patents are on absolutely trivial stuff that reverse engineering means looking at it for 1 minute.
  - TimTheTinker 5y ago
    Early US patents weren't like this. The major problems we're dealing with today didn't appear until later.
  - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
    This is basically the entire raison d'être for GPLv3. It doesn't matter much if the source code is available, or if the specification is available, if you can't actually write code to use it.

riazrizvi 5y ago

Algorithms are not patentable. Alice v. CLS Bank Int’l, Supreme Court 2014, holds that abstract ideas "merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention.” But at the same time, just because a patent includes an algorithm, it is not necessarily invalidated.

puffoflogic 5y ago
Alice only matters if you can afford to get your case before SCOTUS (i.e., both money and political influence). The federal circuit has demonstrated they have no problem whatsoever with ignoring Alice and thumbing their nose at SCOTUS.
activitypea 5y ago
tell that to John Carmack
marcosdumay 5y ago
Nearly all of those histories about patent trolling are for code running in a general purpose computer, with your standard I/O peripherals and the only effect on the real world being changing pixels on a screen. AFAIK those patents are illegal on every single country. But it doesn't stop honest people from losing fortunes over them.

tepitoperrito 5y ago

I need to investigate this "maths disqualifier" because it completely blows my mind that companies are actively patenting the application of statistical machine learning models to their domain. For example Xometry has successfully patented "METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR MACHINE LEARNING PREDICTIONS OF MANUFACTURING PROCESSES"[0]. To me there is literally nothing novel here, they are just describing the results of using an existing stats tool in the "manufacturing" domain, preventing other companies from sharing how they do stuff like this for fear of being sued. I read that patent as saying if you work for a CNC machine shop you can't run random forest on a CSV of your own data unless you get granted a license to by a potential competitor. [0] https://patents.justia.com/assignee/xometry-inc https://patents.justia.com/assignee/xometry-inc edit:fixed link

extropy 5y ago
Currently there exists a widely used "being used with hardware" hoophole that allows taking pure maths and adding a bit of hardware in there "a memory unit" "a processing unit" "I/O unit" and have a valid patent.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  Just like "on a computer", which allowed many previously unpatentable ideas to be patented (even potentially in previously expired patents).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]