The Death of Many (If Not Most) Software Patents?

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/07/the-death-of-go.html

by chrisv • 18 years ago

42 24 18 years ago

thomasfl• 18 years ago

If most software patents suddenly stops being valid, then this could open up lots of new business opportunities?

eugenejen2• 18 years ago

You can patent anything that is innovative but it is still not what a product that people spend money to buy, time to use.

The good part is now everyone has to compete for users with what users wants. So a feature on product A can be quickly copied to product B by its competent competitors. At the same time, product A's creators has to keep on moving on or face replacement. While workers in company for product A may have tougher time in life.

LogicHoleFlaw• 18 years ago

Well, it would remove a lot of the minefields which are currently worrisome to startups.

Software is rather unique in that it has been granted all of patent, copyright, and trade secret status.

I firmly believe that software patents are counterproductive to advancing the industry and should not be held as valid. The legal developments detailed in the article look like great progress in encouraging innovation in the software industry.

joshwa• 18 years ago

Well, now there can be legitimate competition in the e-learning market, at least (c.f. Blackboard patents)

mojuba2• 18 years ago

If software patents stop being valid, companies will keep many of their inventions secret and will protect them as "trade secret" from now on. With patents they were at least forced to publish them. Not good either way, although certainly this will put an end to portfolio-only kind of businesses that did only harm and nothing but harm to everybody.

dmm• 18 years ago

Absolutely, the original justification of the patent system was to get inventers to make their inventions public.

However, the inventions which have been patented recently are often obvious and trivial. Amazon's one-click patent is not some amazing secret that we have been let in on by the patent system.

eugenejen2• 18 years ago

I never thought about that company may put software under trade secret. Then the consequence may be different from what patent reformers expected. And you are right that in that case, the patent filing may decrease. And I am wonder what this mean to innovators that is not affiliate with companies.

mechanical_fish3• 18 years ago

If software patents stop being valid, companies will keep many of their inventions secret...

As compared to the situation today, where Google's patents allow them to be completely open about how their systems work, and we all get to read the source code to Microsoft's software because it's protected by patent?

Companies already keep their nontrivial inventions as secret as they can, because they know that the patent system is useless for its (supposed) intended purpose. [1] The system moves at a glacial pace relative to the industry, it costs too much to use, its results are unpredictable to the point of randomness, it's filled with reams and reams of invalid chaff, and frankly software itself is too abstract, mutable, and easily copied to be reliably protected by patent. There's a good reason why the inventors of patents didn't let people patent written works. Those folks weren't dummies.

No, software patents are a tool for trolls, nothing more. Every invalidated software patent is a victory for mankind.

[1] If, OTOH, you believe that the intended purpose of software patents was to allow deep-pocketed corporations to patent-troll their smaller competitors to death... the system is working precisely as designed.

wmf2• 18 years ago

Hey now, don't be so cynical. Software patents also allow startups (composed entirely of lawyers) to patent-troll large corporations.

miked• 18 years ago

>>No, software patents are a tool for trolls, nothing more. Every invalidated software patent is a victory for mankind.

This is much too strong, I think. I'm a co-founder of a small biotech startup with a single patent to its name. We had trouble enough raising money even with the patent. Do you think that I, or anyone else, would have put up with all the pain and the long hours in the lab if we new that Agilent or Biorad could swoop in at any moment and take our markets away from us using their marketing clout?

>> If, OTOH, you believe that the intended purpose of software patents was to allow deep-pocketed corporations to patent-troll their smaller competitors to death... the system is working precisely as designed.

Sometimes, no doubt. But Borland and that small storage company both cleaned Microsoft out for over $100,000,000 apiece, and MSFT's market cap is a bit larger.

A patent is a limited term legal monopoly which effectively creates a legal partnership between a government and, say, a three person startup on the one hand and, oh, Google on the other. Without the patent it's you and your buddies against Larry and Sergey and you're just bringing a knife to a gunfight. Since this site is largely devoted to startups, this would seem to be an important point.

I think the real solution is to shorten the terms of software patents to, say, 7 years and tighten up the meaning of "obvious to one schooled in the art". That would immediately reduce the patent infringement search space while still giving a small company time to build a first-mover market advantage.

brlewis2• 18 years ago

Ever heard of a software patent that actually advanced the art by being published, when the technique otherwise would be unknown? I've never heard of this happening.

See my poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253318

mojuba2• 18 years ago

In some cases openness might allow you to exploit the invention, especially when a patent affects you directly. If you are a webmaster then Google's PR patent does, for example.

In the world without software patents, there's no way of knowing how it works, neither exploiting it. Although of course there's the advantage of using independently made similar inventions without fear.

paul• 18 years ago

Patents are unreadable anyway, and in fact reading them is legally dangerous because then you may be knowingly infringing, which triggers triple damages, as I recall.

The latest style is to use a mix of patents and trade secrets anyway, meaning that even if you wasted your time reading patents, you still wouldn't have the full picture.

vaksel• 18 years ago

i think the biggest problem with software patents is how long it takes. You may invent something amazing, but it'll be 5 years before you actually see the patent and by that time your amazing technology will be widely used

wmf2• 18 years ago

As they say, that's a feature. After everyone is using the idea there are more potential royalties to collect. You do have to stay in business until the patent issues, though.

akeefer• 18 years ago

It's basically impossible to write any non-trivial piece of software without violating half a dozen completely absurd patents, and I don't think I've seen a legitimate software patent lawsuit in the last 10 years. There may be a few in there that I don't hear about, but upwards of 95% are either 1) a big company trying to kill a small competitor before they get too big by tying them up with useless litigation and legal fees, 2) an IP holding company trying to extract money from a big company with deep pockets, or 3) two big companies using patents as leverage to try to extract concessions out of each other.

I can't think of any company or engineer I know of that would stop writing software if they couldn't patent it, or of anyone that's learned anything useful from reading a patent filing.

The most important parts of software are already protected by copyright and trade secret laws, and patents have absolutely no place there.

chaostheory• 18 years ago

yeah there's little difference between software patent litigation and extortion... I can say the same of business process patents; they might as well allow patents of cooking recipes at this rate

finally a good change of direction for the USPTO

boredguy8• 18 years ago

"In sum, an innovative process is not patentable when operating on a single computer processor but is when operating on two processors, even though the Board recognizes that the process in the unpatentable claim 'is essentially the method' set forth in the patentable claim."

So you just move your data repository to one machine and your data processing to the other, and you have your patents back.

I really just don't understand how something like this happens. I guess "The Law" is a massively backwards-compatible system that makes computer architecture anachronisms look mild.

ssanders82• 18 years ago

This article comes at a particularly opportune time for me. A site I'd built for a client was sued by Channel Intelligence in their mass filing last week (TechCrunch covered it) for their revolutionary and genius idea of "configuring a database system to store information regarding a plurality of items," focusing on wishlists.

The client (#12 in the suit if you're curious) called me in a panic telling me to pull down the site, so all its users are screwed. I've also run a free wishlist site at GreedyMe.com for several years which wasn't named in the suit, but if it had been, I couldn't financially justify trying to fight it.

PageRank was pretty revolutionary. I'm on the fence as to whether that should be patented. Amazon's 1-Click and Channel Intelligence's "list storage" are obvious methods, and I can't fathom how any lawyer or businessman can submit a patent for such nonsense with a straight face.

The Death of Many (If Not Most) Software Patents?

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