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Why didn't we patent the spreadsheet? Were we stupid? (1999)
- TheSwordsman 13y agoI don't personally have a problem with software patents in principle. You've come up with a brilliant idea, you spent time and money to implement it, and you want to make sure you receive the credit for it. I get that. I was born well after VisiCalc was released. I look back on those years, and wish I could have experienced how "open" things were. It seems like the culture was completely different when it came to new ideas for the most part. Also when it came to sharing ideas. Things were different. In recent years I've become less and less of a fan of software patents. Only because they are being used to hinder development of new services because they may somehow relate to a very generic idea that someone had. If you're going to get a patent, and will not abuse it...go for it! Stupid, no. Just happened in a completely different universe...
- angersock 13y ago"You've come up with a brilliant idea, you spent time and money to implement it, and you want to make sure you receive the credit for it." Hint: the marketplace is the way to get that credit.
- tokenadult 13y agoThe marketplace sometimes rewards thieves more than creators, which is the historical reason for laws that regulate intellectual property rights. You may disagree with current laws (I personally think the current term of copyright protection is much too long), but I have lived somewhere where enforcement of intellectual property rights was weak at one time, and that was not good for innovation there. AFTER EDIT: Both of the first two kind replies to my comment ask for some more details about what I observed overseas. Early 1980s Taiwan was the land of "Rolex" watches sold on street corners, pirated United States bestsellers in English-language bookstores for tourists, and general violation of patent, copyright, and trademark rights. Every country in the world seems to go through a stage of copying rather than innovating in its economic development. Eventually, as Taiwan democratized, it became apparent that international trade relations would OF COURSE be helped by meeting treaty obligations to protect intellectual property from other countries. Moreover, it was discovered that there are plenty of creative, inventive people in Taiwan, who created more and invented more as gradually domestic individuals and companies received greater legal protection of intellectual property rights. Innovation is hard to sustain where copying is the path to quick riches. But innovation becomes a more reasonable path for investment of personal time and effort if being first to make something new allows some LIMITED time (I'm with everyone here in desiring intellectual property rights not to extend too long in time) to enter the market and see what consumers think of the innovation.
- Arelius 13y ago> I have lived somewhere where enforcement of intellectual property rights was weak at one time, and that was not good for innovation there. Can you speak on this? Do you feel patent right were weak, or all of intellectual property rights?
- angersock 13y agoSo, specifically in software, if it is simple for "thieves" to "steal" the work, it probably wasn't worthy of protection in the first place. I will admit, you can be a great engineer and a terrible businessman, and thus fumble a first-mover advantage, but I don't think patents are the solution to that. Would you mind elaborating on your experience?
- stan_rogers 13y agoYou don't have to be "a terrible businessman" if you're, say, some guy in a basement and the "thief" is a large company with the ability to copy quickly (even if badly) and deep marketing and production pockets. By the time you're able to broadcast your innovation beyond your neighborhood, you're already competing against the proverbial "major national brand" of the product you invented, as seen on TV and available in a store near you.
- tanzam75 13y agoThe marketplace rewards all sorts of things that are not related to the brilliance of the idea. Access to capital, management expertise, skill of execution, plain dumb luck, etc. Therefore, the marketplace encourages companies to take a fast-follower approach. Let someone else spend the money to come up with the idea, and then pounce all over it. The goal of the patent system is to encourage the idea itself, by giving a monopoly to the inventor. In this way, fast-followers have to compensate the inventor for the invention by licensing the patent. Alternatives to patents -- prizes, research grants, compulsory licensing, etc. -- are also designed to separate the value of the idea itself from the rough-and-tumble of the marketplace.
- nilved 13y agoIf you have the best implementation of that idea, won't you get credit for it anyway? Patents, like everything else designed to inhibit innovation and the flow of ideas, are bad for society.
- Arelius 13y ago> You've come up with a brilliant idea, you spent time and money to implement it, and you want to make sure you receive the credit for it. The problems is that 9 out of 10 times, that idea is derivative of some other idea(s). And you just have to hope that the original idea(s) either aren't patented or have since expired.
- DanBC 13y ago> I was born well after VisiCalc was released. I look back on those years, and wish I could have experienced how "open" things were. You might have missed the "look and feel" reference in the post. Lotus (makers of another spreadsheet, "1 2 3") sued other companies over the look and feel of software that was "too similar" to 1 2 3. Two companies went out of business. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Software#.22Look_and_feel.22_lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Software#.22Look_and_fee...)
- NoPiece 13y agoI agree with you about patents, but overall, I don't things are worse or less open now. Visicalc wasn't patented, but it was a commercial, $99, closed source product. The open source movement is much bigger and stronger now. Linux and Github would have been mind blowingly awesome in 1979. They are mind blowingly awesome now!
- CamperBob2 13y agoI don't personally have a problem with software patents in principle. You've come up with a brilliant idea, you spent time and money to implement it, and you want to make sure you receive the credit for it If only there were a different form of intellectual property, one that grants a limited monopoly over the embodiment of a creative work rather than legal ownership of the idea behind it. Oh, wait. There is. It's called "copyright." And it's (more than) strong enough for the job.
- throwawaykf02 13y agoRight, and somebody simply reverse engineers your creative work and re-implements it, completely bypassing any protection provided by IP. As long as you make something that cannot be hidden away in the cloud or protected as trade secrets, your work is always vulnerable to reverse engineering, and it's surprisingly cheap to get it done. Forget software, even fabricated chips get reverse engineered on a regular basis.
- CamperBob2 13y agoAnd good luck enforcing your patents in the countries where this is actually going to be a problem.
- throwawaykf02 13y agoOh, don't think this is a problem that is localized to some countries -- it happens all over the world. The actual work itself may be outsourced to some countries (some Eastern Bloc countries spring to mind; I met a couple of guys from Czechoslovakia who specialized in reversing wireless firmware in GPS devices) but the firms who contract this work and use the results operate in the US and Europe as well.
- saidajigumi 13y ago> I don't personally have a problem with software patents in principle. You've come up with a brilliant idea, you spent time and money to implement it, and you want to make sure you receive the credit for it. I get that. That's certainly one principle. But literally implemented "principles" are often toxic when it comes to public policy. I largely think that's due to a failure to think through the effects on the entire system. The principle is emotionally appealing, but ends up having undesired or even disastrous primary- and/or side- effects in the real world. In the patent case, we have a Mexican Standoff[1] in that virtually every player is vulnerable (violates one or more patents knowingly or unknowingly) and the only defense is stockpiling more armaments (patents) and shooters (legal staff). The risks and barriers to entry to small players are high. And that doesn't account for the actions of parasitic agencies like patent trolls. That said, things are largely more open now in practice. The level of interchange of ideas and code is far, far greater now than ever before. That culture didn't die or go away -- it exploded right along with the rest of computing. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_standoff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_standoff
- loup-vaillant 13y ago> You've come up with a brilliant idea, you spent time and money to implement it, and you want to make sure you receive the credit for it. I get that. You're thinking at the individual scope. When making a policy, a given individual doesn't weight much. Even all inventors put together don't have much moral weight, compared to the rest of the population. So, patents rewards inventors. That's an advantage. But it's a little advantage, for there are not that many inventors to begin with. There are also the costs associated with the implementation of patents (patent bureau, patent lawyers…), which may be significant, but not much in my opinion. So, on first approximation, we can ignore those aspects, because there are bigger effects, that affect society as a whole. On the disadvantage side, patents restricts what people can do, and they kill competition. (Of course. They were designed that way. But it's still a disadvantage.) On the advantage side, patents are an incentive for inventors to invent, and for companies to fund them. The inventions then benefit everyone (starting with rich people, but still). Now, all we have do do is measure which weight the most. See how patents actually affect society, and decide if it's a net benefit, or a net loss. Either way, try and think about policies which may have more advantages, or fewer drawbacks —or both. Patents are far from the only way of encouraging innovation, after all. You can see that it's much more complex than the "reward the inventor" principle. Principles are good, but they're often not enough. When you look at actual consequences, you see that sticking to easy to understand principles is not always the best thing to do. Especially when deciding for an entire country.
- wnevets 13y ago>Programs were thought to be mere mathematical algorithms, and mathematical algorithms, as laws of nature, were not patentable. And thats the way it should be now. I dont think you should be able to patent math, dna or the air we breathe
- dsego 13y agoSo if it is on paper it's not an invention, but if you apply it on a piece of metal it suddenly is? A piece of code in C is applied math, but a mechanism with cranks and pulleys is not?
- Arelius 13y agoPersonally I think all patents are stupid. I mean clearly they are more fundamental to some industries (health) But I think once we figured out how to do research without patents, the world would be a better place with zero patents.
- nsxwolf 13y agoNot even on tangible, physical inventions? How can the little guy ever make money on an idea if he or she can be instantly wiped out by someone with more money?
- TheMagicHorsey 13y agoI don't know. But how did Facebook, Twitter, and Github grow without applying for patents for years. Twitter only started filing patents recently. Facebook started filing after it already won in the market against MySpace and Friendster. Why didn't Google just copy Facebook and Twitter? Those would be easy apps to copy in the state they were when they first got famous. It doesn't happen because its harder for people to copy ideas than you think it is. If you write software for a living and work in a big organization you will understand that they don't have a magic wand that they can just wave to make new products appear.
- nateabele 13y agoIt's amazing how many things we take for granted that likely wouldn't exist if it had been possible for companies to acquire software patents in the 70's and 80's. I wonder how much of the Free & Open Source software that the internet is built on would never have even been written (or written but not made public) for fear of infringement. Puts somewhat of a new spin on the debate about it today.
- bad_user 13y agoIt does make one wonder, what innovations aren't happening today because of software patents?
- Qantourisc 13y agoMany, because doing so would infringe on some patent. For example your product might not work without rounded corners. (For example sell-rolling phone, not that I can think of a use for it, but still you get the idea.)
- DanBC 13y ago> Just a few examples of concepts where patents played no role in those days: word wrapping, cut and paste, the word processing ruler, sorting and compression algorithms, hypertext linking, and compiler techniques. Well, some people tried: Hyperlinks: (http://eupat.ffii.org/patents/effects/hyperlink/index.en.html http://eupat.ffii.org/patents/effects/hyperlink/index.en.htm...) > British Telecom in the 70s and 80s filed patents in the US on the concept of cross-references in hypertext. In 2000 BT discovered one of these "Rembrandts in the Attic" (US 4,873,662) and decided to use it for squeezing money out of internet access providers. Litigation is beginning in 2002-02. (http://www.cptech.org/ip/business/hyperlink.html http://www.cptech.org/ip/business/hyperlink.html) (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2000/06/23/bt.html http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2000/06/23/bt.html)
- JackFr 13y agoAlso: Wheels on luggage. Cameras in phones.
- Aldo_MX 13y agoI'm not against the patents, but I think there should also exist a revenue limit, and whenever a patent reaches either the time or the revenue limit, get invalidated automatically.
- frozenport 13y agoRevenue is impossible to compute. For example, can Windows OS sales be attributed to a patent on MS Office?
- cmsmith 13y agoOh I'm sorry, we haven't actually made any revenue on that patent because it's owned by our subsidiary 'PatentCom' which charges us a license fee of $1/yr to use it.
- johnward 13y agoI don't think revenue would work. I say just make it a very short period of time. enough for the inventor to get a jump start and then open it up to benefit all.
- nova 13y agoI am against patents in general, and specially in software, but I can see there is no way to change the system the way politics and lobbying work. So maybe we should try another approach, something every government likes: taxes. Let's add a tax on patents please. (Maybe copyright too, specially of old (>10 years) works.) A big yearly tax for every patent you own. It's the only way I can imagine to put some slowdown to the cancerous growth of IP.
- guelo 13y agoAnd yet they had plenty of incentive to invent the spreadsheet. Patents grant a government protected monopoly in order to encourage people to invent. If people have the incentive to invent anyway then it is better for society to allow competition, since competition benefits consumers much more than monopolies.
- dangoldin 13y agoI might be completely wrong but I think you can make the argument that back then the challenge was in the implementation since there were so many technical difficulties and there was no need to patent an approach since it would be difficult to replicate. Now with modern tools it's pretty easy to replicate most software so getting a patent makes more sense. I don't think software patents should be granted but clearly there's an incentive to patent as much as you can.
- eterm 13y agoIs it actually easy to replicate most software or does it just appear that way until you try?
- x0054 13y agoThe problem is, the software patents don't really explain implementation, they simply describe it. Take the scan and email button patent. It presented no implementation at all, in fact the original "inventor" never actually managed to get it to work. So, what's the value to the society in that patent? What's the value to the society in a lot of software patents that offer no actual implementation, or general idea patents. It used to be that you could patent specific implementations, and of some one could come up with a better implementation, they could patent that. Nowadays, it seams like you can patent just about anything, regardless of whether or not it can be implemented at the moment. It would be like the Wright Brothers patenting "a flying device that uses an engine and a propeller" without ever even trying to build one.
- eterm 13y ago
- cheery 13y agoIf they patented spreadsheets today, they would immediately kill them too.
- 6ren 13y agoIf I invented the spreadsheet today, of course I would file for a patent. I can't help feeling bad for VisiCalc, getting killed by Lotus 123, and they in turn by Excel. Similar to Apple (almost) getting killed by the PC (they invented the Personal Computer - even the term was appropriated by their competitor). When you invent something really useful that's never existed before... don't you deserve something awesome in return? But I guess they did make some serious money; and consumers benefited from the better implementations (which is why they switched). Ownership would have prevented this particular progress. I still feel bad for them though.
- bendoidic 13y ago“Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.” - Thomas Edison, king of patents Implementation, partnerships, marketing (visibility), and growth are all just as important as being first. This is one of the biggest misunderstandings in academia, where the ultimate goal is simply to be published first and recognized most.
- 6ren 13y agoThank you! A contrast with academia is a good way to look at it. Also, one might say Bricklin et al did get the academic reward of being recognized as first; but that ethically, whoever helps people most deserves the greater reward (through implementation that meets their needs; word of mouth that reaches them; ease of adoption; 3rd party support; constant improvement etc).
- msteinert 13y ago> When you invent something really useful that's never existed before... don't you deserve something awesome in return? This probably feels like the ethically correct outcome when you've invented something interesting, however it runs counter to free market economics. Being first can provide a competitive edge but it isn't the only factor.
- erichocean 13y agoThis is timely, my startup is working on an invention that does for business computing what the spreadsheet did for number crunching, and yes, we're patenting it. Mostly because our competitors are all multi-billion dollar companies and we need something on our side when the inevitable law suits start flying, and the copiers get revved up. sigh It annoys both of us founders to no end, but I don't see another option given the legal environment in the US today.
- dnautics 13y agothere used to be a SIR - "statutory invetion registry" but the obama administration got rid of it. You should consider licensing your stuff through one of the companies that works to ensure that your stuff is in the commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPX_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPX_Corporation
- erichocean 13y agoThanks for the link! I hadn't heard of them before.
- grimtrigger 13y agoNevertheless, patenting software is encouraged by law, and I find it my duty to the shareholders of the companies I've been working for to take advantage of this protection. What a cowardly cop out. If you believe in software patents, I can understand getting one. But to say "I must do X because X is profitable" is ridiculous.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoOfftopic, but would you quote using * asterisks? Quoting like that makes it almost impossible for mobile users to read.
- grimtrigger 13y agoupdated
- jlgreco 13y agoFrustratingly, italics on the chrome browser on android seem to not work. I usually give it a combination of '>', quotation marks, and italics.
- victorf 13y agoI disagree that "cowardly" is the appropriate adjective and suggest "pragmatic" instead.
- xkiwi 13y agoI immediately come up with an idea to patent stupidity, so no one is allowed to be stupid or they have to pay a fee.
- gonnakillme 13y agoPresumably you yourself have an unlimited license? ;)
- xkiwi 13y agothat's not my point. I hope people really have a deep through before they do anything. But, I have more interesting to troll and patent trolls. Both are fun and worth doing.
- mathattack 13y agoPersonally, I think that the fact that software patents started being granted so late in the history of programming (which was in full swing 30 years earlier in the 1950's) will cause all sorts of problems for the software industry. He was very prescient with this concluding comment!
- microcolonel 13y agoWho cares? Why use a violent monopoly to encourage something which was already profitable, and at the expense of similar work later on? Who cares what somebody in the software industry thinks the government ought to be doing with their monopoly on the initiation of violent force? To the people citing the U.S. constitution here, this isn't about america, it's about pointing guns at people for doing something like what you're doing.
- dm2 13y agoAre there any arguments against a "Mandatory Reasonable Patent License Fee" law that requires patent holders to license their patent? Maybe have it kick in one year after the company offers it to the public or other companies. If anyone had a dispute then they could set up a special court or process for determining a reasonable fee (not difficult) for the patent license. The same could be done with some services and utilities. This would result in a win-win for all parties involved; the patent holder would receive incentive for the invention, the patent licensee would receive revenue from offering a superior product/service or at lower cost, and especially the consumer who receives a better product and would have more choice of higher quality products. This would also result in companies doing less "favors" and "ass-kissing" to each other in order to keep license deals. It seems like this would be the best of both worlds because the patent holder would receive incentive for the invention and t
- clueless123 13y agoFor the same reason, a bunch of stupid patents for stuff like "touch screen paswords" where granted where plenty of prior art existed, Basically, at the time of first invention software could not be patented, so when patents finally where allowed, no previous patent existed. My bad for being too far ahead of my time :(
- jebblue 13y agoYou couldn't patent what already existed in paper form http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet unless you referenced the patents for the spreadsheet which existed before computers and the patent office agreed it was an improvement on the original patent.