Nobelist Gary Becker Calls For an End To Software Patents 147
GigaOM notes that (excerpting) "Gary Becker, a Nobel-prize winning professor at the University of Chicago, stated this week that the U.S. patent system is ”too broad, too loose, and too expensive” and called for the end of software patents: 'Disputes over software patents are among the most common, expensive, and counterproductive. Their exclusion from the patent system would discourage some software innovations, but the saving from litigation costs over disputed patent rights would more than compensate the economy for that cost.'" Here are Becker's comments, from the always-fun Becker-Posner Blog.
Re:Here here .... (Score:5, Informative)
The prevailing advice AFAIK is to deliberately NEVER do a patent search. Why? Because if you knowingly infringe a patent, that's triple damages. Even the suggestion that you did a patent search could be sufficient evidence.
As you rightly point out, everyone knows it's impossible to write any significant (or possibly even trivial) piece of software without infringing something ; since this is the case, it just doesn't make any sense to do any kind of patent search at all.
Obligatory : IANAL.
Re:how to delineate software patents? (Score:4, Informative)
I have a two part thought on this:
Start with that Software is already protected under copyright law. This prevents others from simply copying your code and calling it their own. Ergo, a software patent would need to be more generic, protecting a process, not a implementation.
Take something like bittorrent. The application itself would be copyrighted, it would be the idea of peer to peer sharing that would be the patent. Well, at least if you want to get overly generic about it. More specific would be the idea that you utilize a 'seed' file that contains initial information about the sharing, files, hashes and whatnot to make the system somewhat secure.
But bittorrent is something that, while they benefit from the copyright, they actually increase their own share by making the protocol open via helping 'bittorrent' win over other file sharing methods because people aren't locking into one application.
I agree with the op on the whole - software patents are a bad idea and cost the economy/people more than it benefits them.