| |||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
Broken patent systemBroken patent systemPosted Oct 15, 2007 0:14 UTC (Mon) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)In reply to: Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat and Novell - Just Like Ballmer Predicted (Groklaw) by sepreece Parent article: Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat and Novell - Just Like Ballmer Predicted (Groklaw)
This lawsuit itself points to big problems in the U.S. patent system, because:
- licensor itself isn't using the patent for anything useful
Put differently, if there were no people implementing this idea, the licensor's contribution would be exactly zero. They could have sued (if this patent was so important to them) various people _way_ before, but they held off until Red Hat and Novell had the money to pay. And finally, this patent is old news and it is the people coding this idea that actually had to put effort and money behind it, so rewarding inventors for this now makes little sense.
In the end these are the possible outcomes:
- RH/Novell spend money on something inventors never wrote
I don't see how any of the above is contributing to progress and I especially don't see why the inventors should be rewarded for this 16 years after their invention has been patented, in a field that churns out new versions every few months.
PS. In Australia, patents on software are encouraged by the relevant government body (IP Australia), so the situation isn't much better here either.
(Log in to post comments)
Broken patent system Posted Oct 15, 2007 12:54 UTC (Mon) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link] While I agree that there are problems with software patents, I think your list of objects is off-the-mark:
(1) They ARE doing something useful with the patent - they're licensing it to people who want to implement it. Would you criticize ARM because their designs are licensed to other people rather than fabbed in-house?
(2) Not sure what you mean by "last possible moment" - they've been litigating these patents against various parties for years; few companies want to maintain large numbers of patent suits in parallel - they're a lot of work and cost.
(3) "they are only targeting deep pockets" - well, duh. Not a lot of point to suing people who can't pay.
(4) I agree patent terms are too long. However, there's a reasonable argument that a patent that is the basis for a lot of extension and refinement should be protected while that's happening. No idea is innovative after it's been thought of, by definition.
(5) No idea == no implementation or delayed implementation. It cost money to create the environment that led to this idea; Xerox ultimately recouped some of that money by selling the patents. I think it's fair to guess that the modern GUI would have evolved if PARC hadn't existed, but it would have been delayed.
As I noted previously, I think that open source has significantly changed some of the argument for software patents - the notion that it takes a lot of investment to bring a software idea to practice or to bring it to market is harder to sell, today, than it was 30 years ago, when the current patent rules were largely formed.
Broken patent system Posted Oct 15, 2007 22:06 UTC (Mon) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] About 1, if that were true, they would have attempted to license (or sue) people distributing XFree86, Gnome and KDE 10 years ago. So, they aren't doing anything useful here - they are just waiting until the last moment to extort money.
About 2, see 1.
About 3, if you own a trademark for instance, you must threaten/sue even people that don't have deep pockets. And the system is still alive and well (and a lot fairer). Oh, and you must use the trademarks yourself.
About 4, the term of software patents is about 20 years too long :-) I still recall the idiocy of XOR patent that Autodesk had to pay for.
About 5, in a world without software patents, Xerox could have created a reference implementation instead (which _is_ actually a lot of investment) and sold that to implementers. The folks licensing that would then still have the first mover advantage, while imitators would have to wait for a while to do their own.
The point is, in software, copyright combined with trade secrets offers enough protection to keep innovators ahead of imitators. There is really no need to impose a 20 year monopoly in a field where things change every month, as it doesn't contribute to anything.
|
|
||||||||||||