why MS was not sued over this [LWN.net]

why MS was not sued over this

Posted Oct 15, 2007 21:10 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: why MS was not sued over this by eru
Parent article: A visit from the trolls

Possible but unlikely. Most aspects of a modern windowing system are patented, in the 1980s there were dozens of companies trying to revolutionise the computer, most of them failed but left a minefield of patents behind to mark their trail. As I pointed out in a previous thread, Microsoft is routinely on the receiving end of lawsuits exactly like this one, alleging that new software or other products is infringing on some patent granted years ago to a now defunct company.

Part of our problem is that not only software patents, but all patents are crippled as an economic motivation by the fact that many inventions are arrived at by many people almost simultaneously once the constituent parts become available. You don't need a patent system to encourage such inventions, they'll occur automatically. No kind of government granted monopoly on production could have caused the home computer to arrive in the 1960s when the technology to build them didn't exist, and no lack of such government intervention could conceivably have delayed it into the 1980s when such technology already abounded everywhere, so why allow a 20 year patent on such innovations even when they seem substantial at the time ? Even a patent promising protection for 12 months from the release of the first product would be more than generous in such an environment.

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patents crippled as economic motivation

Posted Oct 19, 2007 15:58 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

What you're saying is that there's no public advantage to issuing patents for inventions which are obvious to anyone skilled in the art. As it happens, that has been understood since the beginning of US patents and it is written into the law that such inventions aren't patentable.

The problem is that the law as it has evolved sets a very high standard for "obvious." There seems to be widespread agreement that it needs to be lower, but lawmakers haven't been able to fix it yet.

I hope any fix doesn't use the word "software." Whether an invention is realized in software or matter is irrelevant to the question of whether the public benefits from the patent being issued.