5 ms·
US Senate to Revive Software Patents with PERA Bill Vote on Thursday
- zb3 2y agoI'd like to patent stupidity..
- BoxOfRain 2y agoI'm afraid there's limitless prior art that would prevent this patent from being granted.
- MattPalmer1086 2y agoI'm afraid there's too much prior art for that ;)
- FredPret 2y ago> "The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140, would dismantle vital safeguards that prohibit software patents on overly broad concepts" I'm submitting a patent for showing colors on the internet
- metalman 2y agoas long as you start with hooloovoo the rest will fall right in place The super-intelligent shade of blue, or more properly, Hooloovoo, is exactly what it says on the tin. Whether the creature is intelligent in general or just compared to other, lesser shades of blue is left ambiguous. It can: Refract in a prism (for special occasions). Turn purple when disgruntled about something. Meaningfully observe and interact with its surroundings, or it wouldn't be part of greater galactic society. So we're looking at some kind of energy creature that behaves like light, and has to be blue for some reason. Though there isn't much literal anatomy to speak of, I would like to know if you could possibly build a creature out of material that can pass through glass, and have it be both intelligent and equipped with senses.
- swayvil 2y agoIf light could interact with light then the rest would be a matter of how you arrange it. Can light interact with light?
- whatshisface 2y agoYes, the electron box Feynman diagram contributes a self-interaction term to Maxwell's equations scaled to the fine structure constant to the fourth power. You can find it in the introduction to Griffiths. I believe it has been experimentally detected.
- swayvil 2y agoThen a super-intelligent shade of blue seems inevitable. Doubly so, given how fast light moves.
- FredPret 2y agoI saw, but have not yet read, a Greg Egan novel where light has a mass. That'd be interesting
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- primer42 2y agoI was feeling optimistic about software patents after the cloudflare ruling. That was a mistake
- mrandish 2y ago> I was feeling optimistic about software patents after the cloudflare ruling. And at the same time the patent lawyer and troll lobby was feeling panicked and started spreading money around. Now we have the lame duck congressional period and we're seeing the results of their money.
- freejazz 2y agoWhy? This is such a myopic perspective on patent law that doesn't even really deal with any actual issues in the jurisprudence. If anything it's more about the politics of dealing with patent trolls.
- pieresqi 2y ago[dead]
- FromTheSteppe 2y agoBuckle up for the next 4 years brother.
- coding123 2y agoPatents should only be for things, not software or methods.
- marssaxman 2y agoAfter seeing what a mess it makes to allow patents on software, I feel skeptical that patents on things are a good idea, either.
- mrandish 2y agoI was just thinking the same thing. I used to just sort of accept that patents were a reasonable and necessary thing. Then after being in the actual business of software for a while as a startup entrepreneur and seeing the complete mess spurious patent claims cause, how patents are so often deployed by mega-corps to defend against startups, and the huge number of grifters the patent "industry" attracts, it's made me more open to the idea that just maybe the whole idea of patents has more negatives than positives, at least in current times. Maybe big pharma and biotech should realize that large scale patent abuse is making people question the whole thing and start lobbying against software patents.
- tivert 2y ago>> After seeing what a mess it makes to allow patents on software, I feel skeptical that patents on things are a good idea, either. > I was just thinking the same thing. I used to just sort of accept that patents were a reasonable and necessary thing. Then after being in the actual business of software for a while as a startup entrepreneur and seeing the complete mess spurious patent claims cause, how patents are so often deployed by mega-corps to defend against startups, and the huge number of grifters the patent "industry" attracts, it's made me more open to the idea that just maybe the whole idea of patents is now more trouble than it's worth. IMHO, that's taking it too far. IP is a solution that solved certain problems; but it's been so effective that those original problems are so alien that people overreact to the imperfections of the solution in extreme ways (like, "let's abolish it all").
- duringmath 2y agoAt least wait till the new administration is in place before passing this damaging crap.
- zoobab 2y agoI guess the tactic is to pass it before the new Trump administration is in power.
- ronsor 2y agoDoes this mean the Trump administration is for or against software patents?
- zoobab 2y agoTrump does not have a good track record with the appointment of Iancu: https://techrights.org/o/2017/08/31/iancu-nomination-and-software-patents/ https://techrights.org/o/2017/08/31/iancu-nomination-and-sof... Let's hope that with Musk it's gonna be different, but I have some doubts.
- xp84 2y agoYeah maybe Musk can clue him in that they’re stupid. Hopefully he doesn’t flip to the pro side though now that he’s big enough to be the bully with the patents.
- caslon 2y agoIt was proposed by Thom Tillis, a Republican who has previously defended Donald Trump: https://www.tillis.senate.gov/2023/3/tillis-statement-on-the-indictment-of-former-president-trump https://www.tillis.senate.gov/2023/3/tillis-statement-on-the...
- trustinmenowpls 2y agoThis is the current Democrat controlled senate attempting to pass this, its especially odd considering they're a lame duck senate
- greyface- 2y agohttps://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/2140/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/214...
- kencausey 2y agoedit: my mistake, this is not the senate More recent: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9474 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9474
- leereeves 2y agoIs that this bill? https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/2140/titles https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/214... Looks pretty dead. Only 1 cosponsor and no action taken in a year.
- kencausey 2y agoedit: my mistake, this is not the senate Perhaps this one: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9474 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9474
- tivert 2y ago> edit: my mistake, this is not the senate > Perhaps this one: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9474 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9474 The OP/EFF says it's a Senate committee that's about to vote on "The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140." I don't know tons about the government, but you linked a House bill that looks like it's still in a House committee, and I don't think a Senate committee would be talking about something like that. Edit: I found this: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-activity/hearings/11/14/2024/executive-business-meeting https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-activity/hearings... It's an agenda for a Judiciary Committee meeting on Thursday that lists "S. 2140, Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (Tillis, Coons)."
- zoobab 2y agoEFF mentions "UPDATE: This vote has been set for this Thursday, November 14, 2024." I don't know where they got the information, as it is not mentioned in the webpage: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/2140/all-actions https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/214...
- Overtonwindow 2y agoIt’s dead. Republicans will not allow democrats to get a lame duck win, and vice versa, and I don’t see a compromise anywhere.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoCampaign link: https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-we-can-t-afford-more-bad-patents https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-we-can-t-afford-mor... (more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39763104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39763104)
- abeppu 2y agoI think I may be in the minority for believing that patents for software could in some cases be reasonable, but the main problem is that the current system has no reasonable mechanism for establishing 'obviousness'. Closely related, especially for software the system needs to consider when two mechanism are equivalent. In particular, I think: - we should convene actual groups of "persons having ordinary skill in the art", who are not shown the patent application, who are presented with problems, and asked to describe a range of viable solutions. - we should also use groups of such persons to judge whether two solutions to a problem (at least one of which comes from a patent application) are not meaningfully different. Given these inputs, I think it would become much more expensive to determine that something is genuinely inventive (and applicants should bear that cost), but it should be possible to weed out a lot of obvious or overly-broad applications. If someone in the field who thinks about this for k weeks and arrives at "the same" answer, it wasn't that novel. I think it should also be possible for a group of "persons having ordinary skill in the art" to judge that an application is seeking something overly broad and that a PHOSITA should know that something is obvious, and incur some extra cost to the applicant. However, if we could convince ourselves that stuff being protected was genuinely inventive, though we might be in a very different world, it doesn't seem crazy to me that e.g. a bunch of the work in ML research in the past decade should have been patentable because it wasn't obvious. It was repeatedly surprising! Of course, the current frenzy of activity might not be possible if it weren't for the spirit of openness that the field is adapted to. If the transformer was patent protected, who knows where we'd be. But it's really difficult to argue that concepts like the transformer architecture, or diffusion models or even something older like CNNs were "obvious" when experts, people in active research were surprised when they first arrived on the scene with the performance they had. And the don't seem obviously less worthy of protection than any of a range of physical inventions.
- whatshisface 2y agoAbout 300k patents are granted per year. There are not enough resources available to do it the right way.
- abeppu 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- alistairSH 2y agoMuch better link. The original link is just a reference to this... https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-we-can-t-afford-more-bad-patents https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-we-can-t-afford-mor... These are committee votes, not the whole Senate.
- samsartor 2y agoI think I'd be willing to accept software patents if the patent was required to include complete source code. Basically, if it acted as delayed open source. Ostensibly the patent system exists to incentivize open publishing of new technologies, but it isn't worth squat if full of vague language written by lawyers.
- irq-1 2y agoSo we'll have software patents with brainfuck code. https://brainfuck.org/ https://brainfuck.org/
- jfengel 2y agoProblematic software patents are rarely about the source code. It's not too hard to implement, but too easy. Anybody can do it, and there was no reason to give a patent in the first place. That said... it would at least guarantee that you put in the minimum effort to actually do it, rather than just sitting on the idea and waiting for somebody to run afoul of your patent. And maybe we'll get a few patent examiners saying, "Explain again how a five-line chunk of code is patent-worthy?"
- freejazz 2y agoNot surprised about the complete lack of substantive discussion of the bill and 'abstract' jurisprudence, which is currently horrendous and unnavigable. It's disingenuous to suggest this bill only addresses software patents when it's been highly controversial that courts have been applying Alice in the context of physical inventions.
- zoobab 2y agoBTW the Slashdot story has been moved here: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/12/1724203/us-senate-to-revive-software-patents-with-pera-bill-vote-on-thursday https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/12/1724203/us-senate-t...
- nojvek 2y agoUS Senate likely gonna do bidding for their corporate donors. It takes ~$1B to elect a president and millions for many of senators and congress(wo)men. US congress's median age is 58.8 and median wealth is about a million dollars. Many are career politicians who are far removed from the lives of median Americans. Remains to be seen what the Trump administration passes that helps the middle and lower class.