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Are patents a necessary evil?
by unfitted2545 2mo ago
Are patents a necessary evil?
- ThrowawayTestr 2mo agoSoftware patents, no. They're just evil.
- yndoendo 2mo agoDepends on how they are used. Let say you come up with a patent. You let open source use the patent, GPL3 ..., for free why charging close source solutions. That could go to funding the open source development or other gains. FANNG has the money, take it from the them by all means.
- killerstorm 1mo agoSuppose you came up with AI algorithm which is better than transformers and such. Your options are: 1. publish it e.g. as a paper or open source, letting all big AI labs to use it for free 2. keep it secret Are you saying that it's evil to have a secret third option of making the algorithm public but forcing AI labs to share profit if they use it?
- basilikum 1mo agoNot OC, but yes.
- throw_m239339 1mo agothen keep it secret, someone else will discover it eventually. Software patents are evil.
- dlcarrier 2mo agoI used to think they were entirely useless, but since then I've learned of many instances where a much better technology is developed because the first iteration is patented. For example, the Wright brothers biggest contribution to aviation was suing everyone using wing warping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war) which greatly advanced the adoption of the much more advanced ailerons. Software patents have a similar effect, for example Cisco's patent on Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol led to the development of the more secure and more capable Common Address Redundancy Protocol (https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/SA/v14/i05/a6.htm https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/SA/v14/i05/a6.htm). We tend to invest heavily in whatever we can get working first, but it's rarely close to an ideal way of doing something. By pushing every developer to find a newer, better way of doing something, patents prevent stagnation and lead to more advanced technologies.
- cogman10 2mo agoThis sort of benefit in software can be realized with much shorter terms. A 5 or 10 year term would accomplish pretty much all the same benefits. 25 years is just way too long for software.
- dlcarrier 2mo agoThe benefit comes from no one ever using the earlier inferior versions.
- cogman10 2mo agoCorrect. 5 years is long enough to kill off inferior standards and let superior ones blossom.
- mrheosuper 2mo agoif it's inferior, why does it matter if it's 5 years or 25 years ?
- 2mo ago
- somat 2mo agoI don't think patents are inherently evil, however they certainly can be used for evil. But The basic idea is sound. If you invent a novel mechanism and publish it the government will grant you exclusive economic exploitation rights to that mechanism for the next 25 years. After that it is now fair game. It is an attempt to solve the real problem that it is much harder to be first than second, the guy in first place has to spend all that time and effort to develop the thing, and the guy in second just has to copy the guy in first. To rectify this social injustice the patent system was developed, where the government would grant and enforce economic exploitation rights of the mechanism to the inventor.
- Shitty-kitty 2mo agoThe problem often stems from the Patent Offices getting caught flat-footed with new tech. When the patent officers don't know enough about the field they are reviewing it is easy for things which are "obvious to experts in the field" or "overly broad" to slip thru and cause major headaches for everyone.
- somat 2mo agoIt does not help that things fundamental to the new tech, even though they took real effort to develop, are now exactly those items that are now "obvious to experts in the field" and "overly broad" And then have fun trying to distinguish real fundamentals from items in the form of (existing invention "with a computer") Or whatever the hot new tech of the day is. A good example(old enough to not matter any more) is the how the Wright brothers invented something fundamentally new, their patent was on how to control an airplane, The problem is, once you see it, it is obvious how to control an airplane. Birds do it, Why should such an simple thing be protected? But conversely. This is a discipline that took the Wrights many years of hard and meticulous work to figure out. Is it morally correct to say "No, we are not going to grant you exploitation rights to this thing you invested so much time and effort developing"?
- foobar1274278 1mo agoCool, now do these: "Buying something over the web", Amazon, 1997: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en "Rounded corners in a GUI", Apple, 2014: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9396565B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9396565B2/en
- bitwize 2mo agoSoftware patents may be what saves the field. Currently copyright as an IP protection for software has been rendered near meaningless by AI. If I can get one AI to reverse engineer Photoshop, and another to implement the produced spec, I have a copyright-clean version of Photoshop. Patents protect the idea of a particular program. And in the post-AI world, it's the idea that holds the value, not the implementation. Implementations are cheap now. Another alternative to preventing the entire software market from collapsing is to revive the Whelan v. Jaslow copyright standard, under which the abstract "structure, sequence, and organization" of a program is eligible for copyright. But programmers would bristle at that almost as much as robust patent protection for software. Until, that is, the money comes in with mouths to feed and mortgages to pay...
- Shitty-kitty 2mo agoYou don't know what code the A.I has been trained on. It may very well be reproducing actual Copyrighted material it has been trained on. This is the major reason why most large open-source projects are banning big code contributions made with A.I
- chrismorgan 2mo agoMost large open-source projects banning AI contributions have been doing it for social and technical reasons, not legal. As for the copyright infringement angle, it’s well and truly too late for that to be a meaningful problem, socially and politically. It’s easily in “too big to fail” territory now—any striking down of the “fair use” exemption claim would kill the entire industry dead, because every one of them would have to throw away all their models and synthetic data and start again, and that’s geopolitically untenable. They moved too fast for judiciary to regulate them, and I think the window of opportunity for legislature to regulate them closed no later than 2024.
- Shitty-kitty 2mo agoYou are wrong about why open-source projects are banning AI contributions. While vibe-coded slop is obviously a pain, many are banning even their own well-known contributors from using A.I to write large parts of code due to legal concerns. I'm sure the patent/copyright trolls care a lot about the "industry." It is still the early days but eventually they will come on knocking.
- _carbyau_ 2mo agoA patent was meant to give a solo genius a way to treat their idea as something tangible, at a time when logistics was much slower and the world revolved around the physical. Maybe they try to develop it themselves, maybe they sell the idea to a big corporation that has the resources to implement it. Either way, genius begets profit, and the world gets genius ideas... in theory anyway. But a genuine idea back then needed a long time frame to actually do something with it. 20 years seemed reasonable at the time. The world is less logistically constrained these days. Make it 5 years, no renewals.
- Shitty-kitty 2mo agoA patent is meant to encourage people and companies to share the details of their inventions, instead of keeping them secret. In return the inventors get protection for a certain number of years.
- robocat 1mo agoThat was the stated purpose of a patent. The modern purposes of patents seem to have shifted a long way from that. I wonder how much of ADSL's advantage is due to trade secrets (spread across many vendors) versus how much has been published as patents.
- Brendinooo 1mo ago>The modern purposes of patents seem to have shifted a long way from that I'm not sure if that's true, or if it's more that 1) we hear more about the more egregious stuff and/or 2) something was lost in translation with that stated purpose when the world went digital.
- robocat 1mo agoPatents are not discussed as inventions any more. Other aspects now matter: defensive patents, patent pools, patent trolls, patent portfolios, etc. Triple damages made a farce of patents as dissemination of invention.
- jayanmn 2mo agoOur demand for perfectionism prevent any progress. I would consider shortening patent length that can help everyone. With all the improvements in the world we could afford shorter window.
- yxhuvud 2mo agoAt least in the chemistry/pharma industries, yes, due to the (necessary) regulatory structures there. But in modern tech? No.
- vectorinox 1mo agoI would recommend that great academic (but very digest) book titled "Against Intellectual Monopoly" to understand why the answer is most certainly "no" (though, their answser is closer to "yes" for pharmacetical patents).
- Asooka 1mo agoI think of them as legalised marijuana. It is not good for you, but if it were made illegal, there will be criminal organisations providing the service. Without patents, we would be mired in NDAs dictating which company can talk to which other company about what technology, and quite possibly several open-source developers passing away in mysterious circumstances. So I see it as unavoidable evil. The patent system makes it lawful evil as opposed to chaotic evil, which is strictly speaking an improvement.
- PunchyHamster 1mo agoIt's more like legalized crack, it's almost never used for any remotely positive use
- PowerElectronix 1mo agoMore like an optional evil that benefits laywers, lawmakers and ill intentioned folks and makes everyone else way worse off.
- Zigurd 1mo agoPatents are a deal made between innovators and governments. I especially dislike this term "intellectual property" because it tries to turn that deal into a right. That feels benign because the little guy innovator depends on rights. But what really happens is that it turns patents into a sacred object. They're not. While it would be a bad idea to do so, mere legislation can set the terms of a patent to any length down to zero or out to forever. It's not a right. It's a deal meant to be beneficial to society in return for the government enforcing a limited term monopoly.
- grishka 1mo agoThey're a nice idea poorly executed. If they would last something like 5 years instead of 20, and only be assignable to individuals, not companies, and non-transferable, they could work as intended.
- oconnor663 1mo agoI don't know anything about pharma, but having worked in tech and had my share of patent lawyer meetings, it sure doesn't seem like software patents are necessary at all. That said, a patent system has a lot of free parameters that you can dial to reduce the cost. At the silly limit, if patents were only good for 24 hours, the cost to society would be ~zero (though also the benefit would be zero), so it's hard to call that "evil" in the sense of definitely causing a lot of harm. The question becomes whether/when you can set all the free parameters to something worth having.