Weekly Edition
Return to the Front page
| |||||||||||||
Continuing fun with software patents
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office continues to amaze with the range of
software technologies that it is willing to patent. Here are a couple of
new ones:
There is no doubt that copious amounts of prior art can be found for both of these patents. Your editor first used a revision control system - accessed with punch cards - over twenty years ago. Web sites allowing discussions existed before Amazon hit the net, and certainly before 1999, when the patent was filed. But prior art does not help address the real problem: the patent office is allowing companies to try to fence off little bits of the intellectual landscape without regard to originality or any pretense of promoting any sort of progress. Increasingly, it is impossible to write any sort of nontrivial program that does not infringe upon somebody's patent. The only saving grace is the fact that most of these patents are never enforced. Otherwise, software development would grind to a halt - at least, in those countries which allow software patents. (Log in to post comments)
Continuing fun with software patents Posted Feb 27, 2003 9:38 UTC (Thu) by scglwn (subscriber, #1245) [Link] The patent offices might as well just award all those silly patents. The more these get awarded, the earlier it will be obvious that they are silly and that software patents should have no value or meaning.
Continuing fun with software patents Posted Feb 27, 2003 10:29 UTC (Thu) by mmutz (guest, #5642) [Link] The patent offices might as well just award all those silly patents. The more these get awarded, the earlier it will be obvious that they are silly and that software patents should have no value or meaning. Sorry, but that isn't going to work out: The more trivial patents are granted, the greater the patent portfolio of companies like Amazon and IBM and just about any bigger company. It simply doesn't matter how easily they can be proved wrongly assigned by pointing to prior art. Consider a small software company that is about to release a new innovative product with a threat (perceived or real) to e.g. IBM. What will IBM do?
Continuing fun with software patents Posted Feb 27, 2003 13:13 UTC (Thu) by Zelatrix (guest, #5163) [Link] It's hard to believe that a scenario such as you describe could actually happen.
Continuing fun with software patents Posted Feb 27, 2003 18:00 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] The Amazon patent here isn't really a software patent so much as a web site design patent. Since it all follows from claim 1, which specifies that the topic is an item for sale, the patent is actually on providing a per-item comment system for an online retail site, not on having a comment system or having an online retail site; it just looks like it could cover comment systems in general because of the style that patents are written in. As far as I know, Amazon was the first to add a comment system to their catalog, and, while it seems obvious today, that's just because Amazon's been doing it for years. In fact, online retail and comment systems both existed for long enough before Amazon started doing this that it must not really be obvious.Amazon's patent, therefore, is as good as any patent. Of course, the whole patent system may well be a bad idea, since empirical evidence suggests that patents do not promote innovation (at least when the patented item could not remain secret). And I think the idea that Amazon wouldn't have come up with such a system had they not thought they would be able to prevent other people from copying them 4 years later is ridiculous; they invented the design so that they could use it, and thereby make their customers more likely to buy things.
Continuing fun with software patents Posted Feb 27, 2003 19:26 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] >And I think the idea that Amazon wouldn't have come up with such a system >had they not thought they would be able to prevent other people from >copying them 4 years later is ridiculous...Those are very good points. And the other half of the reason that Amazon would have invented this with or without patent protection is that it was cheap to invent. Patents do the job only where 1) it costs money to invent, which money cannot be recovered if others are free to copy the results; or 2) the inventor could profit from the invention without disclosing it to anyone. I'd like to point out that even (1) is not an original intent of patents. A patent is fundamentally a deal between the public and an inventor, where the inventor tells the public what he invented and the public gives him some exclusive rights to the invention in return. "Patent" is Latin for "laying open."
Continuing fun with software patents Posted Feb 28, 2003 4:13 UTC (Fri) by torsten (guest, #4137) [Link] Patents are not monopolies on ideas. They are monopolies on specific implementations of an idea.
Torsten
Continuing fun with software patents Posted Feb 28, 2003 14:45 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] If the "Interwoven patent" can be interpreted to cover all revisioncontrol systems, it meants that the UPSTO cannot even look at earlier granted patents for prior art! There are software patents on version control, such as the multiversion file system patents by the ClearCase implementers. A ClearCase manual I have at hand lists U.S. Patents 5,574,898, 5,649,200
Continuing fun with software patents Posted Mar 4, 2003 21:52 UTC (Tue) by southey (subscriber, #9466) [Link] I believe that you will find an old comment on the web (and I think was covered by this site) from the very proud patent director regarding how much money they rake in each year for the government. Patents are are major revenue source.
|
|||||||||||||