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0 pointsgruseom13y ago0 comments

Yes. This part is worth repeating even though it says the same thing as the GP (I cleaned it up slightly):

"Patents are usually discussed in the context of someone "stealing" an idea from the long suffering lone inventor that devoted his life to creating this one brilliant idea, blah blah blah. But in the majority of cases in software, patents affect independent invention. Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement. Why should society reward that?"

Carmack put his finger on precisely what bothers me as a programmer about software patents.

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krickle13y ago· 2 in thread

This is a very good explaination of why it is wrong. It all boils down to the fact that patent examiners apparently cannot be well-versed in every possible domain and therefore don't realize what is trivial or not. They give patents to each of the ten guys, when a patent should only be issued after ten guys' research of many months (if at all).

gruseomOP13y ago

It's not just about what's trivial, though many patents are. It's that you can work hard to solve a problem independently and then legally be attacked for infringing some claim you knew nothing about.

One thing puzzles me. The social utility of patents is supposed to be that they spread knowledge, because otherwise people would keep their discoveries secret. Well, how many people make use of the "knowledge" in software patents to further their work? When was the last time any of us said, "Gee, this is hard, I'll do a patent search to see if anyone has solved it"? The very question sounds like a joke. In other words, regardless of what one thinks about software patents in theory, in practice their positive uses are negligible compared to their negative ones.

SimonPStevens13y ago

That's not the sole utility of patents. While it is part of the agreed exchange (temporary monopoly in exchange for publication), patents are also intended to encourage research and innovation. Who would bother spending time and money on research if the outcome was easily copied by competitors before you could recover your costs. (admittedly, this doesn't quite work out that way with many software patents). The publication of the patent itself is more of a side effect of the desired outcome.

Also, just because you don't read patents doesn't mean nobody does. I would guess it's more of a trickle down effect. University professors and researchers read patents and use it to expand and continue research and gradually for the good patents by the time the patent has expired the knowledge it imparted has diffused into the working participants in the field.

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