[ratsmack]

The US is hobbling itself with software patents. China pretty much ignores all patents and will win in the global market because of this. US companies need to quit the stupid patent wars, lest the become irrelevant on the world markets.

[WalterBright]

I agree that patents are unrealistic in the modern world.

Frankly, it seems that most (nearly all) patents have only a trivial amount of money invested to create the idea, other than what the patent lawyer costs. For example, "playing checkers --- with a computer" patents. Ending all patents would not slow down innovation at all.

There is one exception, drug patenting, where billions are spent developing a drug and getting it approved.

[WalterBright]

Maybe a reasonable solution would be a patent filer would have to pay a registration fee of $1 million if the patent is approved.

So, you might say, only big business could afford to file patents. Not exactly, $1m is well within the reach of a startup.

But even for big business, they're not going to file 1000 patents at a cost of a billion dollars.

Patent trolling would become an untenable business plan.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/microsoft-still...

[pxeger1]

Did I read this wrong, or do you think drug patenting is a good thing? Why?

[jeremyjh]

> Why?

Did you read this ?

> where billions are spent developing a drug and getting it approved

[gknoy]

I'm not the parent, but I think patents for drugs are a good thing. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but the ease of copying them (once a chemical is known) combined with the cost of finding the drugs seem to fit very well with the spirit of patents, where new knowledge development is rewarded with a temporary monopoly.

I do grant that the practice of patenting small incremental changes to existing patented things ("this drug, with slower release!") does seem a bit questionable, but overall it still seems like a good thing. I'd be interested in hearing your argument for why it's not a good fit.

[CheezeIt]

Do you understand why we have a patent system?

[dylan604]

How many things have you developed after spending unkown amount of time? You don't feel you're entitled to ensure you are credited with that work and allowed to earn from that work?

As I've stated elsewhere in this thread, you don't have to be a dick about owning the patent. It's your patent, and you can do with it what you want. There are patent pools that are managed to ensure they can't be used for evil that you can donate your patent to if you can't afford the time to manage it.

[Buttons840]

> How many things have you developed after spending unkown amount of time? You don't feel you're entitled to ensure you are credited with that work and allowed to earn from that work?

I do feel that if I spend my time creating something on my own, I should be free to use it, yes. Unfortunately, the patent system means I'm not necessarily allowed to use something I invented and created myself, because it may be patented.

As John Carmack said:

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying."

[TrueDuality]

There is an inherent disconnect in your argument. Concrete implementations of software deserve protection sure, and do under copyright law. Software patents are attempting to reserve concepts and generally only hurt innovation by restricting other unrelated ideas from using a technique even if they came up with the algorithm entirely in a white box. History has shown time after time of simultaneous development of ideas once all the pieces are available (just look at Calculus).

This algorithm is a great example as its a general use encoding mechanism. If I develop software to encode and decode radio transmissions to a satellite using it, patenting it will prevent it from being using for say image encoding and decoding across the web. That use has zero impact on my concrete implementation or my commercial sector.

Even for overlapping industries, if there are zero patents, and two competing companies independently come to the same technological solution what is the justification for being able to patent that? If they didn't come to it independently because its available publicly on the web, then its prior art and shouldn't be patent-able anyway. If one reversed engineered the other solution and reproduced it, that's perfectly legal for other industries under certain circumstances and is explicitly allowed under the DMCA. I'm not arguing its right, but if that is supposed to be illegal patents as designed are the wrong tool for enforcement.

This isn't a patent covering a specific use of a specific algorithm for a specific industry (which even then I don't think should be patent-able) but the general algorithm itself restricting ALL uses of it. This is an existing concept that was intended to be open, already exists in the real world, and is on route to becoming part of international standards being gobbled up by Microsoft. There does not appear to be a significant or meaningful contribution to the work in this patent and should really have been rejected due to prior art.

Saying the original author should have patented this is also facile as that takes an enormous amount of resources that isn't available to most lone developers, or researchers, especially when the intent is to give it away freely to world.

[dylan604]

The intent of filing a patent to give away freely is specifically to protect against someone else filing the patent. It can be expensive, but not prohibitively so if you're willing to do some of the leg work yourself.

[TrueDuality]

In this case it's an international patent as the original author is not based in or from the US which adds complications. That aside you're looking at a minimum of $500 in patent office fees alone. That's probably fairly reasonable if that was all it is, and if you can get it right on the first try it might be. That cost is per submission and there is a huge schedule of fees that might expand that.

You're also glossing over the personal value of time expenditure to do that which even with professional guidance can take hundreds of hours. It is absolutely prohibitively expensive for something someone is going to give away for free and even most small independent companies.

There should be no reason that a donated public idea or concept should require any expenditure for protection.