"How to Save the Republican Party"

**Lemur** · 02-19-2013, 15:48

Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy

It's easy to talk about patents as a barrier but there removal could actually reduce an economy.

Reform ≠ removal.

**gaelic cowboy** · 02-19-2013, 16:13

Originally Posted by Lemur

Reform ≠ removal.

Removal of some barrier tends to be the startpoint/endpoint in all these debates.

Essentially patents are the easiest way to monetise the internet/software, there also the easiest way to protest your ideas/products in a deregulated economy.

If you have no software patents then you have to fall back to rent collection to monetise your products.

**drone** · 02-19-2013, 16:28

Copyright and patents are meant to promote arts and science, not stifle it. Art and invention belong to the public domain, the patent/copyright term is merely a government-granted monopoly to the creator to reward the effort. It is not a license to rent-seek to the end of time.

Software patents need to be the first on the block. Software is already covered by copyright, and you aren't supposed to be able to patent math, which is all that software is.

The Democrats are owned by Hollywood when it comes to IP-related issues, this is as good a place as any for the GOP to lead the charge.

**Lemur** · 02-19-2013, 16:32

Originally Posted by drone

The Democrats are owned by Hollywood when it comes to IP-related issues, this is as good a place as any for the GOP to lead the charge.

This. Precisely this.

**gaelic cowboy** · 02-19-2013, 16:47

Originally Posted by drone

Copyright and patents are meant to promote arts and science, not stifle it. Art and invention belong to the public domain, the patent/copyright term is merely a government-granted monopoly to the creator to reward the effort. It is not a license to rent-seek to the end of time.

Software patents need to be the first on the block. Software is already covered by copyright, and you aren't supposed to be able to patent math, which is all that software is.

The Democrats are owned by Hollywood when it comes to IP-related issues, this is as good a place as any for the GOP to lead the charge.

Actually patents have never really being good promoters of art and science, they are along with copyright about making sure someone get paid for there efforts.

If no one can protect the software they produce then it will be ripped off, essentially no one will pay for any of it. Now i'm guessing here that this probably wouldn't hurt the development of software, but software employment becomes much reduced.

Software companies would essentially have to compete in service provision after you bought the product, in fact they would probably have to give it away for free in order to extract rent from you instead.

no one will be willing to scrap them so at best patents will be be more easily challenged, and also the narrow definition of copying and theft of software will need to be looked at.

**drone** · 02-19-2013, 17:14

Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy

If no one can protect the software they produce then it will be ripped off, essentially no one will pay for any of it. Now i'm guessing here that this probably wouldn't hurt the development of software, but software employment becomes much reduced.

Software companies would essentially have to compete in service provision after you bought the product, in fact they would probably have to give it away for free in order to extract rent from you instead.

no one will be willing to scrap them so at best patents will be be more easily challenged, and also the narrow definition of copying and theft of software will need to be looked at.

Source code is protected by copyright, binaries are generally what gets delivered to the customer.

**gaelic cowboy** · 02-19-2013, 18:10

Originally Posted by drone

Source code is protected by copyright, binaries are generally what gets delivered to the customer.

but you wouldn't be able to rely on copyright to protect your source code though Drone cos in this non-patent scenario it's just math and that's in the public domain.

**Lemur** · 02-19-2013, 19:14

gaelic cowboy, do you believe that naturally occurring genomes should have patent protection? Algorithms? Mathematical equations?

Why do you believe copyright is insufficient?

**drone** · 02-19-2013, 20:04

Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy

but you wouldn't be able to rely on copyright to protect your source code though Drone cos in this non-patent scenario it's just math and that's in the public domain.

Source code is like a book. You can tell a basic story many ways, but the character names and places are unique. Copyrighted source code means no one can take my files, compile them, and sell the executable. But they can write their own code that does the same thing.

**Tellos Athenaios** · 02-20-2013, 02:43

Software patents were invented to make the likes of IBM a lot of money. Rent-seeking is all they are good for (licensing), hence the niche occupied by the patent troll. Particularly since the lifetime or validity of a patent bear no relationship to actual product or maturity in the market.

That's part one of the problem. Part two is the fact that most of these software inventions have prior art writ large upon them, plain to see for anyone in the trade*. Unfortunately patent offices don't really do this whole "checking the application" thing. So there's an inordinate amount of dross, obvious, or prior art patented, whatever the intentions of the law supposedly were.

Part three is that when it comes to genuine inventions in the art of software, patents don't fit at all. Patents are supposed to protect specific inventions brought to market, not vague descriptions or generic concepts. However, most of the insights in software fall into the "generically reusable concept" category (either as part of computer science or as part of engineering "best-practices"), not in a specific design. Specific designs tend to wind up being algorithms which are not supposed to be patentable in the first place.

Part four is that everyone knows it so it's a matter of war-gaming the system so you can be bigger and badder than your nearest competitors and therefore frighten them off. MAD is not a very healthy paradigm. It's a culture in which people play games like "who can get the whackiest patent past the USPTO?".
[*] And that goes for a lot of patents where "hardware + software" is involved as well. Consider the 2000's era patents on icons on a cell phone, which are distinctly wrong when you recall that your 90's era brick with antenna had those as well, nevermind the questionable novelty of pictograms on a screen at the time. (Pictograms on a screen being something out of the lab from the 50's/60's.)

http://www.ted.com/talks/drew_curtis...ent_troll.html

**gaelic cowboy** · 02-20-2013, 02:55

@ Tellos Athenaios pretty much everything you wrote can be solved without removing patents from any industry.

I can understand the arguements against patents, however seeing as a lot of the economy is tied up in them we better be certain it's a good idea.

**Tellos Athenaios** · 02-20-2013, 03:11

Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy

@ Tellos Athenaios pretty much everything you wrote can be solved without removing patents from any industry.

Solved, how? Will the USPTO, or for that matter any patent office, suddenly do their job properly when it comes to software patents? Will patent lifetime be reduced to something suitable when compared to how many iterations of the invention will or could occur in that time? Will patent applications get processed swiftly so they may be granted or rejected before the subject is outdated or common knowledge?

Anyway there's of course a small problem with "pure software patents" in that pure software is merely algorithms and therefore math, as illustrated: http://paulspontifications.blogspot....hematical.html