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To fix or to self-destruct, that is the questionTo fix or to self-destruct, that is the questionPosted Apr 17, 2006 19:44 UTC (Mon) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)Parent article: Guides to the patent commons
Just as revolutionaries sometimes do their best to make the current situation worse in order to cause a revolution rather than slog thru the system to try and improve it, I sometimes think the best solution for patents is to let this nonsense get worse and worse, in the hope that it will eventually get so bad that everyone will have to notice, including the patent troll companies, or at least everyone else. The proper fix, to me, is to eliminate all patents even close to obvious, cut the number of patents by 100 or 1000, or only allow one patent a day, something drastic to make sure patents actually refer to clever innovative inventions.
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proper fix Posted Apr 17, 2006 20:10 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] The proper fix is simply to eliminate all patents on software, "business methods", etcetera. The economics of patents never made sense as an incentive structure for software innovation, where a single product can contain thousands of "inventions" and where the marginal cost is essentially zero (so that patent royalties completely change the market).
proper fix Posted Apr 20, 2006 2:15 UTC (Thu) by jeleinweber (subscriber, #8326) [Link] For example, we could tweak the patent laws so that they only covered things that permanently rearranged matter. We could call it the "no thought crime" rule :-) New transitors could be patented, but business processes and computer algorithms could not. Wasn't the legal case that orginally started the software patent craze (anyone know the citation) about a software controlled process for curing rubber? That would still be patentable.
proper fix Posted Apr 26, 2006 17:13 UTC (Wed) by caitlinbestler (guest, #32532) [Link] The current practice is not truly about patenting software, or even truly novel algorithms. In many cases people are getting away with patenting the problem.
Eliminating "software patents" will not solve the problem. It will just move the patented solutions into "hardware", where it can *never* be open-sourced.
We need legislation that recognizes the unique needs of preventing software from being ripped off, while not preventing multiple people from finding the same solution to a problem independently.
One solution might be to mandate that algorithmic patents MUST be available for reasonable non-discriminatory licensing. Secondly, if multiple applications are filed for the same concept before any are published
To fix or to self-destruct, that is the question Posted Apr 20, 2006 9:31 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] Sure. Absolutely.At this point every "bad" news about patents is good news for us. And the more horrible the news is, the better. Ideal would be lots of actual news-stories of the type: "Grandmother sued for $5 billion for using patented tea-and-biscuits serving-technique". It's beyond ridicolous, the problem however is that it is not yet obvious to the common man on the street (or the common politician in parliament) just exactly how ridicolous the situation has become. It is LITERALLY true that a system that legally exists in the first place for the express purpose of: "Promoting the porgress of science and the useful arts" actually makes it impossible to write any non-trivial program in a legal way. For anyone. It's just, if you're either large enough to take the hits, or small enough to slip under the radar you migth be lucky and get away with it.
To fix or to self-destruct, that is the question Posted Apr 27, 2006 12:28 UTC (Thu) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link] [It's just, if you're either large enough to take the hits, or small enough to slip under the radar you migth be lucky and get away with it.]
Newsflash... Breathing is illegal, some are being financially ruined and imprisoned for breathing while others skate... Film at 11.
all the best,
drew
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