[kenster07]

There is clearly no reason for software patents. To look at this issue from another angle, consider the following.

What was the reason for creating the patent system in the first place? To give people an incentive to invent new things: if someone invests the time in coming up with something novel, the legal system would give a temporary monopoly in return.

But in today's world, clearly one would imagine the vast majority, if not all software would have been invented as is, without the incentives that patent protection provides. When one contrasts this with the well-known downsides of software patents, the outcome should be clear: abolish them.

[jordigh]

> What was the reason for creating the patent system in the first place? To give people an incentive to invent new things:

No, the point of the patent system is not to incentivise invention. The point of patents is to destroy trade secrets. The word "patent" means "open". The whole point of patents is increase society's knowledge of how to do things.

People invent with or without patents. What they don't always do without patents is to say how those inventions work. The bargain inventors make with patents is, tell us how you did it, and in exchange we promise to not compete with you for a while.

This is an awesome patent:

http://www.google.com/patents/US5255452

This is what patents are supposed to be about: a magician revealing his tricks. Without the patent system, Michael Jackson may have taken his idea to the grave.

The problem is that almost none of the people patenting software are magicians.

[csallen]

Destroying trade secrets may be a benefit of the patent system, but it's historically inaccurate to say that's why the system was created in the first place.

The Constitution itself gives the reason as "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". Numerous letters written by the Constitution's framers support the interpretation that the goal is to incentivize creation by granting monopolies.

[jordigh]

It is not historically inaccurate, it's encoded in the name of the damn thing. The patent system predates the creation of the United States, and its spirit is more than the ambiguous summary of "to promote progress".

The history of patents is long, but Queen Anne's statute is where the the nature of disclosing trade secrets was formalised:

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/patent/p-about/p-whatis/p-histor...

[csallen]

I'm not saying that patents don't accomplish more than promoting progress. They do! I just believe your claim ("The whole point of patents is [to] increase society's knowledge of how to do things") is overly ambitious. That's an important part of the patent system, yes, but far from "the whole point".

As Thomas Jefferson wrote about the US patent system: "Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility..."

[peterashford]

Holy US-blinkers Batman! Patents existed for hundreds of years before the US even existed. Their framing in the US constitution does not describe the reasons for the creation of patents.

[csallen]

This discussion is about the patent system in the United States.

[peterashford]

No, it isn't. The article was about abstract ideas in general and in this current thread, you were the first one to mention the constitution and it was to you and your point that I was replying.

[csallen]

The article appears in the New York Times, which is based in the US and targets a primarily American audience. Furthermore, the article itself begins: "The Constitution gives Congress the power to grant... But in recent years, the government has too often given patent protection to..."

[shasta]

Your view of patents doesn't match reality.

> What they don't always do without patents is to say how those inventions work.

For 90+% of patents, the idea is implicitly disclosed by releasing a product that makes use of the idea. In cases where a trade secrets can be effectively kept, that's what companies do!

[axman6]

No, it's not. Releasing their ideas using a patent involves a lot less risk for a company who relies on an invention of theirs than keeping it secret and just waiting for someone else to have the same idea. It provides stability that they otherwise cannot rely on without some kind of protection. The know they can keep their intellectual advantage for the whole term of the patent, where without it they are just waiting an indefinite time until someone reverse engineers their technological advantage. Stabaility leads to more investment, and patents lead to society gaining access to ideas much sooner than they would have otherwise.

Most people forget the patent system is based on one simple idea: you can exclude others using an idea you have a patent for, but society must have that idea shared in return for the protection, and after a limited period of time anyone may be allowed to use the idea. 20 years is a bit long for software when things are moving at such an accelerated pace, but coming up with an appropriate period of time is also difficult.

[shasta]

> Stabaility leads to more investment, and patents lead to society gaining access to ideas much sooner than they would have otherwise.

Has anyone ever read a software patent to learn something other than "do I infringe on this?"

[axman6]

Do you honestly believe what you're saying? Of course they do, companies constantly keep track of the patents their competitors file to a) do as you said and avoid infringement and b) get inspiration for new ideas (There's nothing wrong with patenting qan improvement to someone else's patented idea, you just have to get permission from them to be able to use the base idea, andb they in term might seek permission from you to use your improvement).

I find it so hard to beliebe that people on hacker news think about these issues at such a childish level; everything is black and white, and we'll ignore the facts if they don't suit our world view.

[shasta]

Note that I specifically said software patent. I've worked for a number of software companies. Most of them recently have a process in place to harvest potentially patentable work product from the engineers... stuff that we were going to do no matter what, but that they'll patent if they can. No company had anyone assigned to searching patents for ideas.

I guess your experience has been different? Care to share details?

> beliebe ... childish level

Was that misspelling some kind of intentional Beiber reference?

Don't assume that my opinions on patents match the typical hacker around here. For example, I don't think software patents are intrinsically special by virtue of being more mathematical than ordinary patents.

Honestly, I have a hard time understanding how you can live in this world and hold the view that patents are non-negligible contributor to our shared knowledge base.

I guess I could see the argument that valuable information is released from the major companies in the form of whitepapers, and that those whitepapers wouldn't be allowed if not protected by patents. But I still think that if you nixed software patents altogether, the impact on disclosed information would be minimal.

[cookingrobot]

That sounds good in theory - but do you see this actually happening in practice? I've filed dozens of patents, but haven't ever looked into a competitor's software patent to see how they do things. Many companies instruct their engineers not to ever read patents because it can work against you in a lawsuit.

[jordigh]

Exactly, the patent system is broken. What the hell are we doing? Why are we writing public specifications that anybody who reads them is liable to get sued even harder than if they hadn't read them? This is against the whole principle of what patents are supposed to do.

[cdash]

This is not an argument for software patents but it is not necessary to actually read the patents yourself for you to benefit from the knowledge they provide. You could read about an patented algorithm in a wikipedia article, a blog, or in an academic paper.

[jandrewrogers]

The reason for creating a patent system is to encourage public disclosure of inventions. Patents came out of the enormous problems that resulted in the widespread use of trade secrets, which actively hindered technological development in the past. This essentially forces everyone to redundantly do a lot of R&D that has already been done under non-disclosure rather than incorporating ideas that have been publicly disclosed and using that as a starting point for further innovation.

We already see this in a number of areas of computer science, where the algorithm state-of-the-art at private companies is a decade ahead of the public academic literature. This basically has the academics in many computer science domains essentially trying to reinvent things that have been known for years as trade secrets at large companies rather than doing genuinely original research.

I do not think there is an obviously good solution, since algorithm patents are difficult to enforce in any case, but one of the trends resulting from a lack of algorithm patent enforceability is that almost all cutting edge computer science R&D is now done and kept as a trade secret by companies because it has a material commercial advantage.

[bjt]

We don't need a patent system in order for openness to beat closedness in the software world. Linux and lots of other open source projects are winning their markets without relying on patents at all.

No one forces you to choose a patent over keeping your invention secret. Trade secrets still exist everywhere. And that's OK.

You say it's a problem that companies are a decade ahead of academia in some CS areas. Given that companies can choose what to make public and what to keep secret, what's the alternative? It's the ability to have some exclusive time in the market that incentivizes the companies to do that research in the first place. I'd rather have them ahead by 10 years because of trade secrets than getting 20 years of exclusivity through a patent.

[jandrewrogers]

Linux leverages ubiquitous disclosure in computer science from decades past. Open source software is largely built on a computer science technology base that, while sufficient, does not reflect many qualitative computer science advances that have been made in the last decade. For software that routinely leverage computer science advances (e.g. databases and parallel systems) you already see a divergence in capability and performance between platforms that are not open source and the open source world because of this lack of knowledge transfer.

Graph analysis platforms are a great example of this. Every open source graph analysis platform is a non-scalable toy that is useless for most real-world use cases compared to private systems that were being quietly deployed five years ago. Why the discrepancy? Because the unpublished algorithms and data structures used by some closed source systems are several orders of magnitude more scalable than is possible with the best existing public algorithms. And this is not the only example with which I am familiar.

The problem open source software has if it is based on increasingly obsolete computer science is that it will not be economically competitive with closed source that is much more scalable and/or much faster and/or has much higher throughput per watt. A combination of materially better capability and efficiency has an enormous impact on CapEx and OpEx, and people care about those kinds of things when it starts adding up to large amounts of money.

[hackinthebochs]

> I'd rather have them ahead by 10 years because of trade secrets than getting 20 years of exclusivity through a patent

The difference is that had the invention been patented, the academic world could be advancing and building on the idea. Trade secrets effectively freeze the progress of an idea. Patents allow an idea to be advanced, even if no company could commercially benefit from the idea in the intervening time. Are we better off as a society with Watson's inner workings kept as a trade secret?

[bjt]

We're not forced to choose. Unlike a patent, a trade secret leaves anyone else free to invent and use the same idea.

[hackinthebochs]

>Unlike a patent, a trade secret leaves anyone else free to invent and use the same idea.

What is the probability that such an idea is independently recreated? Hard to say, but its likely inversely related to how ground-breaking the invention is, which are the ones that society benefits the most from them being made public.

[new299]

"What was the reason for creating the patent system in the first place? To give people an incentive to invent new things: if someone invests the time in coming up with something novel, the legal system would give a temporary monopoly in return."

If someone invests the time in coming up with something novel, and discloses it publicly. If I remember correctly, public disclosure was the more important part of the original motivation for the patent system.

"patents are intended to facilitate and encourage disclosure of innovations into the public domain for the common good. If inventors did not have the legal protection of patents, in many cases, they might prefer or tend to keep their inventions secret."

That's from Wikipedia, but I'd be interested to see a better reference if anyone has one. So, to play devils advocate, given that motivation you can see an argument for software patents. Potentially a stronger one than for other patents.

It's much easier to obscure algorithms than other inventions. If an algorithm is not patentable, many companies might choose to just obscure the algorithm either by offering it as a service or obscuring the code.

By allowing software patents for a complex algorithm the method is released into the public domain in return for a limited monopoly. After the term of the monopoly, the algorithm will be freely available for use by everyone.

[tmzt]

This might be a better one, from the US Constitution:

  To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by
  securing for limited times to authors and inventors the
  exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section8

[peterashford]

When do you think patents were first envisaged? Hint: it's a little bit earlier than the existence of the US

[hackinthebochs]

The basis for patents in US law is the only thing relevant to this conversation.

[ericHosick]

> But in today's world, clearly one would imagine the vast majority, if not all software would have been invented as is, without the incentives that patent protection provides.

It could be that in our society (USA), people would be so willing to invent software without patents because the patent system itself has created an environment by which people can be successful from being so open. The intention of the patent system worked.

A lot of societies are very closed with regards to sharing information.