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> Ironically, Google's PageRank is the subject of several patents, and Stanford's interest in the IP netted them $335 million in Google shares when they exclusively licensed it back to Google. That's not irony, as "should not be patentable" and "is patentable" are not mutually exclusive (I've also never heard of anyone being sued over the many, many pagerank-like implementations out there, so really the only thing going on there is University patent policies). "should not be patentable" and "is patentable" is actually a large part of the problem, because you have to engage in the game to not be sued out of existence, but in doing so, you're making the environment even more toxic. I always like to quote the Gosling story: "In Sun's early history, we didn't think much of patents. While there's a kernel of good sense in the reasoning for patents, the system itself has gotten goofy. Sun didn't file many patents initially. But then we got sued by IBM for violating the "RISC patent" - a patent that essentially said "if you make something simpler, it'll go faster". Seemed like a blindingly obvious notion that shouldn't have been patentable, but we got sued, and lost. The penalty was huge. Nearly put us out of business. We survived, but to help protect us from future suits we went on a patenting binge. Even though we had a basic distaste for patents, the game is what it is, and patents are essential in modern corporations, if only as a defensive measure. There was even an unofficial competition to see who could get the goofiest patent through the system. My entry[1] wasn't nearly the goofiest." You make market incentives to get companies to patent everything they can. Companies incentivize engineers to patent everything they can. Patent lawyers rewrite the software patent applications to take what is already an abstract set of instructions and turn it into the platonic form of that idea, to make sure they cover all implementations of that idea. The patent office accepts it after 7 resubmissions. You're not going to end up with a good result. [1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec... |