Critical Brain Candy

Is secularism a bad thing? Congrats to Germany – Focus on a real hero

2 Comments (+add yours?)

1. Steve Young
   Mar 13, 2005 @ 09:48:44

   While I’m sure we all agree that recently there has definitely been an abuse of patents (and probably not even just software patents), I’m not sure that I agree that patenting software is always a bad idea.

   I fail to see a material difference between the patentability of an idea such as Tesla’s magnetic field shifting AC motor, and the patentability of the idea for the first public-key encryption algorithm that Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman came up with while they were at MIT. That is to say, if RSA encryption (a software patent) is unpatentable, why is anything at all patentable?

   Neil, is it your belief that no intellectual property should be protected by patents (and you’re using the examples of recent abuse of software patents in the USA to leap to that conclusion), or do you feel that ideas like RSA encryption are somehow different from other patents?

2. Neil Thier
   Mar 13, 2005 @ 12:15:04

   Steve,

   You’re correct, I’m not trying to imply that absolutely nothing in the software realm is subject to patents. The intention of patents is to reward individuals or companies that invest a great deal of money into research. That’s it. If money was not involved there would be no other reason for patents. They exist to provide an incentive for innovation.

   You also may be correct that there are other recent lapses in the patent system outside of software, but to be honest I haven’t been seeking those out. I’d love to hear of examples if you know of any, for interests sake.

   Then we come to the current situation. I think most of the world would agree that patents like Amazons “1 click purchase” and this recent one of patenting “active multimedia content downloaded over a network” are total abuses. The point is that these are not “inventions,” they’re ideas. If someone wants to patent some new ultra-efficient way to do multimedia on the Internet, that might be more acceptable.

   There are a few interesting things that do seperate software from other types of patentable items, though. The biggest is the ease of reproducability. If you have a patent for downloading active content into a browser, I could probably write a program to infringe on that in about 5 minutes. As a comparison, it’s much harder to reproduce a new manufacturing technique throughout several factories. The fact that I can reproduce it so easily, without prior knowledge of your patent, is proof that it shouldn’t be patentable in the first place.

   Further, the only thing it took me to reproduce it was my time. The fact that I can give the fruits of my labour away for free does make this whole topic more complicated. No one is going to infringe on a patent in the manufacturing sector and then give it away for free – the materials would likely cost too much. But if some kid spends every day after school for a year writing a program that ends up infringing on a patent, and they want to open-source it, should that be infringement? I would argue that if someone can do it for free, then no, it should be fine. The entire point is to protect the monetary incentive. If a kid can do it by himself, with no money, that’s not protecting anyones research dollars.

   Does this mean the bar for what’s patentable will move higher over time? Yes, and I think that’s how it should be.