Inventors Need Protection
Join me in telling Congress that #PatentsMatter by signing the @SavetheInventor petition: http://bit.ly/PatentsMatter. Congress needs to know that Inventors are needed to grow our world and deserve protection so they will not get "lost in the shuffle" and do patents matter to us all. Inventors need to be included in any discussion. I am just an ordinary Gulch citizen, but I know this issue is important to our future. Further information and the petition can be found at: savetheinventor.com
The distinction is that I can be confident not to violate another company's software copyright by not copying their software (duh!). On the other hand, every routine I write has the potential of violating someone's patent -- and there have been a lot of vague patients granted for some rather obvious things.
The reason for patent protection is given as wanting to encourage companies to develop new ideas. I would suggest that, at least in the software industry, we have plenty of encouragement for the development of new ideas and that the only thing that software patents do is suppress innovation.
1) Software only protects the artistic way you say something, so its protection is very limited. This is why companies do not provide source code usually.
2) By what standard do you determine that a patent is vague? Do you know how to read and interpret claims? Claim language is fairly precise, and impression is usually held against the drafter.
3) The reason for patent protection is that it is a property right, not to encourage anything. Using someone's invention without paying for it is the freeloader, theft mentality.
Also the economics prove you wrong. Before there was any patent protection for software, there was very little commercial software. With a greater recognition under the law for patents to cover software implemented inventions, the commercial software industry exploded (separate from hardware). Since we started weakening our patent system in 2000 we have seen the US falling behind in all areas of technology.
Lastly, you cannot be against patents for software implemented invention and not be against all patents on electronic circuits, since all the software does is wire (set connections) in a general purpose electronic circuit. Software per se is just bad writing, but once implemented it is just an electronic circuit.
With the advent of the personal computer and standardized software and hardware the potential market for software has exploded. The investment threshold for starting a company to develop software has dropped drastically.
I don't think that anyone can reasonably say that the software industry has stagnated since the year 2000.
Using someone's invention without paying for it is freeloading -- but what if you invented it yourself without being aware of them? This can happen in physical objects, of course but the software development environment is much more fluid. A software developer can come up with a half a dozen or more 'inventions' in a day.
And, the question "Do I know how to read and interpret claims?" is exactly to the point. How do I check those half dozen things agains the patients and accurately determine if I might have infringed something?
You would not build a house without hiring an expert to make sure you had title to the land, the same is true when making a product. Besides there are academic studies showing that companies that are aware the patent landscape of their area of technology are much more successful. It is just a good business practice, just like doing a marketing survey. Just because you own the building material, does not mean that you can build on someone else's property. The US had a system for years to determine who invented something first. It was rarely used, because people do not "independently" invent the same thing. Two engineers given the same problem often come up with two separate solutions and inventions. The software industry became lazy in copying other people's inventions. This is partly because of the weak patent system for software implemented inventions, but it is also because software was not easily incorporated into new products like hardware. In hardware very few people would build a component they could buy off the shelf, but software programmers do this all the time.
Here is one of several articles http://www3.weforum.org/docs/CSI/2012-13... showing the using is falling behind in inventiveness and this definitely includes software. Most of the advances in software in the last decade have been incremental and nothing near what they were in the late 1990s.
The development of software is much more fluid than that of building a physical object. When you build a house you do have to make sure you have title to the land. You do not necessarily check to make sure that no one has patented "a method for nailing baseboards to the wall using a nailgun", you just figure out how to get the boards put in.
A quick, and by no means exhaustive search found an illustrative patent #5,249,290: "Method of and apparatus for operating a client/server computer network"
This patent says, in essence, that if you have multiple processes running in your server that you assign a new task to the one with the smallest workload. (Duh!)
I can't imagine doing it any other way. I know I did that in a system that I wrote two years before the filing date -- and was taught it 20 years earlier.
Of course it's probably invalid, but if the owner sued a small company it would destroy them trying to defend it. They would simply pay -- and thus we have patent trolls.
You are against patents on software, but what about firmware, what about FPGAs, etc, etc, etc.
As to the fluidity of software, your software design would improve, be faster and smarter if you studied the patents that were relevant to your market It is not only wrong morally and legally not to do your due diligence it is bad engineering and bad business.
Note I said that I probably did some of the things in the patent prior to it being granted but don't believe that logical processes should be patentable.
You are welcome to look at the patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US5249290
Keep in mind that to destroy a small company, the patent doesn't have to be valid, the company doesn't even have to actually infringe, it simply needs to be nebulous enough that a claim can be brought.
Patent law can be a good thing, but it can be manipulated and unethically enforced.
I do not believe that I am stealing the intellectual property of another because I independently thought of the same thing. Now, if I copied his code, that would be an entirely different thing. If all code were published in the same manner as other inventions are published by being created then it would be different.
I still don't know that anyone could be aware of the billions of lines of code that are out there to see if someone else has written the same routine. It's actually pretty much impossible to check all the sources of PUBLISHED software solutions.
In ordinary language obvious means immediately apparent. Novel means something that did not exist before. Something that did not exist cannot be obvious before it is created. Under the law a patent is first examined for novelty and then if it is novel, it is reviewed for Obviousness.
You are just repeating rhetoric that you have neither analyzed nor understand.
Let's start with some basic facts:
1) Every invention in the history of the world is a combination of known elements (things). We know this because of conservation of matter and energy - you can't create something out of nothing.
2) An invention is a human creation with an objective result.
3) An inventor is the first one to create the invention.
4) Whether something is an invention has nothing to with whether it complex, hard to program, whether some academic thinks it is important, or even whether it has an merit in the marketplace.
Not believing you are stealing, does not mean that you are not stealing. You can't fake reality. And if you didn't know it before, which I doubt, you know it now.
"What the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind’s contribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject of patents and copyrights is intellectual property.
An idea as such cannot be protected until it has been given a material form. An invention has to be embodied in a physical model before it can be patented; a story has to be written or printed. But what the patent or copyright protects is not the physical object as such, but the idea which it embodies. By forbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares, in effect, that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object’s value, that that value is created by the originator of the idea and may not be used without his consent; thus the law establishes the property right of a mind to that which it has brought into existence.
It is important to note, in this connection, that a discovery cannot be patented, only an invention. A scientific or philosophical discovery, which identifies a law of nature, a principle or a fact of reality not previously known, cannot be the exclusive property of the discoverer because: (a) he did not create it, and (b) if he cares to make his discovery public, claiming it to be true, he cannot demand that men continue to pursue or practice falsehoods except by his permission. He can copyright the book in which he presents his discovery and he can demand that his authorship of the discovery be acknowledged, that no other man appropriate or plagiarize the credit for it—but he cannot copyright theoretical knowledge. Patents and copyrights pertain only to the practical application of knowledge, to the creation of a specific object which did not exist in nature—an object which, in the case of patents, may never have existed without its particular originator; and in the case of copyrights, would never have existed.
The government does not “grant” a patent or copyright, in the sense of a gift, privilege, or favor; the government merely secures it—i.e., the government certifies the origination of an idea and protects its owner’s exclusive right of use and disposal." AR, Capitalism The Unknown Ideal