Is the Tide Turning On Patents? 172
Glyn Moody writes "The FSF has funded a new video, 'Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system,' freely available (of course) in Ogg Theora format (what else?). It comes at a time when a lot is happening in the world of patents. Recent work from leading academics has called into question their basis: 'The work in this paper, and that of many others, suggests that this traditionally-struck "devil's bargain" may not be beneficial.' We recently discussed how a judge struck down Myriad Genetics's patents on two genes because they involved a law of Nature, and were thus 'improperly granted.' Meanwhile, the imminent Supreme Court ruling In re Bilski is widely expected to have negative knock-on effects for business method and software patents. Is the tide beginning to turn?"
I'm not as optimistic about Bilski (Score:5, Insightful)
I see a lot of parallels between Bilski and Eldred v. Ashcroft [lmgtfy.com]. They are both IP cases where the Court was asked to step in and do Congress's job for it. In Eldred they refused to issue any opinion whatsoever as to what would constitute an unreasonable extension of copyright terms. I see no Constitutional basis for them to hand down any other opinion in Bilski. IMHO the majority will refuse to state anything definitive on the issue, and mumble something about it being Congress's prerogative to interpret the "progress of science and the useful arts" clause in any way they see fit.
At that point lobbyists will descend on Congress with checkbooks in hand, and we'll all end up worse off than we were before the case was ever brought.
Re:Piling on (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes and No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but barely, and could easily return to the No side with big money backing it.
That being said, whether it's next week or next year or 20 years from now, software patents will be be pointless. They will be ignored by everyone and their dog because countries like China and Russia completely ignore them and to compete with them, we will do the same thing.
Open source is the future, believe it or not.
Monsanto (Score:1, Insightful)
Most of the patent stuff I read is definitely stifling to innovation, but when it comes to things like Monsanto and their patent on specific varieties of plants and seeds that get into the wild and contaminate other crops, that's not just irritating or unfair, it's downright terrifying.
Very good read (Score:1, Insightful)
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm
Hopefully this silliness will end.
At the very least, we can get mandatory licensing. I almost understand rewarding funds for research on a particular technology (not quite, much of it is simultaneously discovered) but I absolutely do not understand giving any party a monopoly over how to use that technology. Patents and copyright only stifle creativity and progress.
This is progress? (Score:3, Insightful)
Cited as evidence of a sea change in patent law: the FSF makes a Youtube video. Some academics wrote some papers.
This puts patent law reform at about the same level of public interest as this video [youtube.com] on pouring shampoo out of a bottle.
I'll wait for in re Bilski, thanks.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is, if you were starting a business that provides a software solution, would you want to be able to protect your solution from the competition?
Patents protect small businesses and innovation from competition, including big companies that will do anything in their power to stomp little companies with disruptive technologies. Open source is great, no doubt about it. But if you invent something, even if it is software, it deserves protection. Patents are part of capitalism, so no, there's no tide turning.
Re:Yes and No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I hope so! (Score:3, Insightful)
That is the trouble with patents, delineating intellectual property from reductionist components. It can be argued both ways.
MPAA news (Score:3, Insightful)
I would think that our politicians may not wish to be seen as business friendly right now.
All five major TV news networks (CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox) are owned by a movie studio in the MPAA. People who believe the TV news (and there are a lot of them) will believe a story that spins any consideration of narrowing copyrights or patents against bedroom authors and inventors.
Software patents can help certain industries (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a bit troubled by Slashdot's blanket reaction to software patents.
In the line of work I am in (broadly: statistical analytics), almost all innovation comes in the form of creating improved methods that are implemented in software. It takes a large amount of resources to come up with these improved methods (they are generally far from obvious), and they can easily be transferred across the industry. Most companies in my industry would refuse to pay for innovation if they knew people could join, learn every recent innovation in two months, and then leave to the highest competitor bidder, effectively destroying any competitive advantage. Non-compete agreements are legally useless in my state, and NDAs are tenuous and practically hard to enforce. Patents (or stealing IP) are really the primary methods companies in my industry survive.
tldr: software patents can and do vastly encourage innovation in several competitive and useful industries.
Re:Video codecs (Score:3, Insightful)
Is the formula to calculate the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter obvious? Neither is E=MC2 obvious, but no algorithm can be patented. Why should be an algorithm for video compression be patentable?
Only because you implement it in software and you run it on a general purpose computer, you argue it should be patentable. So you can implement the calculation of PI and E=MC2 in software and run it on a general purpose computer.
Software are mathematical algorithms, nothing more. It's just that you write the software in a so called "language" and you have multiple languages in which you can express the algorithm. But in the end is all goes down to the work of Turing and his Turing machines.
Re:bilksi due soon; I'm optimistic (Score:3, Insightful)
But should we throw out all software patents because in the abstract sense, not tied to a computer, they're mathematical algorithms? That's where we get the other policy argument: the Supreme Court is a political body. Software is worth a lot and represents a huge portion of the GDP. We're just starting to come out of a recession. If the Supreme Court invalidates business method patents, that's fine, because people will still keep using them if they're economically efficient, and 'business methods' are not products that are sold. But if the Supreme invalidates all software patents at a swoop, they just slashed the GDP by a significant amount, and the resulting market crash will make the Great Depression look like a minor blip.
How exactly would eliminating software patents have *any* effect on the GDP? Software will *still* be protected, as it always has been, by copyright law.
The US is an exception in allowing software patents in the first place. The rest of the world has gotten along without them just fine.
Re:SC has plenty of ground to stand on (Score:1, Insightful)
Because if I can come up with a different hardware mechanism that fulfills the same task then I can still make use of the math developed, the algorithm itself.
Re:Video codecs (Score:2, Insightful)
You can touch a physical process or a machine. You can't touch some wave functions that are written on a piece of paper.
A patent was always about something you can show and touch, but software is math, which is just some algorithms written somewhere. Only because you can write the algorithms on a computer and make a computer calculate it doesn't mean that the computer will become a device that you can patent.
In the same way, if you write an algorithm on a piece of paper and make a human calculate it in his head doesn't mean that the human is a new device which is patentable.
To make my point clear on your example. If you build a machine, you can patent it. But if you write a formulae which describes the machine as a series of complex particle wave functions on a piece of paper you can't patent it. Because I can calculate the wave functions in my head, by a calculator or with a computer. What are you claiming in your patent, all current and future ways of calculating your wave functions?
That is basically what software patents are. They claiming all current and in the future possible ways of implementing an algorithm.
The line between math, algorithms, software and patentable things are pretty clear. It's only not clear if you try to define software as not been math (which is certainly is) to protect your "intellectual property".