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Software patents are mostly garbage and unneeded. And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not

Software patents are mostly garbage and unneeded. And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible). Show me one useful software patent that (a) is not "obvious to one skilled in the art", and (b) benefits society by being granted a monopoly. Just one! Software rarely requires expensive research that would be worth protecting. Rather than enabling a fair market, this takes fairness out of the market. Software patents are like getting a patent on "Murder story with final revelation of who did it." Maybe add one or two features, like a "detective with hat", etc. In one fell swoop you would be able to own most murder mysteries. Software (like books, stories, art, etc) is better handled by Copyright law. May the one who actually has a better product win! Sorry for the rant.

JohnFen 11mo ago
I agree with your rant. I have a similar one. I personally think that software should mostly just not be patentable at all, since (among others) these things are not patentable according to US patent law: scientific discoveries, mathematical methods, aesthetic creations, and rules or methods for performing mental acts.
- bandofthehawk 11mo ago
  In addition, software is also copyrightable, which makes much more sense than patents for protecting unauthorized use. IMO, patents for software should be mostly eliminated, and even copyright terms should be much shorter.
  - observationist 11mo ago
    5 years full copyright, 5 years noncommercial unrestricted fair use with mandatory attribution, then straight to public domain. Berne Convention be damned, and multigenerational copyrights can go straight to hell as well. Software patents are stupid, and even more so with AI soon to be able to take arbitrary compiled code and produce readable, well composed source in a target language with documentation and optimizations. Studios and platforms and funds and giant corporations that "own" terabytes of IP are a cancer. We're going to have to fix copyright. Until then, pirate everything.
fsckboy 11mo ago
>Show me one useful software patent that ... (b) benefits society by being granted a monopoly. Just one! that's a bullshit criterion, and nothing about what you said applies to software in particular. it's generally agreed that monopolies are bad for society, but patents only grant a temporary monopoly to reward innovation, in exchange for which society gets disclosure (at the time patent systems were promulgated, many ideas died with their inventors as trade secrets) and encourages more R&D by creating a system for payoff.
- bandofthehawk 11mo ago
  The only "system for payoff" I've seen with software patents is patent trolls. Are there cases of software inventors being rewarded for their software more fairly because they had a patent?
  - oriolid 11mo ago
    I think every every company I've worked at that had R&D had some kind of reward system for patents. Yes, most of the software patents were nonsense but those who have their names on it still did get paid.
    - waterhouse 11mo ago
      Guessing those rewards are in the hundreds of dollars, probably a fraction of the engineer salary that went into the technical work.
- Dylan16807 11mo ago
  It's not bullshit. You said it yourself, the benefits are supposed to be disclosure and encouraging R&D. But disclosure is rarely an issue with software, and patents are bad at properly disclosing software details in the first place. And in software there's already a huge motivation to do R&D, while patents are more likely to block useful work than in most fields. Even if I think of highly optimization-motivated fields like video encoding, patents slow down innovation more than they accelerate it. So can you name some software patents where those motivating factors actually worked? It's a fair question.
yyurgenson 11mo ago
RSA
- Dylan16807 11mo ago
  What was the societal benefit of putting 20 years of monopoly on that algorithm? I don't think potential profit was a big motivator in that research work. And that patent got invalidated in most of the world anyway.
  - Aloisius 11mo ago
    The societal benefit was having RSA publicly described. MIT isn't a charity.
    - Dylan16807 11mo ago
      You think they were just going to sit on that and do nothing if they couldn't get a patent? Or that they'd turn it into a product without the underlying math being revealed right away? I don't believe either of those for a second.
      - Aloisius 11mo ago
        There is a rather long history of the workings of cryptography products kept secret, so yes, it is entirely possible that the underlying math would have been kept as a trade secret. It is also possible that it would have never been created in the first place because resources were allocated to other patentable inventions. Of course, in the case of RSA, a similar algorithm was developed separately by the British government and kept secret for 24 years.
        Dylan16807 11mo ago
        Kept secret by the government is very different from kept secret in a product anyone can buy and encrypt arbitrary messages with. What are some message-sending cryptography products where people didn't know how the encryption worked for a long time? > It is also possible that it would have never been created in the first place because resources were allocated to other patentable inventions. Given the history of RSA in particular, I'm extremely skeptical of that.
josefritzishere 11mo ago
Gold star comment.
mring33621 11mo ago
I agree that software patents are generally garbage and hurt innovation. Unfortunately, there are probably many people here on HN that make a living off software patents.
smj-edison 11mo ago
What would you think about still having software patents, but having them expire in 2-5 years? I feel like the concept of a patent is still a good one, but the time it takes to go from zero to a product is drastically lower with computer programming. The patent length should reflect that.
- OgAstorga 11mo ago
  How would you feel about patenting language? I.e. If you speak with certain words or certain patterns then you have to pay a royalty (only for 2 to 5 years).
  - smj-edison 11mo ago
    First off, I think that's a false equivalency, as patenting is about ideas (in a platonic sense), not about instances of ideas (which is what copyrighting is). Secondly, we already have that in limited forms with trademarks and copyrights. Thirdly, I think the concept of intellectual property is one of the most brilliant social innovations in the past 500 years, as it aligns incentives to innovate (why would I innovate if someone will just steal my work?).
    - trhway 11mo ago
      >it aligns incentives to innovate (why would I innovate if someone will just steal my work?) it was true 200 years ago. It stopped being true about 100+ years ago. Whether somebody innovates or not became unimportant, as a bunch of other people would still innovate the same thing. Just look at airplanes innovation back then - multiple people were doing it simultaneously, and the fact that Wright brothers got patent actually slowed down airplane innovation in US for couple of decades after that.
      - smj-edison 11mo ago
        Let me see if I understand your argument correctly: 1. Before 1900, when someone came up with an idea, it was unlikely that someone else came up with that idea. 2. Because only one person had that idea, patenting protected their idea from being stolen. 3. After 1900, however, multiple people would have the same idea, but only one person could win. 4. Because only one person could win, it became a net loss to all the others, as they could no longer innovate. 4a. One example of this is the wright brothers. Is that correct? If so: 1/2. I believe that people have been coming up with the same ideas simultaneously for a long time. Leibniz and Newton comes to mind, for example. 3/4. But would any of them have been able to get investments into their projects if they couldn't patent it and then reap the benefits?
greg_w 11mo ago
One cannot (in the US) get a patent for software itself. This was settled a while ago. There needs to be more in the claims. In fact, the patent discussed here does not claim continued fractions and nobody would be in danger using them even if the patent issued as is (which is not certain, because the patent claims rather trivial modification of a classic neural network architecture, which should be brought up by the examiner as obvious). Patents are propelling the society when they work as intended. They made XIX century and at least good chunk of XX century. Without patents, people fall back to copying each other, because it is much easier to copy than to innovate.
- Retric 11mo ago
  Patents go way back possibly as far as 500 BC, with other examples dating to 1331 etc, yet the introduction didn’t kick off any great wave of progress. Instead a wide range of factors like better plants feeding both population growth and an ever larger percentage of society could do something other than grow food where the real root causes here. Devoting land and labor to cotton for example requires a surplus of food.
  - greg_w 11mo ago
    I would rather call the old iterations proto-patents. It took a while to get to a system where anyone can claim an invention as property and make it protected from "borrowing without permission" by law.
    - Retric 11mo ago
      A narrower definition is fine, but now you need to define why those specific differences were important and the timeframe + geographic limitation on those specific differences must match what you’re describing. In other words on paper patents worked like you described in some places well before things kicked off, but the rule of law was more fluid. So you could make the argument that progress depended on some specific level of integrity in the legal system, but that’s now a very arbitrary line which looks like a true Scotsman argument when you try and pin down a specific date for a transition. Similarly you run into issues of which countries what what levels of innovation etc.
dpark 11mo ago
A huge chunk of software patents are also “well known thing, but with software”. Looking at you, Sonos. Even if these things were novel at one point, doing them again in software is not novel.
thwarted 11mo ago
> IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on Generalized Continued Fractions and their Series Transformations and was awarded a Patent A good portion of the perception and use around patents is the word "awarded", which implies that there was some evaluation, either objective or subjective, by an expert in the topic and that the invention met some high level of… something that made it worthy of being "awarded" for the "work" that it took to invent. Most parents are not evaluated like that today, and software patents specifically probably never have been.
- trhway 11mo ago
  >> IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on ... we've been through several such cycles - "...on computer", "... on Internet", and now " ... with AI" . (of course i have several, including couple with AI, and i'm against patents, especially software ones)
pinkmuffinere 11mo ago
> Software patents are mostly garbage and unneeded. And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible) I want to know about these patents that you want your name off of! What were they for? Why do you want your name removed? This is the opening to a great story, please tell!
aeonik 11mo ago
I'd be super cool with software patents if they actually open source the software and had actual usable modules included with the patent. otherwise I agree, copyright is the way to go.
- CamperBob2 11mo ago
  I wouldn't. Many if not most patents are awarded to the first person to encounter a problem and apply a (likely obvious) solution, not the first person to solve a longstanding problem at great expense after many others have tried and failed. And even if that weren't the case, nobody needs to be given exclusive rights to math. In principle the law says as much, but in fact that's never been an obstacle.
  - kingstnap 11mo ago
    My professor once mentioned how easy it is to be novel and interesting; Just have the interesting part be not novel and the novel part be not interesting!
  - aeonik 11mo ago
    You make good points, I think of it like this, Patents were meant to be for the public good, aka disclosure. In modern software terms, to me, that means any software patent should be open sources, and they aren't, which is a worst of all worlds sort of thing.
wahern 11mo ago
> And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible). I was originally named on a patent filing (along with the CTO), but left the company and apparently it was too much effort to communicate with me so they just swapped my name for another engineer. But it was literally my idea (in as much as any such software patent is one person's idea). I was literally given a problem to solve and came back with two alternative solutions to implement, without conferring with anyone else at the company or elsewhere. The only input from anyone else in the company was selecting one of the two options, which I then fully implemented entirely myself. Not only have I always disliked software patents on principle, I was also cheated out on having a patent to put on my resume. (Heck, it was hardly my best idea and for all I know the company patented a bunch of my other work without citing me.) Which is pretty much their only value--as social currency for hiring or highly specious pretend asset security for VC investments. Technically, removing my name from the filing invalidated the patent, but it's all just a ridiculous shell game.

JohnFen 11mo ago

I agree with your rant. I have a similar one. I personally think that software should mostly just not be patentable at all, since (among others) these things are not patentable according to US patent law: scientific discoveries, mathematical methods, aesthetic creations, and rules or methods for performing mental acts.

bandofthehawk 11mo ago
In addition, software is also copyrightable, which makes much more sense than patents for protecting unauthorized use. IMO, patents for software should be mostly eliminated, and even copyright terms should be much shorter.
- observationist 11mo ago
  5 years full copyright, 5 years noncommercial unrestricted fair use with mandatory attribution, then straight to public domain. Berne Convention be damned, and multigenerational copyrights can go straight to hell as well. Software patents are stupid, and even more so with AI soon to be able to take arbitrary compiled code and produce readable, well composed source in a target language with documentation and optimizations. Studios and platforms and funds and giant corporations that "own" terabytes of IP are a cancer. We're going to have to fix copyright. Until then, pirate everything.

fsckboy 11mo ago

>Show me one useful software patent that ... (b) benefits society by being granted a monopoly. Just one! that's a bullshit criterion, and nothing about what you said applies to software in particular. it's generally agreed that monopolies are bad for society, but patents only grant a temporary monopoly to reward innovation, in exchange for which society gets disclosure (at the time patent systems were promulgated, many ideas died with their inventors as trade secrets) and encourages more R&D by creating a system for payoff.

bandofthehawk 11mo ago
The only "system for payoff" I've seen with software patents is patent trolls. Are there cases of software inventors being rewarded for their software more fairly because they had a patent?
- oriolid 11mo ago
  I think every every company I've worked at that had R&D had some kind of reward system for patents. Yes, most of the software patents were nonsense but those who have their names on it still did get paid.
  - waterhouse 11mo ago
    Guessing those rewards are in the hundreds of dollars, probably a fraction of the engineer salary that went into the technical work.
Dylan16807 11mo ago
It's not bullshit. You said it yourself, the benefits are supposed to be disclosure and encouraging R&D. But disclosure is rarely an issue with software, and patents are bad at properly disclosing software details in the first place. And in software there's already a huge motivation to do R&D, while patents are more likely to block useful work than in most fields. Even if I think of highly optimization-motivated fields like video encoding, patents slow down innovation more than they accelerate it. So can you name some software patents where those motivating factors actually worked? It's a fair question.

yyurgenson 11mo ago

RSA

Dylan16807 11mo ago
What was the societal benefit of putting 20 years of monopoly on that algorithm? I don't think potential profit was a big motivator in that research work. And that patent got invalidated in most of the world anyway.
- Aloisius 11mo ago
  The societal benefit was having RSA publicly described. MIT isn't a charity.
  - Dylan16807 11mo ago
    You think they were just going to sit on that and do nothing if they couldn't get a patent? Or that they'd turn it into a product without the underlying math being revealed right away? I don't believe either of those for a second.
    - Aloisius 11mo ago
      There is a rather long history of the workings of cryptography products kept secret, so yes, it is entirely possible that the underlying math would have been kept as a trade secret. It is also possible that it would have never been created in the first place because resources were allocated to other patentable inventions. Of course, in the case of RSA, a similar algorithm was developed separately by the British government and kept secret for 24 years.
      - Dylan16807 11mo ago
        Kept secret by the government is very different from kept secret in a product anyone can buy and encrypt arbitrary messages with. What are some message-sending cryptography products where people didn't know how the encryption worked for a long time? > It is also possible that it would have never been created in the first place because resources were allocated to other patentable inventions. Given the history of RSA in particular, I'm extremely skeptical of that.

josefritzishere 11mo ago

Gold star comment.

mring33621 11mo ago

I agree that software patents are generally garbage and hurt innovation. Unfortunately, there are probably many people here on HN that make a living off software patents.

smj-edison 11mo ago

What would you think about still having software patents, but having them expire in 2-5 years? I feel like the concept of a patent is still a good one, but the time it takes to go from zero to a product is drastically lower with computer programming. The patent length should reflect that.

OgAstorga 11mo ago
How would you feel about patenting language? I.e. If you speak with certain words or certain patterns then you have to pay a royalty (only for 2 to 5 years).
- smj-edison 11mo ago
  First off, I think that's a false equivalency, as patenting is about ideas (in a platonic sense), not about instances of ideas (which is what copyrighting is). Secondly, we already have that in limited forms with trademarks and copyrights. Thirdly, I think the concept of intellectual property is one of the most brilliant social innovations in the past 500 years, as it aligns incentives to innovate (why would I innovate if someone will just steal my work?).
  - trhway 11mo ago
    >it aligns incentives to innovate (why would I innovate if someone will just steal my work?) it was true 200 years ago. It stopped being true about 100+ years ago. Whether somebody innovates or not became unimportant, as a bunch of other people would still innovate the same thing. Just look at airplanes innovation back then - multiple people were doing it simultaneously, and the fact that Wright brothers got patent actually slowed down airplane innovation in US for couple of decades after that.
    - smj-edison 11mo ago
      Let me see if I understand your argument correctly: 1. Before 1900, when someone came up with an idea, it was unlikely that someone else came up with that idea. 2. Because only one person had that idea, patenting protected their idea from being stolen. 3. After 1900, however, multiple people would have the same idea, but only one person could win. 4. Because only one person could win, it became a net loss to all the others, as they could no longer innovate. 4a. One example of this is the wright brothers. Is that correct? If so: 1/2. I believe that people have been coming up with the same ideas simultaneously for a long time. Leibniz and Newton comes to mind, for example. 3/4. But would any of them have been able to get investments into their projects if they couldn't patent it and then reap the benefits?

greg_w 11mo ago

One cannot (in the US) get a patent for software itself. This was settled a while ago. There needs to be more in the claims. In fact, the patent discussed here does not claim continued fractions and nobody would be in danger using them even if the patent issued as is (which is not certain, because the patent claims rather trivial modification of a classic neural network architecture, which should be brought up by the examiner as obvious). Patents are propelling the society when they work as intended. They made XIX century and at least good chunk of XX century. Without patents, people fall back to copying each other, because it is much easier to copy than to innovate.

Retric 11mo ago
Patents go way back possibly as far as 500 BC, with other examples dating to 1331 etc, yet the introduction didn’t kick off any great wave of progress. Instead a wide range of factors like better plants feeding both population growth and an ever larger percentage of society could do something other than grow food where the real root causes here. Devoting land and labor to cotton for example requires a surplus of food.
- greg_w 11mo ago
  I would rather call the old iterations proto-patents. It took a while to get to a system where anyone can claim an invention as property and make it protected from "borrowing without permission" by law.
  - Retric 11mo ago
    A narrower definition is fine, but now you need to define why those specific differences were important and the timeframe + geographic limitation on those specific differences must match what you’re describing. In other words on paper patents worked like you described in some places well before things kicked off, but the rule of law was more fluid. So you could make the argument that progress depended on some specific level of integrity in the legal system, but that’s now a very arbitrary line which looks like a true Scotsman argument when you try and pin down a specific date for a transition. Similarly you run into issues of which countries what what levels of innovation etc.

dpark 11mo ago

A huge chunk of software patents are also “well known thing, but with software”. Looking at you, Sonos. Even if these things were novel at one point, doing them again in software is not novel.

thwarted 11mo ago

> IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on Generalized Continued Fractions and their Series Transformations and was awarded a Patent A good portion of the perception and use around patents is the word "awarded", which implies that there was some evaluation, either objective or subjective, by an expert in the topic and that the invention met some high level of… something that made it worthy of being "awarded" for the "work" that it took to invent. Most parents are not evaluated like that today, and software patents specifically probably never have been.

trhway 11mo ago
>> IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on ... we've been through several such cycles - "...on computer", "... on Internet", and now " ... with AI" . (of course i have several, including couple with AI, and i'm against patents, especially software ones)

pinkmuffinere 11mo ago

> Software patents are mostly garbage and unneeded. And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible) I want to know about these patents that you want your name off of! What were they for? Why do you want your name removed? This is the opening to a great story, please tell!

aeonik 11mo ago

I'd be super cool with software patents if they actually open source the software and had actual usable modules included with the patent. otherwise I agree, copyright is the way to go.

CamperBob2 11mo ago
I wouldn't. Many if not most patents are awarded to the first person to encounter a problem and apply a (likely obvious) solution, not the first person to solve a longstanding problem at great expense after many others have tried and failed. And even if that weren't the case, nobody needs to be given exclusive rights to math. In principle the law says as much, but in fact that's never been an obstacle.
- kingstnap 11mo ago
  My professor once mentioned how easy it is to be novel and interesting; Just have the interesting part be not novel and the novel part be not interesting!
- aeonik 11mo ago
  You make good points, I think of it like this, Patents were meant to be for the public good, aka disclosure. In modern software terms, to me, that means any software patent should be open sources, and they aren't, which is a worst of all worlds sort of thing.

wahern 11mo ago

> And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible). I was originally named on a patent filing (along with the CTO), but left the company and apparently it was too much effort to communicate with me so they just swapped my name for another engineer. But it was literally my idea (in as much as any such software patent is one person's idea). I was literally given a problem to solve and came back with two alternative solutions to implement, without conferring with anyone else at the company or elsewhere. The only input from anyone else in the company was selecting one of the two options, which I then fully implemented entirely myself. Not only have I always disliked software patents on principle, I was also cheated out on having a patent to put on my resume. (Heck, it was hardly my best idea and for all I know the company patented a bunch of my other work without citing me.) Which is pretty much their only value--as social currency for hiring or highly specious pretend asset security for VC investments. Technically, removing my name from the filing invalidated the patent, but it's all just a ridiculous shell game.