When Pythagoras invented a new way to make calculations with triangles, there was not yet an European Patent Organization. Bad luck, because everybody knows that patents stimulate innovation. Pythagoras invested much time in contemplation. Now, anyone could use this new mathemathical method for free. How could others be stimulated to make the same investment for no financial benefit?As a matter of fact, Pythagoras was very important for the further development of mathematics – exactly because it was free and stimulated others do build on it’s foundations. The same applies for software, which consist of ideas and the actual implementation of those ideas in computer language, often called “code”. The implemantation, the code, is protected with copyright. That means that you can freely implement and improve any idea, but you have to provide for your own implementation. Otherwise, the effort and investment of others would be hurted. The ideas flow freely, so that the competition on the implementational level may be even harder. One company implements the idea of a word processor in a way that attracts many people, while another company tries to attract students. Competition is good and drives innovation. One can observe this in the open source world, where competition is often heated.
Now enter the world of patents. We start to limit the ideas. If some company, usually a big one, patents an idea, other companies are no longer able to use that idea without a penalty. For example, image a hyperlink. Each time you click on a search result, you use a hyperlink. If that was patented (it nearly was), then such technology would be restricted. Of course, the new European Patent Organization would not patent such existing and widely avaiable technology. Or would it? Not very long ago, the hyperlink was a revolutionary idea. Now it is used everywhere. That is the way innovation in Information Technology works: the revolution of today will be the foundations of tomorrow’s innovations. A typical small computer program typically involves thousands of such revolutionary ideas of the past. By restricting these new ideas, and only allow the “inventors” of the ideas to implement it, innovation will be slowed down.
Patents will protect big companies, who have enough staff and many to scare away smaller companies with patent wars. The big companies know thet violate each other’s patents, which is unavoidable, but resorts to gentleman’s agreements. The smaller companies and the open source movement have no defence againt them because they do not have the means to make such gentleman’s agreements. Even governments who like to use open source are likely to suffer, and will become more dependant on big companies.
The open source movement will be forced to hide and seek freedom in encrypted storage, communication, and private networks. Already, completely private information sharing is possible with systems like Freenet. Such systems and tools will be improved and their popularity will grow. Such technologies are very useful for music pirating and other illegal activities. To drive honest open source programmers to private techonogies means to stimulate the development of software which can be used in less legal ways.
The question remains: why software patents? Obviously, the big companies have made up a good story. But software patents don’t add much to the already existing copyright restrictions. They limit the widespread implementation of new ideas. They threatens small companies, governments and open source. And pirating will be stimulated.
About the author:
Evert Mouw is a certified Microsoft professional (MCSE) and an enthusiast Linux user. He administers a small company network and studies political sciences in The Hague, Netherlands. He wrote an GPS add-in for Microsoft Mappoint and maintains a Dutch website with information about fighting spam. His email address is post at evert dot net.
Only an idiot would make such an assertion and use an analogy with mathematics to make it.
Everyone knows that mathematical concepts cannot be patented and the argument that a patent stimulates innovation is even more rediculous. What about all the mathematicians that deidicate entire lifetimes to solving mathematical problems without any reward. Solving Fermat’s last theorm hardly made millions did it?
Every patent out there is based on the 100,000s of hours of totally unrewarded work. The patenting itself is just putting 2&2 together, finding an application for concepts that have already been developed.
What about all the patent that surroud AV compression, did Dolby, Fraunhoffer etc. develop FFT, Wavelets, psycho accoustic models etc. No unrewarded academics probably. The corporations simply found applications and marketed these ideas.
If you think patents are the result of hard work look at some of the US patents for compression algorithms. There are even some that claim inovations that were mathematically proven impossible long before the patent was filed.
In short patents are just a cheap form of monopolization.
“Gotta have a patent system. Otherwise there is no incentive to invent anything since others will just rip-off your work, and all that R&D is down the toilet.”
Prove it. I say it might stop YOU but it would stop you, but not stop people who actually go about inventing things.
The reason to invent is to remain competitive.
The justification for patents is to stop secret guilds from divulging information. Fine. So let’s say we grant the need for such a system even though with modern universities, the liklihood of secret guilds and cabals is fairly much 0. No, it *is* zero for anything of appreciable interest.
Never-the-less, let us allow a temporary monopoly (patent) so long as: 1) the full invention is disclosed; 2) the inventor can actually produce such a thing that is claimed; 3) the invention is not trivial or obvious; 4) the patent is limited to precisely the thing that is produced by the inventor so as to not allow for “broad language” patents that cover far more than they ought; 5) the patent does not merely state an idea but actually represents the manipulation of real-world physical properties.
Unfortunately, patents on software and so-called business process patents tend to fail on *all* of the above counts but failing on even a single count is sufficient to deny patent applicability; however, they *ALWAYS* fail on the last count.
Software patents are an afront to intelligence and society.
The facts stand:
1.) The Software Industry does have a monopoly problem. It tends to form monopolies in areas:
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Office
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Pagemaker (sorta competes with Word, but usually is treated very differently)
Quicken
etc. etc. etc.
Actually the technology industry has had a serious problem with monopolies for a very long time. In fact this problems predates the rise of software as stand alone commercial products. Witness the domination of IBM, DEC and Xerox in various niches of the industry before the rise of PCs. This was driven almost exclusively by hardware innovation and sales, software was barely even a secondary issue. Therefore discussing this in the context of software patents may not be relevant.
2.) Patents are an extremely effective tool to prevent entry.
Actually I would have no argument with that, if software patents where issued in a fair, equitable, and rational manner. I am the first to admit that fair, equitable and rational is not the case today. That is why I believe the rules around software patents should be revised. However I do not advocate scrapping them all together.
Lots of words are relative buddy; that doesn’t mean you get to throw them out as meaningless if not given an exact range; there is something called reading in context.
You didn’t respond to my point anyway. I was simply pointing out that the guy suing Apple is not small; he’s backed with capital and has been for a decade (more likely more than that).
The original article had no context or magnitude applied to the terms large and small. In my example with companies suing Apple over iTunes based technologies both companies are smaller than Apple. You may want to examine other magnitudes of large and small. That is OK. But my argument still stands within my describe context.
You go on to talk about investors. As if software entry requires heavy capital; I’d think you’d have figured this out now: Software is a place where you can enter with almost no capital and still become the leader (of course you end up forming capital through your first sales).
Investors are great, but most of them are still smart enough to say “put up or shut up.” And as I’ve said about 10 times now, software patents do not require so much as a prototype or prototype design…
The statement on capital investment was simply to complete the example you gave of Jobs and Wazniak garage startup history.
Addressing your small business example. I have a very good friend that made an attempt to make a living as a low capital startup software developer. In order of impact on his livelihood here are some of the problems he encountered; cash flow during longer projects, unscrupulous partners, development tools that didn’t work as advertised, a market place that changed its requirements too fast and too often, and yes software patents. However by the time software patents became an issue, all of these other problems had driven him to bankruptcy and functionally forced him out of the business. I do not offer his experiences as common to all small developers. I also know some small developers that have done quite well. What I contending is that software patents, IF PROPERLY ADMINISTERED, may not be the boogymen many people make them out to be.
Why would I try to innovate on something if I think I might get my butt sued off by some big, greedy company? Patents restrict innovation. Abolish patents and intellectual property rights. If you can make a better mouse trap, go for it.
Math is free.
I don’t care what the patent office says. I will never obey crap like this. I will not support politicians, administrators, or companies. Don’t make any arguements to me. Patents are stupid and patent people are idiots.
screw that talk!
everyone saying that microsoft can go and sue everyone that uses a radio button. there’s prior art to a radio button, a button, links and icons on “physical” world and design so that’s BS.
now, why would i use a linux workstation if EVERY program and envyroment is a copy from windows and such? i only have more trouble getting my video driver working correctly.
with some patents on those broader issues, we’d have inovation for a change.
and with inovation, we could came up with something that big corporations would want to copy for a change.
then OS would have the patent for the inovation stuff and we would be in a position to bargain.
now, fearing the M$ patents on buttons, come on.
Icons, button are not Microsoft ideas let alone innovations. They existed on system like Apple way before Windows. Software are abstracts, they are tools for hardwares. Without hardwares, softwares are useless.
Some posters pointed out how flawed are patents when two people from different countries came with the same ideas without copying each other.
gabriel wrote:
> with some patents on those broader issues, we’d have inovation
> for a change.
That’s utter BS! You seem to be confused and clueless. Do you actually think that it would be a good thing if everything one does has to be new, instead of being able to build upon existing ideas? That would lead to virtually no innovation at all. At best you’d have thousands of guys, each with a badly designed part (why would they make a better design when they already have a government-guaranteed monopoly in their niche?), but no one could legally build anything from those parts. That is, unless there is heavy cross-licensing, at least between the big players. And even then it would only result in very bad products and no competition since it would be impossible to enter the market. What a great idea! Let’s do that!