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Why Bill Gates Wants 3,000 New Patents
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jul 31, 2005 12:30 PM
from the because-the-system-a-certain-kind-of-broken dept.
from the because-the-system-a-certain-kind-of-broken dept.
theodp writes "The NY Times looks at Microsoft's newly acquired passion for patents and wonders: What would Thomas Jefferson think if he were around to visit Microsoft's campus, seeing software patents stacked like pyramids of cannonballs? Jefferson might also be shocked by Microsoft's summer crop of patent apps, which includes Creating a note related to a phone call, Adding and removing white space from a document and Identifying when baseball is exciting. Gotta meet that quota of 60 fresh, nonobvious patentable ideas a week!"
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First posting. (Score:4, Funny)
Ofcourse (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ofcourse (Score:5, Insightful)
Its a bit like nuclear weapons -- You do not have to use them to serve a purpose. The threat of eradicating your enemies is quite powerful.
Re:Ofcourse (Score:5, Insightful)
ASX
WMV
FAT fs
You are correct. As they became more popular, their power and thus by extension their ability to force vendors and OEMs into using their software increased. The larger they got, the larger this influence became. Due to the necessity for interoperability, an OS monoculture was the easiest to maintain and consumers saw no problems with using only Microsoft OS's. If only they knew in the early nineties what we know now.
removing white space from a document? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:removing white space from a document? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:removing white space from a document? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly why I want Microsoft to lose one of these patent suits and lose BIG. I mean to the tune of billions of dollars. My opinion is that the only thing that will make the government stop the maddness will be when one of the big companies gets taken out behind the woodshed for a frivilous patent.
I don't myself understand how anyone could even believe that software is really patentable. All modern computer languages are context free grammars, which is a subset of all grammars, and hence all language. Patenting the written software program for what is does it exactly like patenting the plot of a book, or a certain type of story. And while the written word is copyrightable of course, I've yet to see a patent on fantasy stories set in alternate versions of Earth, or stories involving wizards, or aliend.
Software patents are absolutely wrong and the customer and market hostile american company today absolutely loves them because they eliminate the requirement to offer a quality product (or any product at all!).
Baseball? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Baseball? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Baseball? (Score:4, Interesting)
But this IS trivial...ambient volume goes up...it's exciting...volume goes down, boring. Have you even seen a group of fans stoic during an exciting event? They're probably all screaming their heads off, and the announcer probably sounds like he's about to have a coronary.
Ban MS from getting patents and dissolve current (Score:3, Insightful)
wealth and jobs, and has been *good* for the US economy and some of
the billions generated are being channeled to some worthy charitable
causes as well. Clearly, 'more Microsofts' are needed and it would
have an immense impact on the US economy, among other things. If there
were software patents in the 60s and 70s, there would not have been a
Microsoft, and the associated billions and the PC revolution. Some
research intensive company would have held on to some critical patents
and could have just sat on them and produced no meaningful products.
However, the present Microsoft is doing almost everything it can to
prevent another Microsoft from ever occurring, thereby causing a
"future loss" of billions of dollars and harming the US economy. One
company cannot be allowed to dictate the future of America. Microsoft
is hurting America in a significant way since by being very aggressive
and seeking a huge patent arsenal, it wants to almost ensure that the
next tech revolution doesn't happen. It will happen, surely, but is
more likely to happen in countries with nascent patent laws, such as
in India and China.
After Microsoft was found to be an 'abusive monopolist', it should
have been barred from obtaining any patents. Infact, maybe that is
what is needed, to target a big software company like Microsoft which,
if barred from obtaining patents, would itself lobby very hard to ban
software patents for all ! And a strong case can be made aginst why
Microsoft in particular should not get the protection of patents.
All it will take is a determined senator to recognize that America
needs more Microsofts, and the current Microsoft should be reined in
appropriately. It can barred from obtaining any more patents and/or
it's current patent portfolio could be dissolved. Then let Microsoft
spend some of its billions and unleash it's army of lawyers and
publicists to try and convince the rest of America why software
patents are bad and no one should have them. That would be
interesting.
Someone needs to tell Microsoft: "Abusive monopolist. No patents for you !"
Re:Ban MS from getting patents and dissolve curren (Score:5, Interesting)
IBM makes $2 billion/year from patent licenses. With that amount of money and over 10000 patents in diverse areas, they make MS look like a grade-school bully.
From: http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html [forbes.com]
After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.
An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
>Thus they come up with large numbers of what most Slashdotters see as legitimate inventions.
Legitimate?;
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-961803.html [com.com]
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/10/17/005232.shtm
Redmond Monopole (Score:5, Funny)
frivolous patents (Score:3, Interesting)
Edison Labs (Score:5, Informative)
The article submitter says this like it's some newfangled scheme freshly dreampt up by big bad Bill. It isn't. Around 100 years ago when Thomas Edison ran his lab it was a patent mill; hired inventors had to submit a weekly quota of patent applications.
Re:Edison Labs (Score:4, Insightful)
~Philly
patent violation (Score:5, Funny)
Open your eyes! (Score:5, Informative)
A symptom of the decline of society (Score:5, Insightful)
In the past, if you wanted to make a better faucet, all you had to do was make sure your idea was so unique that it was unlikely that anyone had put something of that nature together before. Now, with the new attitude of the Patent Office, you have to prepare yourself for the possibility that the very idea that water comes out of a pipe is possibly claimed by someone out there. The amount of squatting on basic concepts is going to doom innovation, as a great deal of truly innovative and world-changing inventions have come from a man or woman working in their basement or garage in their spare time.
Just thinking to yourself, "Has the underlying concept been demonstrated before and left in the public domain?" means nothing, absolutely nothing. Prior art has grown increasingly meaningless. Hell, millions of year of prior art in each and every person that reads this has been patented.
Company A discovers that gene X causes disease Y and patents this gene that has existed since the dawn of humankind
Company B develops a test to establish wether gene X is present using nothing but their own methods except for the basic presumption that gene X will cause disease Y.
Company A sues Company B for patent infringement because they violated their patent on the gene.
This scenario has occurred before and Company A is the winner.
While I respect the fact a market economy is a neccesity for the human race at the present time (I say that in the hope that replicators are invented at some point) I don't see the neccesity to blindly approve of the persuit of profit at all costs simply because people want to and "That's just the way things have been done". There is a cost associated with such activity, a cost for which we have no means to compensate. The free flow and generation of capital should never undermine or be put ahead of the greater free flow of ideas in society as a whole , or the freedom of individuals, or you inevitably end up with a "snake eating his own tail" situation.
Locking down entire realms of study because of a overreaching patent does far, far more harm for us as a people than the good it does for the patent holder. It forces innovators to be reluctant or unwilling to pursue their ideas. The long term effects of this kind of stagnation should be self-evident.
The desire to make a buck - which should be encouraged - does not validate the methods employed to do so. Right now, the laws are structured to permit and encourage the lack of any focus other than short-term gains for the investors. Short-term gains which will likely pan out to be massive losses financially and otherwise for many in the end.
What would Jefferson say? (Score:5, Funny)
"Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state. "
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. "
"An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens."
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. "
"Any cute black slaves around? My wife is out of town."
On a more serious note... Jefferson on Patents (Score:5, Informative)
"Inventions... cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody... The exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813. ME 13:334
"The following [addition to the Bill of Rights] would have pleased me:... Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature and their own inventions in the arts for a term not exceeding __ years, but for no longer term and for no other purpose." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:451, Papers 15:368
"In the arts, and especially in the mechanical arts, many ingenious improvements are made in consequence of the patent-right giving exclusive use of them for fourteen years." --Thomas Jefferson to M. Pictet, 1803. ME 10:356
"Certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. It is equally certain it ought not to be perpetual; for to embarrass society with monopolies for every utensil existing, and in all the details of life, would be more injurious to them than had the supposed inventors never existed; because the natural understanding of its members would have suggested the same things or others as good. How long the term should be is the difficult question. Our legislators have copied the English estimate of the term, perhaps without sufficiently considering how much longer, in a country so much more sparsely settled, it takes for an invention to become known and used to an extent profitable to the inventor. Nobody wishes more than I do that ingenuity should receive a liberal encouragement." --Thomas Jefferson to Oliver Evans, 1807. ME 11:201
"No sentiment is more acknowledged in the family of Agriculturists than that the few who can afford it should incur the risk and expense of all new improvements, and give the benefit freely to the many of more restricted circumstances." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1810. ME 12:389
http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jef f1320.htm [virginia.edu]
It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the pos
Thomas Jefferson and Microsoft patents (Score:5, Interesting)
What would Thomas Jefferson think if he were around to visit Microsoft's campus, seeing software patents stacked like pyramids of cannonballs?
Thomas Jefferson would be mightly unhappy!!! Origiannly TJ was against patents and copyrights however his friend James Madison eventually talked and showed him how they could be beneficial and support the creation of new art and objects. Once he was convinced TJ, using an actuary table, calculated patents and copyrights should only last 28 years, if I recall right 14 years with one 14 year extention possible.
FalconSooner or later... (Score:4, Funny)
Non-Western SoftCo: We wrote some cool new software.
US 'IP-directed' SoftCo: Ha! We have software patents that cover your program! Hand over all your money now!
Non-Western SoftCo: Do we look American? Fuck you, and fuck the horse your lawyers rode in on.
US 'IP-directed' SoftCo: B-but... you can't talk to us that way! We'll use our bribed, uh, 'lobbied' politicians to stop you entering our market!
Joe Public: [Downloads software from non-US site]
US 'IP-directed' SoftCo: Shit! Our revenue stream! If only we actually made something! Aiiieeee!
ThiS, of COurse, may have happened already...
Identifying when baseball is exciting (Score:5, Funny)
bool is_baseball_exciting ()
{
return false;
}
Re: Here's the funny thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I was doing some reading the other day, and based on what I found, I'm not certain that software, technically, and legally, is patentable. The latest ruling determined that the loading of software into a machine makes it into a new machine, and thus, patentable, but it didn't go so far as to say that software, by itself, is patentable- the USPTO has held that software is primarily a series of mathematical algorithms, and as such cannot be patented. I'm wondering if there's still a fundamental question here that needs to be decided by the courts.