7 ms·
Maybe patents is a bad idea and should be removed.
by commitpizza 4y ago
Maybe patents is a bad idea and should be removed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bheadmaster 4y agoSoftware patents, at the very least. https://endsoftwarepatents.org/ https://endsoftwarepatents.org/
- commitpizza 4y agoI don't really see the difference, why just software?
- speeder 4y agoThe purpose of patents, is incentive companies to share their secrets. For example, Coca-Cola never patended their formula. So you might think: I can copy it and sell my own right? Well, yes, legally yes, if you ever found their formula, somehow. They been successful for more than a hundred years now in hiding that formula. Thing is, software patents allowed people to actually patent ideas, concepts, stuff that is obvious and don't need sharing, for example: "ghost racer" is a patented concept, for a while any game that wanted to display to the player his past run by showing a slightly different copy of himself so he can compare, had to pay patent royalty. But the concept is obvious, it is simple, it is there, nobody used a ludicrous amount of money and time to invent it. This is different than the patent for Michael Jackson dance moves that requires specialized devices, he patented physical objects that required time and money to make, they had a non-trivial purpose on his dance and he had to work to create them to make his dance moves possible. And now that he is gone, the awesome stage tricks he invented can keep existing, because he wrote detailed patents explaining how to repeat his feats.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoThankfully, the ghost racer patent is expired by now: https://web.archive.org/web/20210824042808/https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/129914/hard_drivin_hard_bargainin_.php?page=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20210824042808/https://www.gamas... That doesn't make it any more deserving of a patent.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago> stuff that is obvious Stuff that is obvious cannot be patented, according to the law. The problem is the system's implementation of the law. Software shouldn't be patentable because math isn't patentable.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoI think you need a better argument than that. Is physics patentable? Everything in the real world eventually depends on physics. Yet despite the unpatentability of physics, patents built on physical properties of the world exist as well. Why should mathematics and software be different?
- tremon 4y agoSoftware implementations require trade-offs. An implementation of an algorithm can be memory-hard or memory-efficient, single-threaded or multi-threaded, generic or optimized for a particular processor, constant-time or low-latency. But no implementation can be all of those at the same time. To create a solution within the constraints given is what engineering is all about, and requires expert domain knowledge and creative thought. Software isn't just math, it operates on real processors with real limitations. I'm not arguing that software patents should be valid, but the "software is just math" argument is too weak to carry much weight.
- commitpizza 4y agoSoftware doesn't need to be obvious and could need the sharing aspect of it. I am thinking of all the new ML models that are up and coming for example. Not only do you require some advanced software but also a lot of hardware capabilities. I don't really buy your argument since the same could be said for obvious stuff in the physical world as well. I still think I am leaning towards companies keeping their secrets if patents is the only solution we can bring to the table.
- hulitu 4y ago> They been successful for more than a hundred years now in hiding that formula. This is a legend. Coca Cola is just water with sugar. The "formula" tastes different in every country. And today's coca cola is not the same like yesterday, so they shall fill a patent every other year in every country.
- thorin 4y agoIt doesn't taste that different in every country (I've had it in most continents and quite a few countries). For whatever reason I still massively prefer regular coke to most of the other mainstream suppliers. I do like some small batch niche cokes though. Strangely as a kid I drank loads of diet pepsi, but I never drink diet soda now, and I probably only have 1 or 2 cans of coke/month on average.
- BlueTemplar 4y agoIt's only "obvious" after the fact, and was clearly not obvious to the patents office, or the patent wouldn't have been granted. As for the "no effort" claim, reminds me of the : Henry Ford vs Charles Steinmetz' (of General Electric) invoice for fixing a generator : "Making chalk mark [showing where the issue is], $1. Knowing where to make mark, $9,999."
- rocqua 4y agoBecause the bar for 'invention' is even lower in current software patent law than for current physical engineering patent law. In general, the software world sees plenty of innovation, and would continue to see that innovation without patents. Besides, software is much closer to mathematics. The idea that e.g. long-division is patentable is ridiculous, but if you write "long-division, but on a computer" the only thing that prevents a patent is how glaringly obvious the prior-art is.
- jeltz 4y agoFor me the reason is that I cannot say I understand other industries well enough. But I understand software well enough to say that parents there are harmful. Many of them are too generic and trivial and hinders innovation.
- bell-cot 4y agoSoftware patents, "better paperclips", and a lot of other "lawyers get rich, bureaucracies get bigger, little people get screwed patents? - YES. (Some sort of IP protection or reward system is still needed for real inventions - where it takes serious money, expertise, time, etc. to achieve something major.) But maybe a better moral would be that shell corporations (& lawyers playing shell games with them) should be outlawed.
- commitpizza 4y agoBut real inventions can occur in software too? Inventions that takes serious money, expertise and so on. Some examples: - Rust memory management - New models in machine learning that enables amazing results - Protocols
- anonymous_sorry 4y agoBut is there broader benefit to a legal system that enables the inventor to enforce time-limited monopolies on them? Rust's memory management was invented without any such incentive, and the world is richer for it.
- bombolo 4y agoSure they can happen, but in general they require a much lower investment to be done, and are easy to reinvent. Once I had an idea while sitting on the toilet, about how to use past log data to pre-emptively scale up, when the peak hour is about to come. I had the idea just randomly sitting on the toilet for a few minutes… it was already patented.
- asah 4y agoThis cuts both ways: it's also easy to "surround" software patents with new innovations that are required to be competitive in the marketplace. Then both parties cross-license and you're good. Yes the lawyers get paid but the cost is pretty low compared with software engineers, and the societal benefit is that these innovative move into the public domain.
- 4y ago
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoThe idea behind them is solid... the time limits are absurd, especially for trivial stuff. So, to solve the triviality, the patents shouldn't be worth more than it would take for a competitor to reinvent the end result - so if we're talking about a truly advanced chemical process, sure, takes time and reasearch and people and experiments... definitely worth millions. In contrast, pressing pageDown and in result moving one (full) page down (instead of moving a screen-height) should be practically worthless, since it'd take someone just a few hours to reimplement. Valuing would be hard but still better than nothing. The other is the time limits.. especially in software, a year is a lot of time, really a lot... and 20 years is way too much.
- BlueTemplar 4y agoBut that's not how invention works : what about advances that seem trivial after the fact... yet nobody has thought of for centuries, despite all the "ingredients" being available ?
- pixelfarmer 4y agoWhat about patents are non-transferable and only valid, if the issuer actually makes use of them? The moment you let them rot in a drawer, you invalidate the patent. That would disable companies whose sole purpose is to "troll" others with patents they aquired from whomever, and it would also disable companies from inventing something just to block off this path to competitors, while never making use of it itself to press more money out of customers with the "old garbage". I mean the marketing blabla behind patents is always the little inventor who found something incredible but will be eaten by the large corps, right? Which means they should be interested in actually creating a product out of it to make money, and the patent gives them a "safety" period before the big corps stomp the little guy to the curb. Or ... maybe this whole thing was a pure marketing ploy and patents have been misused in all kinds of ways in the 19th century already?
- BlueTemplar 4y agoI give one example of 18th century misuse (or rather, too broad of a patent granted) in a parallel thread : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33505728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33505728 Some decades later, however the (much less broad ?) patents over steam engines able to produce circular motion, seem to have forced Watt to differentiate and improve his "2nd engine" so much that it could be differentiated enough from the other patents : https://technicshistory.com/2021/10/10/the-steam-revolution/ https://technicshistory.com/2021/10/10/the-steam-revolution/ Note also that Watt was bad at business, and only owned 1/3rd of "his" patents. Our post-modern issues seem to me to instead stem first from : - it being too easy to shelter liability (and tax fraud !) behind complex company trees - a failure of antitrust and lack of goal/duration-limited companies allowing companies to grow waaaay too big to the point where they have enough power to heavily weigh on governments (note though that Watt had already managed to convince the British government to give a 25 year extension on "his" "1rst" steam engine)
- ksidudwbw 4y agoPatents should be coupled to the product. The patent is hidden and considered in draft mode until a working product matching the patent completely is created and submitted to the patent office to check if it matches the patent. If you are working as an inventor it's your own responsibility to market and sell your ideas and create appropriate contracts when selling your inventions to someone. A patent has to go through several layers and areas of concern before finally being approved. The entire approval process must be documented and publically available.
- adql 4y agoThe idea was basically "Let's give some legal protections to investment in research so someone can't just steal it the second you publish it". As it is common, the idea was fine, it even somewhat worked in few places, but applying it everywhere turned out to be silly. We have medical companies changing an atom here in there to make "same" but legally distinct drugs, and software people patenting half a day of work of someone as some "invention" (and my favourite [1], "playing with cat using a laser pointer"). It failed as a system decades ago and if anything it became blockage to innovation (gotta check thousands of patents, they might be too similar!). More than that, it is peanuts in cost for corporation but significant one for a single "inventor" so majority of it lies in hands of corporations that would do that R&D anyway. The protection it provides was also supposed to encourage publishing the science (as opposed to just lock up your trade secrets and never show it to the world) but frankly long patent interval makes it a bit pointless, competition can just invent "same/similar legally distinct process in many situation and only people getting richer by patents are lawyers, not "inventors". I start to think laws should have "best by" date, and be re-evaulated after 10 or 20 years whether they served a purpose well and still serve it... [1] Method of exercising a cat https://patents.google.com/patent/US5443036A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US5443036A/en
- asdff 4y agoIt's really that the capitalistic patent driven research system is pretty terrible imo. So you have some need to invent some technology for the betterment of humanity and the world. The patent model requires that in order for that technology to exist, someone needs to have the idea out of the blue, and for it to go on to be produced at all it needs to be a convincing enough idea for people to part with their disposable income out of their own will to fund all the overhead of this business plus profit. That seems like a great way to invent a cash cow that the government protects on your behalf, but I'm not sure we would have invented and proliferated the wheel or the bow and arrow if we had this model all through out our human history. You'd have people dealing with really crappy octagonal wheels because someone is squatting on the round wheel patent and might not even have much of an interest to bring it to mass market. There is another model for innovation, however, and that is the government research grant model. The government taxes wealth, the taxes accumulate into massive funds, government experts hired from the field identify compelling research topics that would benefit the collective, funds are made available and other researchers submit proposals of what they would do with that money, government experts choose the most promising proposals, money goes to things based on research merit versus the product or technologies potential to take money from people's pockets.