The disabling of hardware codecs in community distributions

In the US, Alice v. CLS Bank has dealt a death blow to software patents. We just have to make sure they stay dead :)

Naw, it’s world of the lawyers, for the lawyers, and by the lawyers.

Let’s people decide by themselves which one is worse :).

And here I'm just making up something that I'm sure people better-qualified than me probably have covered, but:
any technology that becomes an international standard (ISO, IEEE, ITU, whatever) should

1. after some public period, be legally closed to any further "oh wait we have a patent that covers that!" claims.
2. therefore, have an official, reliable, world-wide "patent is done, this is for the world" date

This kind of goes hand-in-hand with some of the other things I listed -- the "no-accidental-reinvention" part could help make this reasonably possible, and from the other direction, the standard itself could cover open source project licensing and so on.

I certainly think that the terms for software patents are too long.

My preference is for no software patents, but if we must have them then a much shorter period is required.

Our legislators seem to have forgotten that 20 years was picked as a compromise. In a world of physical manufacturing it was deemed roughly long enough for someone to acquire financing, arrange a location, set up tooling and begin production whilst still giving a period of monopoly on the sale of the invention. Effectively it gave you a head start over the competition.

By the late 90s software was at a point where it was already moving far faster than those 20 years were meant to deal with. Software doesn't require anywhere near as much investment in manufacturing and distribution logistics - a box with floppies or CDs, some booklets and a manual were not that difficult to produce. Many companies were already giving up on that, and by the mid-2000s a lot of software was simply downloaded.

These days we look back on the 1980s ring binders and generous manuals as a luxury of ancient times. If we're lucky then the software we buy has a PDF manual that consists mostly of screenshots. If we're exceptionally lucky then the screenshots in it are for the version we actually bought.

So we're basically looking at a system that was designed to deal with an initial startup period measured in years, but it's being used for an industry which can measure its startup period for products in days. Sometimes even hours.

It was almost defensible in the days of the GIF patent. But today 20 years is just unfit for purpose. 7 years is a more reasonable compromise, but still a compromise.

Late to the party, of course, but the "accidental reinvention invalidates" idea is nice, but impossible to make workable in practise - the standard of evidence that would be required to prove that it really was accidental reinvention would be prohibitive. Particularly given the requirement that patents are published.

In theory that should be captured by the question of novelty, something that the patent examiners should be qualified to judge - the fact that they're /not/ is a separate issue from the legal rules around patents.