Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Posted Apr 18, 2010 15:32 UTC (Sun) by Kit (guest, #55925)In reply to: Film: "Patent absurdity" by rvfh
Parent article: Film: "Patent absurdity"
Having a reasonable (a concept completely foreign to the current system) reward for truly innovative creations (another foreign concept) will help encourage innovation.
Posted Apr 18, 2010 16:02 UTC (Sun)
by ebiederm (subscriber, #35028)
[Link] (27 responses)
Patents are never the motivation for people to create. At their best patents can serve as a shelter so that you can afford to create. Too often these days patents don't manage to serve that purpose.
Posted Apr 18, 2010 19:29 UTC (Sun)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (26 responses)
however without something like patents, what is there to stop a big company from copying something invented by a small company/individual and using their economies of scale and existing distribution to drive the small company/inventor out of business?
forming a company to produce/sell a hardware product is _expensive_, if someone else can just copy the product and start selling it who would be willing to invest?
the patent office today is out of control, you will get no disagreement from me on that. But I believe the problem is that they are granting too many patents, not the idea of a patent is invalid.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 0:54 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (19 responses)
In case of software, that would be copyright.
In case of other patents, this may be more difficult, no doubt. Keeping something a secret while you ramp up production can be really, really difficult. That is the dilemma and inventor must face: should I go it alone or sell my invention to someone that has manufacturing capacity? Business involves risk - this is one of them.
> forming a company to produce/sell a hardware product is _expensive_, if someone else can just copy the product and start selling it who would be willing to invest?
> the patent office today is out of control, you will get no disagreement from me on that. But I believe the problem is that they are granting too many patents, not the idea of a patent is invalid.
True. So, the first step would be to get rid of patenting where it is not needed, which is software. As for the rest, it should probably be a lot more stringent. After all, I'm pretty sure that USPTO has registered patents for anti-gravity machines and such :-)
Posted Apr 19, 2010 1:24 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (18 responses)
in terms of other fields, it doesn't even need to be david vs goliath, any new idea is a risk.
again, using the safety pin example, even a large company is taking a significant risk in gearing up and pushing a new product, there are always other large companies that could dilute, if not beat you on any one product. in some cases it may be size related (say Vons supermarkets vs Wallmart), but in other cases it may just be that you have enough competitors, each of who could copy your success without having to take any risk of failure (think auto manufacturers, one may have a new idea, but if it works, every other company will have it in their vehicles the next year)
the way to eliminate patents on things like anti-gravity machines is to require a working model be available for examination and testing. the patent office used to have this requirement.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 2:09 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (17 responses)
Great example. Now, let's take Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz, for example.
Let's say that Hyundai can take all of Mercedes-Benz patents and use them tomorrow, free of charge. Do you honestly think that they would be making the same cars as Mercedes-Benz, just by having those patents available and for the money you pay today for current Hyundai models? That they could just take over that part of the market by virtue of having the same patent pool? I just don't see that happening in a hurry. It takes a lot more than that.
Coming back to the Nokia v. Apple thing. You know, Nokia have N900, they have X6, they have N97 and probably a half dozen other models. And yet, none of them are iPhone. It just isn't the same, because there are so many things to a great product that has charisma, not just patents.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 2:38 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (16 responses)
If Mercedes had the ability to use all of Hyundai's patents at no charge, how would Hyundai fight back?
say Hyundai developed a new engine design that gave them twice the power and MPG of existing engines for the same cost, weight and size. Don't you think that they should be able to license the design rather than just have it copied by Mercedes?
As for the Nikia v. Apple, I'm not sure what in the iphone should be patentable. it's good engineering, and it has nice polished software in it, but is that really novel enough to qualify for a patent? the engineering isn't patentable, they are assembling components purchased from others and packaging them nicely. As for the software, what is in the software that hasn't been done somewhere else by someone else first? They may have been the first to put multi-touch into a phone, but how is that substantially different than multi-touch interfaces on another computer system?
Not every successful product needs to have a patentable invention behind it.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 3:40 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (11 responses)
I think they should be able to come to the market with it first. Which they could, if they played their cards close to their chest.
The others would not able to use that immediately. They would have to figure out what it was, make prototypes, test, build production to do it etc. This takes time. In the meantime, Hyundai would be taking away their market share, provided they ran their business properly.
And again coming back to Nokia v. Apple, Nokia _is_ trying to do what Apple are doing. They have a music store, they have an application store, they have and control smartphone OS (several, in fact). But the problem is that Apple right now does it _better_, so they win. Same with everything else.
There are many products that have these great ideas in them, but otherwise suck. Most people stay away from them, in my experience.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 4:43 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (10 responses)
If that's your position we will just need to agree to disagree.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 5:43 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (6 responses)
Because industrial espionage is usually a breach of contract or some kind of law. Reverse engineering is not.
Patents come from a very dubious place - a very old law called Statute of Monopolies, which essentially limited crown given monopolies to new inventions only. I'm sure it was very progressive in 1623. Whether this remains the case in 2010 is a subject of many debates.
I can understand that there could be areas that are helped by giving out monopolies. However, we should do that sparingly. Current practice where every man and his dog can patent practically everything has gone way out of hand.
PS. I'm not sure why there would generally be a problem with using other people's ideas. Humans learn by copying. If we were stripped of that ability, we would not be ourselves any more. I cannot see why it should follow that whenever someone has an original thought, it should not be available to others freely. In fact, in many fields of endeavour this is the norm.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 6:04 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (5 responses)
the entire idea of the patent system is to make it so that those ideas are available for other people to use freely after the patent expires. If there was not such a system then there would be the risk of such ideas being lost, or locked up through trade secrets (with all the inefficiencies involved with maintaining such secrets, even where they are possible) for much longer time periods.
Our world today is what it is due to technologies that could have been locked up with trade secrets that are instead now freely available to use. Think of such things as how we make Steel or Aluminum and consider what would have happened if those were trade secrets of one particular company, with every employee being locked up under contract to not reveal the secrets.
Those are a couple examples where the process could be kept secret while selling the result. Prior to the patent system it would have been likely that such ideas would have died with the inventor, and had very little effect outside the immediate area (remember that if secrecy is your only protection against being flattened by your rivels you don't want to let many people in on the secret, which limits how large you can grow)
by giving out a temporary monopoly the patent system is designed to trade the short term advantage to the inventor for the long term advantage of society by making the inventor document the details of the invention. In the worst case (where the patent owner uses the patent to squash all use) society gets the invention a generation later, in the best case, not only does society get the invention free to everyone a generation later, the inventor is able to make good use of it in the meantime.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 6:24 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link]
Compare the situation to, for instance, general principles embedded in our (western) laws. Most times we err on the side of caution when someone's rights are to be squashed to gain something else. With patent law we do the opposite - we let broad monopolization of ideas to gain a very dubious outcome.
So, I remain sceptical whether we should be giving these things out like lollipops. It seems like suppression on a grand scale.
As for trade secrets, they exist right now and are enforced right around the world. If they were the all powerful tool to keep everyone out, create monopolies and endless profits, companies would just use them instead of patents, now wouldn't they? However, they don't last - people are inventive. They either figure out what you're doing or they come up with a better way.
So, no, I don't think that use of trade secrets would ultimately have a monopolistic effect. And if it would, we could simply adjust the duration of trade secrets via legislation. That would be really simple.
Posted Apr 20, 2010 21:05 UTC (Tue)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (3 responses)
Yet most patents cover ideas which can not be lost for they are embodies in millions of copies around the world and can be easily reverse-engineered. Sure. If you can not guess how the product is made even if you have it in your hands - then it's fair justification for monopoly. How many patents describe things like THAT? 0.1%? 1%? Nobody argues agains these patents. But why keep all the software patents around? The "great idea" embedded in software can not be easily lost: even if nobody has the source you can still use the same old implementation via emulators and recompilers. The initial justifications for patents is bogus in 99% cases for physical patents and 100% cases for software.
Posted Apr 20, 2010 21:40 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Apr 20, 2010 21:50 UTC (Tue)
by jordanb (guest, #45668)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Apr 20, 2010 21:54 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
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Posted Apr 19, 2010 8:31 UTC (Mon)
by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
[Link] (1 responses)
Are you arguing in favour of rewarding the individual (or company) or because of the benefit to society? If the second, is there any reasonable proof, not just based on assumptions and logic, that patents do bring the benefit they are supposed to? You know the thing about premature optimisation :)
Posted Apr 20, 2010 5:17 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
like most things in history we don't get a chance to do controlled experiments.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 9:52 UTC (Mon)
by Los__D (guest, #15263)
[Link]
Why should we need protection against actions that are already illegal?
Posted Apr 21, 2010 14:12 UTC (Wed)
by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942)
[Link] (3 responses)
If it would be possible, then most car companies would create such engine on its own. Inventions are not coming out of nowhere, they are based on past ideas. So it is possible for other people to come up with them. And if two persons would invent the same thing why do we want to award one who invented a month earlier?
The real value of the inventions is when they come into life as a product. Patents just slow down that since after getting a patent there is no insensitive to bring the invention into the world quickly as the company can just sit on the patent while deciding on a marketing plan.
Posted Apr 21, 2010 17:35 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (2 responses)
I think this is the core of the dispute.
if you believe that the idea will come to someone else at about the same time then patents are major harm.
however if you think that there are ideas that will not come to many people around the same time, then patents can be a good thing as they get those ideas to everyone at the expiration of the patent instead of having to wait for someone else to come up with the idea.
If you do not believe that ideas can be rare, then there is no reason to respect or honor anyone who has ever had an idea, because they will just be one of a flood of people with that same idea.
note that this would have to include Einstein, Darwin, Newton and all the 'great' figures in science and math as well.
I believe that there are ideas that are very rare.
There are too many cases where someone has noticed something (frequently the result of an accident of some sort) and pursued it to find something worthwhile.
Posted Apr 24, 2010 14:31 UTC (Sat)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link] (1 responses)
note that this would have to include Einstein, Darwin, Newton and
all the 'great' figures in science and math as well.
Maybe if you want to have an incentive for inventors, you could
look at the incentives there are for scientists; maybe such incentives
should be there for inventors, too. But we will never see this
happen, because then the big corporations who profit from patents
could no longer argue that the patents are needed for the small
inventor.
Posted Apr 26, 2010 13:31 UTC (Mon)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link]
Penrose tiling?
Posted Apr 19, 2010 1:05 UTC (Mon)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (4 responses)
The problem is, when IBM has 12,000 patents, and the small inventor has a handful, and the IBM infringes one of the small inventor's patents, IBM can always use their portfolio to force a cross-license. So the small inventor is never protected against competition. (RMS presentation) And that's the rare case where the small inventor has the desired patent. Usually it's the megacorp that has the desired patent, and the small inventor can't force a cross-license, so he either gets told to flat take his product off the market, or start paying a patent tax. I also have to disagree with the idea that the number or quality of patent today is the problem. I think the opposite. IBM wants the free software community to think that quality is the problem, so that people will support their ineffective, time-consuming patent projects such as DIY-patent-review. I think the best example of the real harm caused by patents is MPEG H.264. There are 900 patents, held by 29 companies in 50+ countries. No amount of raising the standards will ever solve the patent problems that mplayer, xine, GNOME, KDE etc. face. Complete abolition is the only reasonable solution. Anything else is just hand waving.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 1:33 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (3 responses)
in the software field this is the norm, in other fields I believe that it is the exception.
one problem is that due to the fact that the patent is published and is (by definition non-obvious), the legal assumption is that if you use the invention you learned about it from the patent. It would be nice if there was some way to prove independent invention and have that nullify a patent, but proving that you didn't hear about something is a hard thing to do. It may work if you have a large research staff and can show years of work on a subject, but it can't work for many other ideas (again the safety pin example, how could you prove that you thought up the idea independently). This is one of the trade-offs in patents, you occasionally punish independent invention in exchange for getting the idea out into the public for other people to use (instead of them being trade secrets) and getting new ideas developed (thereby encouraging new inventions).
Posted Apr 19, 2010 5:48 UTC (Mon)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (2 responses)
Yes. Patents have gotten out of hand in other industries, also.. but with software in particular it's a complete disaster.
Patents themselves have proven that they work and are effective at promoting inventions and inventors in the past, but like everything else in the USA government it has spiraled out of control.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 10:47 UTC (Mon)
by dark (guest, #8483)
[Link] (1 responses)
In their book Against Intellectual Monopoly, Boldrin and Levine examine a series of situations that should have demonstrated the innovation-boosting effects of patents, if there were any. They looked at countries before and after patents were extended to cover a field of business, and they looked at neighboring countries where one had patents and the other didn't.
In no case did they find increased innovation from patents. They did find cases where innovation went down, and some cases where the blooming of an entire industry was delayed until certain critical patents expired.
It seems obvious to me. The drawbacks of patents are easily visible, and the benefits remain speculative. Patents harm innovation by discouraging competition and imposing fees on incremental improvement.
Posted Apr 20, 2010 8:05 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
Posted Apr 24, 2010 13:56 UTC (Sat)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link]
OTOH, with something like patents, the big company has a much
easier time: Once they notice the small company, they can just send in
their lawyers who (probably rightfully) claim a patent infringement
and get an injunction, so the small company has hardly any time to
benefit from their invention. And the big company does not need to
develop or extend, produce, and market anything new.
Posted Apr 18, 2010 22:52 UTC (Sun)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (18 responses)
Usually that's profits from sales of whatever they are making. Trade secrets have worked reasonably well when it comes to protecting stuff you don't want your competitors to know (for a while).
I'm looking at the recent Apple/Nokia spat and thinking that patents are used by both companies to try to hurt the competitor rather than innovate. By all means, Apple have been newcomers to the mobile phone market, as compared to Nokia. Apple allege Nokia stole their IP. Nokia allege Apple stole their IP.
In reality, Apple made a product that people really wanted. They were able to produce it in quantity and deliver the right way. The fact that Nokia allegedly stole Apple IP isn't helping Nokia gain much ground in the market - everyone still wants an iPhone - for reasons unrelated to any patent. Similarly, Nokia lost that market share because they didn't have the product that filled the need of the market at that time, not because Apple supposedly stole their IP. And that happened because their business plan sucked and in many ways still does.
In short, factors that have nothing to do with patents have been crucial in ensuring the success of the iPhone (taking my daughter as a test subject, here a some: fashion statement, app store, itunes etc.). Because Apple were clever, they exploited the first mover advantage unbelievably well.
But, what Apple are trying to do with patents now is cement this position for a much longer time. What is the justification for this? They didn't make enough profits already? They are losing money on iPhone? I think not.
You can see Apple's attempts to do similar things with HTC as well. Similar logic: now that we are winning, we should continue winning forever.
Nokia's attempts to turn back the clock using patents is equally counter productive. They should focus on culling 90% of their devices and putting effors into making the rest working properly instead. Which, again, is not related to patents in any way.
In the end, the important question in the above example is this: would Apple have been just as successful with the iPhone if patents didn't exist? You bet. And on the flipside: would Nokia have lost the market share? Absolutely.
Posted Apr 18, 2010 23:17 UTC (Sun)
by Kit (guest, #55925)
[Link] (12 responses)
Amusingly enough, patents were meant to be an improvement over trade secrets, in that instead of the information simply staying hidden forever (requiring someone ELSE to independently rediscover it, which shouldn't happen very often for truly novel ideas), the creator would get a time-limited monopoly on it, in exchange for making the information open to the public domain.
The problem is that the patent system is simply a mess. The barrier to entry for the little guy is way too high (but more than low enough that larger entities have no problem amassing a huge number), while at the same time the patent office is giving patents out for things that shouldn't even be patentable in any way, shape, or form.
Posted Apr 18, 2010 23:51 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (10 responses)
I mean: the only requirement for patent is it's "novelity" and "non-obviousness". And "non-obviousness" is understood as "inability to invent it in 5minutes". If we want to replace trade secrets "non-obviousness" must be defined slightly differently: "inability to replicate the invention after playing for 5minutes with the presented model (without reading the text of patent, of course)".
This will kill 99% of patents right then and there - and will be more then enough to induce disclosure of trade secrets. They are by definition hard to guess from the end result - or how can you keep them secret?
Posted Apr 19, 2010 0:04 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (9 responses)
the problem is that the patent office is not enforcing the non-obviousness or disclosure requirements.
but some patents are obvious from the product that's being sold, and trade secrets do no good at protecting the invention.
as a trivial example, consider the safety pin, how could you sell it and keep it's design a trade secret?
Posted Apr 19, 2010 0:34 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (7 responses)
This, IMHO, is the wrong issue. Invention shouldn't need protecting. What needs protecting is your ability, as an inventor, to move first and reap benefits from that alone. Trade secrets work pretty well for that.
If, then, your invention is so non-obvious to others, it will take them much longer to reverse engineer it. Which will give you even bigger advantage. If it is more obvious, you will lose this first mover advantage rather quickly, as you should, because the invention was fairly obvious.
On the other hand, patent systems gives the same number of years to all inventions, making the obvious one real obstacles to progress.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 0:58 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (6 responses)
take the example of the safety pin, it was very non-obvious to come up with, but very easy to reverse engineer.
trade secrets can do absolutly no good in protecting the invention.
a small company that starts to manufacture them could easily have the product reverse-engineered by a large company that doesn't have to build a factory to build them, and which has distribution channels to sell them, and which can purchase materials cheaper than the small company.
there would be a slight lag in the time to market of the copy-cat product of the large company, but not much of one, and any such lag could be smaller than the time it would take the small company to negotiate prices with sales outlets nationwide (which the large company would not need to do)
think how quickly wallmart could get a product cheaply onto store shelves across the country and consider how hard it would be for a small company to get their product onto store shelves across the country.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 1:53 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (5 responses)
> take the example of the safety pin, it was very non-obvious to come up with, but very easy to reverse engineer.
Walter Hunt was happy to get $400 for the invention at the time (which would be around $10,000 today). If he were to sell this to a manufacturing company at the time, instead of the man he owed the money to, do you not think the manufacturer would make a sizeable profit on this before others moved in? And, they could also be the ones owning the trademark (if they so wished), making the "original" safety pin. And all that for measly $400, or $10,000 in today's money.
I don't see the significance of this example.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 2:27 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (4 responses)
if you want an example where there was a much larger fight, but similar (if less clear) inability to protect against reverse engineering, take a look at the colt revolver patents. I don't remember the full history (and I am not taking the time to look it up right now), but I seem to remember that the initial inventor attempted to make a go at it before selling out to a larger manufacturer (and if I remember, he sold out because people were infringing on his patent and he didn't have the resources to fight them), but even that larger manufacturer waged patent fights for years.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 6:05 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (3 responses)
"At the time of his death, Colt's estate, which he left to his wife and son, was estimated to be valued at around $15,000,000."
This is an interesting quote from the same article:
"Colt never claimed to have invented the revolver, as his design was merely a more practical adaption of Collier's revolving flintlock, which was patented in England and achieved great popularity there."
That's the thing about copying - it is very, very useful :-)
Posted Apr 19, 2010 6:37 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (2 responses)
As was pointed out by others Colt is yet about example of how original inventor got no benefits out of the patent. If you take look on the huge "patent fights" over easily reverse-engineerable patents you'll see that rarely original inventor get serious money to continue his work (Edison is rare exception). In most cases the people who buy patent for the cheap and then exploit money benefit - or in some rare cases few guys invent something and only one profits out of the invention. Patents like this are good for extortion but bad for progress: patents which cover results of expensive research are rarely fought over. It's literally cheaper to buy the license rather then reverse-engineer.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 22:27 UTC (Mon)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
Oh -and if you're talking about the light bulb, it wasn't that! Edison patented a light bulb that DIDN'T WORK. The light bulb he made his money from was a copy of Joseph Swann's, which he came across - in production - in England some two years before he filed his own patents.
(Oh, and Swann's bulb was patented - Edison ripped him off!)
Cheers,
Posted Apr 20, 2010 6:52 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
Posted Apr 19, 2010 6:22 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
You can't - and that's the point. Patent system was already broken back then - it was just not so obvious. Take look on these ancient fibulae. Do they look similar? What is non-obvious and what can be patented are exact proportions - if you spent money and time, performed and a lof of investigations and found uber-effective and good proportions for pin then others can buy the rights from you or use other, less effective proportions (few percents from optimum is Ok, I think).
Posted Apr 19, 2010 0:30 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link]
Actually, the problem with _software_ patents is that the disclosure bit doesn't work. When did anyone ever hear of a software company encouraging their software developers to go looking for ideas in the patent database? This can only land them in more trouble.
Instead, it is cheaper and easier to "invent" the same thing on your own, without reading any patents at all. Which then brings us to the second point: non-obviousness. If the patent was so non-obvious, how come many have been able to "invent" it on their own, which happens with software all the time?
In the end, such patents do not serve the purpose they are supposedly there for.
Posted Apr 18, 2010 23:58 UTC (Sun)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (4 responses)
In addition, for physical products you may not be able to sell something and keep it's design a trade secret (for some manufacturing processes you could attempt to keep the process secret, but you can't keep the result secret and still sell it)
one of the problems with patents right now is that the patent language does not clearly explain what the patent is describing. The patent is supposed to describe the invention in such a way that anyone normally skilled in the field could implement the idea, many current patents are so vague that even experts in the field cannot tell exactly what is being patented and so cannot clearly say if something implemented by someone else infringes on the patent.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 0:42 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (3 responses)
A noble idea, no doubt. However, in practice, and particularly when it comes to software patents, most times counter productive.
As I mentioned in other posts, the problems are many. First, all patents get the same length of protection, no matter now easy/hard are they to reverse engineer or "invent" independently. Also, nobody in the software business ever looked at patents for ideas, because they could be held liable for triple damages if they inadvertently infringe on a patent they read about.
In the end, this renders the idea of disclosure next to worthless.
No doubt, being talented and skilled in mathematics and being able to apply it to various areas of computing is something to be admired. People coming up with that stuff should be celebrated and highly paid, IMHO. However, giving people monopoly over that sort of thing is counter productive for the society and should not be done.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 1:15 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (2 responses)
the problem with patents in software is that there is so much independent invention that is not documented in any way that the patent office could check, and the patent office is not qualified to determine if something is 'obvious to someone ordinarily skilled in the art'
add to this the contoured legalese that the patent discousures are written in and you end up with a situation where even the inventor can have trouble understanding what the patent is describing.
I agree that software patents are a disaster and need to be killed off, but when talking about the problems with software patents you need to be careful to say you are talking about software patents, not patents as a whole (unless you really are intending to talk about patents as a whole)
patents work in many fields, and have worked for centuries, the fact that they don't work in a new field (software) doesn't change this.
Posted Apr 19, 2010 6:54 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (1 responses)
Bogus patents are norm, not an exception and they often protect obvious and simple things. System break-down started long ago - it's just with software patents it's more obvious. Sadly they start to work poorly even in places where they worked for centuries. Where before we got patents for the process of making colored glass (thing which eluded people for centuries) today we are getting patents about how to arrange flowers in a vase!Film: "Patent absurdity"
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Yup - and this is where it all falls apart...
The entire idea of the patent system is to make it so that those ideas are available for other people to use freely after the patent expires. If there was not such a system then there would be the risk of such ideas being lost, or locked up through trade secrets (with all the inefficiencies involved with maintaining such secrets, even where they are possible) for much longer time periods.
Our world today is what it is due to technologies that could have been locked up with trade secrets that are instead now freely available to use. Think of such things as how we make Steel or Aluminum and consider what would have happened if those were trade secrets of one particular company, with every employee being locked up under contract to not reveal the secrets.
Those are a couple examples where the process could be kept secret while selling the result. Prior to the patent system it would have been likely that such ideas would have died with the inventor, and had very little effect outside the immediate area (remember that if secrecy is your only protection against being flattened by your rivels you don't want to let many people in on the secret, which limits how large you can grow)
Yup - and this is where it all falls apart...
Yup - and this is where it all falls apart...
Yup - and this is where it all falls apart...
>so you think the only advantage anyone should get for a new invention is whatever head
start they can get on the competition, and other than that everyone should be able to freely
use any ideas that they can get their hands onFilm: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
If you do not believe that ideas can be rare, then there
is no reason to respect or honor anyone who has ever had an idea,
because they will just be one of a flood of people with that same
idea.
Science and math is not patentable, not even in the USA. And the
research done by these people was done without having an "incentive"
from a monopoly (what would that incentive be for science, actually?).
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Have they proven this? Where, and when?
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
however without something like patents, what is there to
stop a big company from copying something invented by a small
company/individual and using their economies of scale and existing
distribution to drive the small company/inventor out of business?
Nothing. But the small company can use their invention (hopefully
enough to recoup their investment and make a nice profit) before the
big company gets going; and that's quite a window of opportunity until
the big company has developed or extended their product (if they succeed at all)
and ramped up production, marketing etc. There were 700000 copies of
VisiCalc sold despite its being cloned soon by several companies,
including Microsoft.
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
>Trade secrets have worked reasonably well when it comes to
>protecting stuff you don't want your competitors to know (for a while).
If it's the replacement for trade secrets then why it's not declared so?
If it's the replacement for trade secrets then why it's not declared so?
If it's the replacement for trade secrets then why it's not declared so?
If it's the replacement for trade secrets then why it's not declared so?
If it's the replacement for trade secrets then why it's not declared so?
If it's the replacement for trade secrets then why it's not declared so?
If it's the replacement for trade secrets then why it's not declared so?
Colt is yet another good example and Bell is too
Colt is yet another good example and Bell is too
Wol
Colt is yet another good example and Bell is too
You can't - and that's the point.
as a trivial example, consider the safety pin, how could you sell it and keep it's design a trade secret?
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
Film: "Patent absurdity"
No, they don't
I am not saying that patents work well for software (in fact I think they don't work for software), but I do think that they work well in other fields.
patents work in many fields, and have worked for centuries, the fact that they don't work in a new field (software) doesn't change this.
