3 ms·
Software patents are not "so clearly harmful" just because you say so. The reason many patents, not all and not necessarily the majority, are harmful is becaus
by walid 13y ago
Software patents are not "so clearly harmful" just because you say so.
The reason many patents, not all and not necessarily the majority, are harmful is because there is no clear definition of what a patent is allowed to be. The definition of hardware patents that was intuitively accepted by patent clerics did not evolve properly to accommodate software. This is by no means a limitation on patents but by the bodies that grant them.
It also isn't a matter of the bar being low for patents applicants. The weakness in the system is that until a clearly worded definition of what a software patent constitutes, we can't pass a judgement on whether patents are useful or harmful.
- marssaxman 13y agoI can and will pass judgement, because I've been watching this mess develop for the last 20 years, the consequences are clear, and it's only getting worse. When I say "clearly harmful" I mean that it is as clearly harmful as anything ever gets in the software industry. Software patents are good for lawyers. Software patents are good for monopolists who want to control a market without having to compete for it. Software patents are not good for software developers, who are frequently prohibited from reading patents by their employers, rarely read patents even when allowed to, in any case don't speak the legal language in which they are written. Software patents are not good for startups, who have no way of discovering whether they are in violation of patents short of going to market and seeing whether they are sued; a lawsuit can easily bankrupt a startup regardless of the merits. Software patents are not good for large companies, who have to waste enormous amounts of their employees' time making up bullshit patents just so they can have an arsenal of defensive patents with which to ward off other large companies. Software patents are not good for open source, which neither needs nor wants the temporary monopoly that is the point of getting a patent in the first place. Software patents are not good for software users, who suffer from reduced marketplace competition, increased vendor lock-in, and a more sluggish pace of progress overall due to the opportunity cost of the time wasted on patenting things and dealing with bullshit patent lawsuits. Software patents are clearly harmful.
- walid 13y agoWell then since you do have an opinion about software patents, define software patents. The problem is not the list that you mentioned above. In fact I can refute every one of them. The problem is that there hasn't been a concerted effort to define a software patent. Hardware patents are easier to define. They are that thing you build according to a patent claim. Software is neither a material thing nor a concept. It actually runs in a computer and more or less controls it. It is an invention. But the boundaries of the claim are difficult to discern. Most of that is because software patents are a few decades old whereas hardware patents are more than a hundred years old. Hardware patents have run through their paces and "debugged" so to speak of glitches in the system. Hell, all software is new. So software patents are even newer. But you still have to define software patents.
- tanzam75 13y agoYou haven't demontrated anything that makes software patents different from other patents. Everything you wrote applies to non-software patents as well, with appropriate adjustments of the remaining wording. ("software developers" to "engineers", "open source" to "scientific research", "software users" to "consumers")
- marssaxman 13y agoSounds like patents are a bad idea, then.