Ask HN: What does the software industry without patents REALLY look like?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556783

by terramars • 15 years ago

1 1 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Keep in mind, we have an example of a software industry where patent use is virtually non-existent - HFT and quantitative finance almost exclusively use tight confidentiality and trade secrets to operate.

Without patents, do new compression algorithms, data structures, etc stay trade secrets only to be used in situations where they can be protected?

Not defending just making a probing question at a weak spot of the argument that I haven't seen seriously confronted.

marssaxman• 15 years ago

The software industry without patents would look almost exactly like the current software industry, but with fewer lawsuits and less FUD.

Because of the triple-damages liability for willful infringement, patenting your idea is a great way to make sure that nobody will pay any attention to it or make any use of it whatsoever. At Microsoft software engineers are actually forbidden from reading patents; only the lawyers are allowed to do that, specifically to protect engineers from knowingly using a technique described in a patent. All infringement will therefore be inadvertent.

Abandoning software patents, then, means that people would still carry on reinventing unpublished ideas in their own projects, just as they currently do and always will. Nothing would really change for big companies anyway, since they basically only build up patent portfolios to defend against each other's patent portfolios, but they'd waste less of their engineers' time writing up pointless patent claims that nobody else will ever read.