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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 12 2012 @ 01:36 PM EDT |
That's an excellent statement of a major problem not just with the USPTO, but
with lawyers being in charge of the patent specification process at all.
(There is no need for your lines from "Let's extrapolate" onwards.
Your first half is self-consistent and devastating without any extrapolations
needed.)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: sproggit on Saturday, May 12 2012 @ 04:31 PM EDT |
Since the introduction of "inexpensive" computing, the software
industry hasn't just flourished, it has gone from strength to strength. Profits
and taxes generated as a result of software sales, licensing and leveraged
charges including hardware, support and training now constitute a significant
portion of tax revenues for most western democracies. Perhaps even more
significant, those same western democracies depend upon the software to continue
to function.
Everything was sweetness and light in the software world, until...
A group of "hippy", "unconstitutional",
"communist", "anarchist" free-thinkers decided that free and
open source software, guaranteeing freedom, was not only more important than big
corporate profits, it actually delivered significantly better code.
The established software players looked into the future and saw their entire
industry wiped out, like dinosaurs watching the light of the comet. Terrified,
they spent a slice of their massive profits and started to put laws in place
that would protect their profit-generating monopolies.
Copyright was no good - most of the competing FOSS software was either markedly
different or developed in a clean-room anyway. Worse, the Free Software
community treated closed-source content with such disdain that it would not have
been accepted, even if offered.
What other avenues existed to protect the cartel of proprietary software?
Answer: patents... Patents represented the one single, internationally
recognised and thus quasi-legal vehicle that could be thrown at Free Software.
So it was that the US Government began to accept software patents, despite a
host of reasons why this should be inappropriate.
The only way that the US PTO would decide to stop accepting software patents [in
effect invalidating tens of thousands that already exist today, and for which
the holders have paid tens of millions of dollars [and that's just to the PTO,
who knows what campaign contributions and lobbying expenses get invested].
The only way that we will ever be rid of this evil that is software patents
would be for the US Government to be left facing a crisis of such magnitude that
the revocation and invalidation of software patents was the lesser of two evils.
No other inducement, call to logic, enhancement of the grant process, will
suffice.
The only option is eliminate software patents in their entirety. The only chance
of that succeeding will occur if a "bigger, badder" threat faces big
business in the US and those other countries that accept software patents.
I'm no expert and I don't understand the subtleties of relevant international
treaties, but I'm hoping that 4-5 nations look at what the US has done and
realise that if they accept software patents, it will kill their domestic
software industries stone dead. Their only hope is to reject the "software
patent dogma" and hope that their collective is sufficient to induce the US
to back down.
It would take the combined efforts of Brazil, India, China, and half a dozen
smaller players to come to the table and flat-out reject software patents before
this is brought "to a head" at the WTO and/or WIPO. Unless [or until]
that happens, the US will export software patent legislation [now that US
companies have blanketed the software landscape metres-deep with patents] and
use their portfolios to keep everyone else out of mainstream commercial software
development.
A very long-winded way of saying that whilst I might agree with your views at a
micro-level, they are, sadly, irrelevant.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 12 2012 @ 05:00 PM EDT |
More importantly Engineers, not lawyers are those supposed to
be the ones "skilled in the art" to whom obviousness is
supposed to be obvious, which is the crux of patentability.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 12 2012 @ 07:22 PM EDT |
And that is why the entire patent system is a hopeless failure. All we can do
is suffer until even the corrupt politicians see that it is so.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 13 2012 @ 04:42 AM EDT |
If all hope is lost that enough megacorps will come down on the
anti-software-patent side to force the US government's hand into wholesale and
drastic patent reform (yeah yeah, I know, pigs will fly first) ..... then we may
have only one viable solution remaining.
The free and open source software movement is strong, and it doesn't need
governments and lawyers to approve what it decides to do. There was a start at
patent retaliation in GPLv3, but it was barely a token gesture. Something
vastly stronger could be invented, and applied to various open licenses as an
explicit fight against software patents. Not everyone will want to join in the
battle by selecting such a license, but enough might.
The sky is the limit in this area, and extreme power could be wielded if
desired. As an example, if future versions of the gcc suite were relicensed to
a GPLv4 under which the right to use terminates upon exercising a software
patent, we would no longer be powerless, as that would apply considerable
pressure to many parties. And even deadlier patent retaliation scenarios can be
imagined.
I hope it won't require such measures, but I've not heard anyone offer anything
else that might have a helpful effect.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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