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See? Patents do help foster innovation!See? Patents do help foster innovation!Posted May 3, 2009 7:38 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: See? Patents do help foster innovation! by dion Parent article: KSM tries again
that isn't fair to the 'small inventor' battling the 'large company' (the image near and dear to the patent defenders heart) because the little guy may not be able to find out that the company is infringing on the patent due to trade secrets.
that being said, I think that a very good case could be made for an explicit exception for the case of open-source software, where any author of open-source software can post a copy of their code to a site (or a list of sites), and companies then have X amount of time to protest the use of any patent in code posted there. give the author of the opensource code immunity for any use prior to any notice being delivered and you will have authors willing to post there.
I'm sure that companies would quickly spring up offering the service of investigating this code looking for patent violations (I'm also sure that most of them would not begin to be able to do the job, but that's their, and their clients problem to deal with ;-)
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See? Patents do help foster innovation! Posted May 3, 2009 11:32 UTC (Sun) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]
Well, personally I have never seen one instance of patents having a positive influence on anything, but I've heard plenty of stories from various industries where they were a huge burden, so I'd rather do away with patents completely.
However, "immunity until notified" for published works would be a very fair deal for everyone, especially the society that allows patents, because publishing is exactly what patents are supposed to encourage.
See? Patents do help foster innovation! Posted May 3, 2009 12:41 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
playing devil's advocate here.
can you give an example of any country that did not have patent laws producing anywhere near the number of new things that are produced by the US?
unfortunantly there is no example to go by to counter this.
all that can be done is to look at history and note the number of things that we done by one person or group, and then lost over time to be rediscovered by another group many years later. the patent system is supposed to prevent this by getting these people to disclose 'enough details so that a person ordinarily skilled in the field can duplicate the invention'
In my opinion, the big problem is that the bar for getting patents is just too low. it used to be that you had to provide a working model of the invention to be inspected and see if it matched up with the patent. that's not done anymore, and many patents are for things that just don't work. the patent is also only supposed to be granted for things that are 'not obvious to a person skilled in the field', that is not being done (especially in the computer field) and this leads to far too many patents.
then you get into the problem that
See? Patents do help foster innovation! Posted May 3, 2009 13:27 UTC (Sun) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]
Yes, in software tons of things are being invented places where there are no software patents.
If there is any great advantage to having software patents then the US and Japan should be leading the world in software innovation.
See? Patents do help foster innovation! Posted May 3, 2009 14:26 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the grandparent comment was advocating eliminating all patents, not just the ones on software.
I don't think that there is anyone who would claim that software patents are currently working correctly.
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