English Court Allows Patents For "Complex" Software

jonbryce writes "The court of appeal in England has ruled that companies should be granted patents for 'complex' software products. In this particular case, Symbian had written something that makes mobile phones run faster. The court case has received very little attention because of the bank crisis, but it can be appealed to the House of Lords and then the European Court of Justice."

Complex?

[quanticle]

I'm not sure how this ruling makes sense, given that the article didn't actually say what the legal definition of "complex" was.

Photoshop is Complex

[B4light]

But that doesn't mean Adobe should be allowed to patent software with the ability to edit raster images...

Why?

[Darkness404]

Amidst the fact that most of the world is going through a major crisis, who in world could think that what we need to do is give the corporations even more power while limiting competition? Wasn't the lesson we learned was that large corporations were bad and that you should give more power to the people? Apparently not.

Software Patents kill Innovation

[CuteSteveJobs]

Software Patents make writing software in a particular country a risky proposition. There are so many things the USPTO has let be patented, that I doubt you can write a single program without violating someone's patents. You have to wonder, if Software Patents existed in the US from the beginning, if the US Software Industry would have grown into what it is today? Easier to move to and write your software somewhere else (which now doesn't include Britain).

Re:Photoshop is Complex

[lysergic.acid]

that's a poor way to grant patents. just because something has market value doesn't make it an innovation or an invention. anything that is useful has market value--especially if you're able to patent it and force others to pay you licensing/royalty fees to use it. the ultimate goal of the patent and copyright system is to promote public good and societal progress. public interest should always be placed above economic interest, not the other way around.

one of the inherent flaws with most patent systems is that once something is patented, even if someone else with no knowledge of the patent filing independently invents the same idea, they will either, be forced to pay royalties to the first inventor, or simply forbidden from using their own invention. it's a means of excluding others from the use of the patented idea, essentially giving the patent holder a monopoly. but why should someone be prevented from implementing an idea they invented independently just because they came up with the idea later? should being born 10 years earlier give a person the right to monopolize an obvious concept?

software patents exacerbate the problem when companies are allowed to patent mathematical algorithms or trivial/obvious functionality. things like UI interfaces, JavaScript popups, portable e-mail, etc. should not be patentable. these patents do not benefit society in any way, and they have hindered technological progress rather than promote it.

at the very least, non-commercial uses of patented ideas should not be prohibited. give the first inventor exclusive rights to commercial the idea, but if someone else comes along and re-invents the same concept for personal use, they should be free to do so. otherwise the patent system is just restricting free expression and stifling innovation.

Re:Complex?

[Fluffeh]

Not to be daft, and certainly not to promote a pro-patent view on /. but isn't this pretty much the exact purpose of a patent rather than the vague bland ones that seem to be making the way in droves? I say if you develop some tricky algorithm to make phones "work faster" than you should be allowed to patent it, and flog it off to the carriers.

If you ask me, it's the IBM Patent space Patent [slashdot.org] patents that we should all be worrying about. It someone invents something, power to them. If you patent something that is simply there to make it harder for others to be creative - THAT is when we should be writing to our collective members.

Why can't people just use their common sense [roflposters.com] when it comes to patents?

A stupid idea....

[Joce640k]

Sometimes really simple ideas are the hardest to come up with.

What's wrong with patents is when they allow ideas that any competent person would come up with in a couple of minutes if they ever needed to do it, ie. the only reason nobody "invented" it yet is that nobody ever needed it.

Example: "Compact text encoding of latitude/longitude coordinates" - Patent 20050023524

(Guess who patented that one...)

Basically it's just base-64 encoding of lat/long coordinates.

It may be "new" (in the sense that it was never done before) but any competent programmer could have come up with it with a few seconds thought.

By this yardstick my current software should have at least 10,000 patents covering it.

This makes no sense.

[AndyCR]

First of all, you don't "patent" software - you patent portions of software. Patenting entire pieces of software would make no sense, as it would do nearly the same darned thing as copyrighting it. Second, what defines complex? All software ideas are complex. Is a BSP tree sufficiently complex? I imagine so, and a patent on that would have decimated the game industry early on.

This sure clears everything up.......NOT

[Martian_Kyo]

Pity most ingenious software solutions are simple.

This just complicates things, most complex software is combination of widely known design patterns, which part of it will be patented?

Judges will have to be real code gurus to judge in these cases.

Not to mention that things like this will could only stifle progress if actively enforced.

Re:Complex?

[Chrisq]

So you can only patent a computer program if it does something!

Re:Something about software is different.

[Tim C]

In most other industries, the patent system means that if I invent a nice mouse trap I can get royalties from the guy with the mouse trap factory a.k.a. the producer.

Or you can invent your own type of mousetrap, different to/better than that one in some way, and convince people to buy yours rather than theirs.

That's not possible with software patents as it is the concept of e.g. "storing user preferences in a database and retrieving them on subsequent visits" that is patented, not the actual implementation. They don't patent the implementation because they don't need to, that's covered by copyright.

Patenting software is essentially an attempt to extend copyright to cover all other implementations that would otherwise be non-infringing. That's why it's wrong.