I am just curious if there is anyone here able to point a single useful outcome of software patents. I am a software engineer and I can not find any good in software patents. Copyright laws and trade secrete are enough to protect our work.
The value is that it helps you cement the value of your business with potential investors and the bank, it establishes credibility when marketing yourself to customers.
I'm fundamentally opposed to them, but the reality is that they exist. Because of this, I found myself organising patent protection for our software.
If they are abolished, I'll be upset about my £8k investment - but more happy that sanity has prevailed.
The value is that it helps you cement the value of your business with potential investors and the bank, it establishes credibility when marketing yourself to customers.
In other words: a legal cudgel, often useful to business people and often useful to startups. I'm sure the economy does not benefit from the ensuing posturing and cudgeling, but I can see why someone would see having one in their self interest.
I think you could cut out a lot of software patent trolling if you required a working device to be submitted. With the widespread availability of small, cheap, microprocessors, this wouldn't be an insurmountable requirement for individuals. Also, it would make silly software patents like "One-Click" less straightforward to apply for. (Amazon: this box implements the "One-Click" functionality. Reviewer: how can I make it work? Amazon: well, it has to be plugged into our test data-center.)
Many software patents I've read seem totally invalid. But there are a few I think may be reasonable. For example, many audio/video codecs like the ones in the MPEG standards are developed by companies who make money through patent licensing. And for the most the ideas in these patents are far from "obvious."
You could argue about whether these patents are good or bad for society, but at least in these cases the patent system is operating as designed: allowing companies to profit from novel research through a temporary monopoly on the results.
These two lines of pseudocode are patented. In reality, they usually are implemented in just about two lines. There's nothing non-obvious about it; if you take 15 minutes and go test the only two possible median prediction methods, this one comes up as the best.
And yet it's patented. And most video coding software patents are just like this one: stupid.
If you want even more ridiculous ones, just go look at motion search patents; they've basically patented everything under the sun.
Patents should be on implementations, not ideas. Algorithms are ideas, not implementations. People didn't do this decades ago; the inventor of Quicksort didn't rush out to patent it. But today, any time anyone comes up with an algorithm, they instantly patent it, because the system is broken.
I think DEC did have a patent on link lists in the 80s ;) - but still, your point remains. It wasn't the inventor that did it either (just someone having a laugh).
The main point to argue here is that in this case the patents do not protect an invention they protect a "reasoning process", a concept (or several). In mathematics once you know and understand the solution, even for the most complicated problem, the solution becomes obvious. (The same happens with any cognitive process.)
If for example one of the days I teach my students the mathematics behind MPEG and if I am a good teacher, then the very next moment the MPEG algorithm is obvious to them.
On the other hand the implementation of an algorithm can be complex and laborious and it is worth being protected, but this is done by copyright. (Nobody should be allowed to copy-paste code unless the author permits it.)
But I must admit that I somehow understand your point here. Let's say that someone discovers such a smart concept that is worth being awarded with a temporary monopoly, even if we protect a cognitive process. But in this case he already has the monopoly! The only thing he has to do is not to disclose the idea to others. (The algorithm is a trade secret in this case.) Eventually the secrete will be revealed, maybe by reverse engineering, but the company in discussion already has profited on its temporary monopoly. (This is natural protection for software if I can say that. Not the same case for a device invented in 18th, at that time all you had to do was to open its box and copy the mechanism inside it. Here patents are fully justified.)
Trying to find out what is the exact patent protection period I have found what Jim Warren said on "Public Hearing on Use of the Patent System to Protect Software Related Inventions" Wednesday, January 26, 1994 San Jose Convention Center, and this is exactly my point:
"(6) Reduce the protection period.
Issue a finding that 17-year software protection patents are
clearly unreasonable where, in an industry where significant
innovation can often be created in months, most innovation
has minimal costs relative to traditional inventions,
manufacturing and distribution is trivial, products can be
shipped within weeks of being finalized, great profits can be
attained in less than a year, the life of a product typically is
only a few years, and all of the growth of the industry, from
inception to Diamond vs. Diehr in 1981, was barely three
times the 17-year monopoly period.
Shorten the one-time protection period to no more than,
say, two years. Sui generis is justified."
To conclude my long post, sorry for that :), I must say we are developing products that make use of audio/video compression techniques and I needed to develop and implement several such algorithms and I can say for sure that software patents were not at all helpful for me, on the contrary, they only gave us head aches.
A good example would be Skype, who have defeated reverse engineering of their protocol, and benefitted from that temporary monopoly. (I'm using "defeated" in rather broad terms, since the protocol was eventually reverse engineered).
Last time I did a startup, it was made very clear to me that having IP was effectively a requirement; without it, our chances of getting investment money were enormously lower, and our likely value at M&A or IPO would be lower as well. In other words, not getting a patent would significantly decrease the chances of success, and the eventual value of the company.
So I applied. The short version of the story: it was a revolting, morally abhorrent, tedious, timewasting and unbelievably expensive process. It costs $15,000 to apply for a preliminary patent which offers no protection, but does set the date of your priority. From the date you file the preliminary patent, you have 1 year to file the all-up version or all rights expire and you can't get them back. Doing this second version would have cost $50,000.
Throughout the application process, the lawyers made very clear that:
1) We wouldn't get approved or denied for 4-5 years.
2) We wouldn't ever know until the patent was actually granted if someone else had already filed one on it that had priority over ours, because some patents are not visible to a search.
3) The patent was going to be useless to us in court, because a) we would not have the money to defend it and b) we had probably invalidated it anyway by discussing the idea in public and/or having a publicly-visible (if unpublished) alpha version available before the patent application was filed.
4) Whatever protection it did grant was only in the USA; international protection was an entirely different ball of wax that we'd need to deal with separately, and probably couldn't have gotten or paid for even if we had wanted to.
Tell me how this does not describe an utterly broken system that discriminates against small companies?
This is a prime example why commercial use of open-source leads to benefits for both sides. Some people think "commercial" == "bad" no matter what. Here you see that with commercial background, you might be able to help the greater good with your backing.
Are you entirely certain that RedHat is not worried about future 'submarine' warfare in future? (Sure, they have a steady supply of peasant soldiers, but the empire rules the seas...)
Who does RH legal talk about here, anybody got link: "The brief of one large technology company even tried to argue that patents somehow benefit the open source community."?
