[leeoniya]

"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." -- John Carmack

from http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/patents/carmack

[jandrewrogers]

This is obviously not true in many cases. There are countless algorithm problems where decades and thousands of pages of published literature on the problem go by before some researcher manages to make a material advance. Computer science is full of cases like this.

If all of the interesting problems were so trivial to solve, they would not be "problems" by definition. The idea that smart programmers could solve these problems any time they wanted to if they put their minds to it is unrealistic. They are considered "hard problems" precisely because countless smart programmers have failed to find a solution after no small amount of effort.

[ScottBurson]

Well -- there are hard problems -- and then there are hard problems.

It seems that a lot of patents are being granted for solutions to problems that are only moderately difficult, if even that. Certainly, I have seen a number for which the solution seems quite standard given the problem. I think what happens here is that new technologies create new problems, which though not deep, are novel. These are solved in quite standard ways, in many cases; but since the problem is novel, technically, so is the solution, so the PTO grants a patent for it. And a large fraction of the patents being issued are of this nature.

I think the solution is to restrict patents to problems that are demonstrably hard -- of the kind that you describe, where there is objective evidence (in the published literature, for example) that people have thought about the problem for some time without solving it.

[fspeech]

The key here is that patents are supposed to be non obvious to those "skilled in the arts" and herein lies the rub: who are those skllled in the arts? In my previous career (wireless and IC) I saw most patents as trivial for someone skilled in the arts: they were mostly byproducts of routine engineering design work. They were novel only in the sense that you are probably the first to work on a specific form. Yet they could appear rather deep and profound to the untrained eyes as you need a lot of training to be skilled in the arts in the first place. Can patent examiners truly judge the novelty of these patent applications?

And the funny thing is: if you come up with some real algorithm for some real hard problem it is unlikely that your algorithm can be protected by a patent, certainly not in its general form. The true algorithmic nature of your solution is likely too abstract and mathematical for a patent as patents do not protect laws of nature (physics and math qualify as laws of nature).