i'm not sure what to think of patents, they are need to protect research and investments, but they are easily misused and seem to be up to multiple interpretations, i know that patents also affect the medical industries, where in some cases people can not research a particular virus or a potential cure for something important, cause the gene code is patented !! patents are needed but this system sucks
As a software developer, I wholeheartedly disagree. I was part of a company which developed some rather innovative stuff, and had the original founder and a couple of his friends jump ship, start another company, and get a new round of financiers. Obviously it's a lot easier to copy something than to develop it the first time, and without patent protection he would have gotten away with it.
That is what Copyrights are for, to protect someone from flat out duplicating an existing work. Probably also worth noting that by default ownership of patents leans toward the inventor, not the company paying his/her salary, it depends on what kind of IP agreement you sign. As a software developer, you should realize that signing a heavy-handed IP agreement can severely limit your job marketability. It's like you learned to pump gas at one gas station, and now even though you're good at it, you can't pump gas anywhere else.
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I think it's pretty obvious that the countries with stronger IP laws tend to be the ones with a better high-tech industry, and I don't think that's coincidence.
ROTFLMAO ... I think you've lost track of what countries are dominating the high-tech industries, the software jobs are pouring into countries that have far from strong IP laws..
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I agree that sometimes patents are mis-used, just like any other tool. But the answer isn't to scrap the tool, it's to improve the oversight. Unless and until software is something that takes no thought or effort to develop and there is no more innovation in the industry, we'll need software patents to protect the original developers from the copycats.
The whole point of computers is that they are easily programable, have a flexible user interface, etc. Many/most software patents these days are patenting the blatantly obvious. The idea of copying someone's phone number from a Post-it note to a paper address book suddenly becomes "pushing remote PIM data to a centralized host" and undoubtedly some idiot out there has a patent on it.
Will SJ, who gave us his views on the DRM and now teacher unions, if he will enlighten us regarding patents.
After all, didn't Steve say during the iPhone announcement... "and boy have we patented it!"
I agree with Auxio, "I work for a company which holds a number of software patents, and I can tell you that the only reason they/we hold patents is in the case where another company sues us. So that we can hopefully leverage our existing patents and find something the other company infringes on and then settle out of court."
Don't get me wrong, I agree with SJ regarding patenting the hell out of the iPhone... Then have Apple legal get busy on any violators and use the proceeds to pay off any mp3 awards brought forth by the courts. That way, what Apple looses to Acatel-Lucent, they'll more then make up in future suits. Sad, but it's what makes the business world go around!
The problem is not with patenting intellectual property ... that is what all patents really are in the end ... whether hardware or software. The problem is with having a balanced, fair and intelligently run judicial system that can determine which suits deserve to be tried and which do not.
Doesn't Apple use AAC for all of it's iTunes STORE songs? So how could that get affected?
Since iTunes does have the capability to playback MP3's and create MP3's, I guess that's one downside.
Yeah, iTunes has a lot of built-in support for MP3 encoding and playback. And it has done this since very early versions. So this is the trouble. Even if Apple released iTunes 8.0 with only AAC support, they would still be at risk because of past usage.
Patents in general is out of hand. It is not just in software, nor limited to computer industry, we are living in an age of patents. I thought it was a joke when I read human DNAs can be patented... well, the joke is on us all.
Doesn't Apple use AAC for all of it's iTunes STORE songs? So how could that get affected?
Since iTunes does have the capability to playback MP3's and create MP3's, I guess that's one downside.
Microsoft didn't sell MP3s either. I think it's just for the playback component, but maybe WMP has an optional MP3 encoder like the iTunes software does.
I'm not sure what to say about software patents specifically, but I understand that Lucent had a patent backdated and cut out Fraunhoffer out of it. One thing I do know is that the USPTO is not doing its job, but I'm not sure they are at fault here.
Incidentally, I think the biggest anti-patent folks are the ones in the FOSS community, who make their living for the most part copying the ideas of the commercial software industry. Every once in awhile something innovative happens in FOSS, but generally it's a chorus of "I hope someone makes a FOSS version of X", where X is some product that took substantial development effort to produce. That kind of attitude gets me annoyed.
I really don't know what to say about your first example, it sounds like a software patent being used to make up for forgetting to make people sign a non-compete agreement.
The Foss community makes a living? For most, I think it's just a hobby. Can an innovation really be that hard to make in the first place if a few hobbyists can code the same thing in a month?
I wouldn't downplay the technolgy input that FOSS software has. Quite a lot of OS X is based on FOSS. Safari's rendering engine is based on Konqueror, the printing system heavily uses CUPS, the execution environment is based on BSD, the compiler that compiles most of the software is from GNU. SAMBA does the Windows file sharing compatibility.
MP3s have been around for HOW MANY YEARS? and this company is just coming out of the woodwork NOW to claim its share of the royalties?
I call Patent Troll.
I also think that the court needs to address a MUCH NEEDED statute of limitations on royalty collections.
to Alcatel-Lucent:
I'd say if you were too busy to try and get those royalties in the same YEAR that fraunhoffer got theirs then you missed your oportunity. Shame on you for waiting so long. I personally plan to boycott anything with Alcatel or Lucent technology inside if this court decision is not overturned.
I called the same thing when they sued The Empire over yhe 360. I'm not sure how it turned out or if it turned out yet,
That is what Copyrights are for, to protect someone from flat out duplicating an existing work. Probably also worth noting that by default ownership of patents leans toward the inventor, not the company paying his/her salary, it depends on what kind of IP agreement you sign. As a software developer, you should realize that signing a heavy-handed IP agreement can severely limit your job marketability. It's like you learned to pump gas at one gas station, and now even though you're good at it, you can't pump gas anywhere else.
You appear to have a severe misunderstanding on where the value lies in an innovative process. The value is not in the particular implementation, but the approach that lets an idea be profitable and productive. In addition, almost any company requires work-related patents to be assigned to the company (my patent was assigned to that company, too), and rightly so. That's what they're paying you for.
People who equate real software engineering with some sort of automatic process that requires no creativity and contains no innovation bug me. That's "computer programming" and it's a 2-year associates degree at a community college or what a teenager picks up in his basement.
Yes, patents are sometimes abused. But they're also used the way they're supposed to more often than not.
I really don't know what to say about your first example, it sounds like a software patent being used to make up for forgetting to make people sign a non-compete agreement.
There was a non-compete agreement. Those are extremely hard to enforce, never last very long, and IMHO, are much, much worse for innovation and the industry than patents will ever be. No, it was the patents that saved the company.
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Originally Posted by JeffDM
The Foss community makes a living? For most, I think it's just a hobby. Can an innovation really be that hard to make in the first place if a few hobbyists can code the same thing in a month?
YESSSS!!! That's my whole point. All great inventions seem "obvious" in retrospect, and they're often orders of magnitude easier to reproduce than to produce. Look at the Wright Brothers... Curtiss copied their designs easily, but he didn't invent flying. It was patents, and winning every patent lawsuit, that kept the Wright company in business.
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Originally Posted by JeffDM
I wouldn't downplay the technolgy input that FOSS software has. Quite a lot of OS X is based on FOSS. Safari's rendering engine is based on Konqueror, the printing system heavily uses CUPS, the execution environment is based on BSD, the compiler that compiles most of the software is from GNU. SAMBA does the Windows file sharing compatibility.
Samba is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. There's nothing at all innovative in Samba, it's just a free implementation of something.
And I didn't say innovation is non-existent in FOSS, just that most FOSS projects seem to be "let's reproduce this technology that some company put a lot of resources into creating because we don't want to pay them". And I don't think that increases innovation or helps our economy.
@Booga: I understand where you are coming from with regard to protecting innovation so that others don't directly copy it and kill off the companies which paid for that innovation. However, the vast majority of software patents these days are for tiny algorithms which have been used in practice for many years already.
If software developers from the 60's and 70's would have been as patent crazy as technology firms are today, we wouldn't have half of the amazing technology we do because everyone would be tied down in lawsuits trying to prove that their technology is a "clean room implementation". And the only people who'd be better off are the lawyers.
I mean, I consider that I've done some pretty innovative work in my years as a software developer, but most of it has come out of mathematics textbooks and looking at prior work to come up with something innovative. While the bigger project that I was working on is something which should be protected -- the little steps which created it certainly shouldn't because they were based on prior knowledge. Unfortunately, that's not how patents work. You have to patent all of the little details rather than the bigger invention. That's why I never cease to point out prior implementations when I see patents being shown here on AI.
In the example you give with the Wright brothers, they wouldn't even have been able to build their airplane because they wouldn't be able to use the propeller motor since all of the implementation details for the motor would have been patented already. They would have had to invent every single component from scratch rather than being able to reuse existing technology to build something bigger than the sum of it's parts.
That's the problem I have with software patents. That it's become more about patenting every little implementation detail rather than the main invention. This is what I forsee will cause technology to stagnate in the coming years because it will tie developers hands. Patents should be about protecting outright copying of end products and not about preventing others from using innovative building blocks to create entirely different products.
Samba is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. There's nothing at all innovative in Samba, it's just a free implementation of something.
Was anything about Microsoft's networking protocol innovative? I think you'd have to argue that first. I think it's only used because it's the one that's built into Windows.
Using SAMBA on my Mac as a server is far more reliable for me than using a Windows computer for a server to Windows clients. I think that's a worthwhile improvement.
SMB is an IBM networking protocol. Microsoft continued to use and expand it into CIFS.
Arguably, none of Microsoft's or Samba's implementation is particularly "innovative"; most of it is inferior to alternatives such as AppleShare, NFS or AFS.
If software developers from the 60's and 70's would have been as patent crazy as technology firms are today, we wouldn't have half of the amazing technology we do because everyone would be tied down in lawsuits trying to prove that their technology is a "clean room implementation". And the only people who'd be better off are the lawyers.
Actually, all those would be in the public domain after 7-14 years, besides the fact that patent law didn't allow patenting of software back then.
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Originally Posted by auxio
In the example you give with the Wright brothers, they wouldn't even have been able to build their airplane because they wouldn't be able to use the propeller motor since all of the implementation details for the motor would have been patented already. They would have had to invent every single component from scratch rather than being able to reuse existing technology to build something bigger than the sum of it's parts.
I see your point, but the Wright brothers don't prove it because they DID have to build their own internal combustion engine because in 1902 no existing engine had the power-to-weight ratio to enable flight.
It's interesting that the Wright brothers, in fact, only patented one thing: their mechanism for changing the angle of attack of wings independently in order to coordinate roll and yaw while steering. They were SO paranoid that their inventions would be easy to copy and that patent law at the time wasn't strong enough that they worked in secret for the better part of a decade. If the airplane had been built under today's patent laws, it probably would have reached the market years sooner. The whole point of patent law is to get things into the public domain quicker in exchange for some exclusivity.
I agree that the current system is somewhat broken, but to claim that software shouldn't be patentable is to claim that it contains no innovation and costs nothing to advance the field.
Funny, I've had Lucent stock for years (now called Alcatel-Lucent since their merger) and it hasn't budged since this announced... Still sinking like a rock.
Funny, I've had Lucent stock for years (now called Alcatel-Lucent since their merger) and it hasn't budged since this announced... Still sinking like a rock.
Don't expect it to move until MS actually parts with the cash.
Don't expect it to move until MS actually parts with the cash.
I don't know who to root for anymore... I own Microsoft, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, HP AND Apple stock... thankfully, Apple has performed like a champ, and HP is doing very well also.
Actually, all those would be in the public domain after 7-14 years, besides the fact that patent law didn't allow patenting of software back then.
7-14 years is a long time in the software industry. Consider how much software innovation took place between 1970 and 1984. C, UNIX, the GUI (and computer graphics in general), computer networking to name a few innovations.
You decry the open source movement for lack of innovation, but did you ever consider that as many (if not more) of the major innovations in computer hardware and software have come out of academia and government research as have come out of corporate environments?
Much of my own software is built upon publicly available knowledge from mathematics and computing science which came out of such institutions. If it hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to write a lot of the software I have because the knowledge it's based on would have been covered by patents which may or may not be expired.
This is where I think that looking at the world through monetary colored glasses fails. I consider the fundamental algorithms and programming languages which are used as building blocks to be things which should not be patentable. Just as language and mathematical formulas shouldn't be.
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I see your point, but the Wright brothers don't prove it because they DID have to build their own internal combustion engine because in 1902 no existing engine had the power-to-weight ratio to enable flight.
Right, but they didn't have to re-invent the combustion engine. Only optimize it.
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I agree that the current system is somewhat broken, but to claim that software shouldn't be patentable is to claim that it contains no innovation and costs nothing to advance the field.
My main point is that only end products should be patentable, not the building blocks those products are based on. So that even if someone copies your design, they can't sell the same end product as you without paying you royalties.
Comments
everyone needs to get together and completely wipe this crap out, seriously its getting to a point of ridiculousness.
I don't know.
IP law is more complicated than that.
As a software developer, I wholeheartedly disagree. I was part of a company which developed some rather innovative stuff, and had the original founder and a couple of his friends jump ship, start another company, and get a new round of financiers. Obviously it's a lot easier to copy something than to develop it the first time, and without patent protection he would have gotten away with it.
That is what Copyrights are for, to protect someone from flat out duplicating an existing work. Probably also worth noting that by default ownership of patents leans toward the inventor, not the company paying his/her salary, it depends on what kind of IP agreement you sign. As a software developer, you should realize that signing a heavy-handed IP agreement can severely limit your job marketability. It's like you learned to pump gas at one gas station, and now even though you're good at it, you can't pump gas anywhere else.
I think it's pretty obvious that the countries with stronger IP laws tend to be the ones with a better high-tech industry, and I don't think that's coincidence.
ROTFLMAO ... I think you've lost track of what countries are dominating the high-tech industries, the software jobs are pouring into countries that have far from strong IP laws..
I agree that sometimes patents are mis-used, just like any other tool. But the answer isn't to scrap the tool, it's to improve the oversight. Unless and until software is something that takes no thought or effort to develop and there is no more innovation in the industry, we'll need software patents to protect the original developers from the copycats.
The whole point of computers is that they are easily programable, have a flexible user interface, etc. Many/most software patents these days are patenting the blatantly obvious. The idea of copying someone's phone number from a Post-it note to a paper address book suddenly becomes "pushing remote PIM data to a centralized host" and undoubtedly some idiot out there has a patent on it.
Will SJ, who gave us his views on the DRM and now teacher unions, if he will enlighten us regarding patents.
After all, didn't Steve say during the iPhone announcement... "and boy have we patented it!"
I agree with Auxio, "I work for a company which holds a number of software patents, and I can tell you that the only reason they/we hold patents is in the case where another company sues us. So that we can hopefully leverage our existing patents and find something the other company infringes on and then settle out of court."
Don't get me wrong, I agree with SJ regarding patenting the hell out of the iPhone... Then have Apple legal get busy on any violators and use the proceeds to pay off any mp3 awards brought forth by the courts. That way, what Apple looses to Acatel-Lucent, they'll more then make up in future suits. Sad, but it's what makes the business world go around!
Doesn't Apple use AAC for all of it's iTunes STORE songs? So how could that get affected?
Since iTunes does have the capability to playback MP3's and create MP3's, I guess that's one downside.
Yeah, iTunes has a lot of built-in support for MP3 encoding and playback. And it has done this since very early versions. So this is the trouble. Even if Apple released iTunes 8.0 with only AAC support, they would still be at risk because of past usage.
Doesn't Apple use AAC for all of it's iTunes STORE songs? So how could that get affected?
Since iTunes does have the capability to playback MP3's and create MP3's, I guess that's one downside.
Microsoft didn't sell MP3s either. I think it's just for the playback component, but maybe WMP has an optional MP3 encoder like the iTunes software does.
I'm not sure what to say about software patents specifically, but I understand that Lucent had a patent backdated and cut out Fraunhoffer out of it. One thing I do know is that the USPTO is not doing its job, but I'm not sure they are at fault here.
Incidentally, I think the biggest anti-patent folks are the ones in the FOSS community, who make their living for the most part copying the ideas of the commercial software industry. Every once in awhile something innovative happens in FOSS, but generally it's a chorus of "I hope someone makes a FOSS version of X", where X is some product that took substantial development effort to produce. That kind of attitude gets me annoyed.
I really don't know what to say about your first example, it sounds like a software patent being used to make up for forgetting to make people sign a non-compete agreement.
The Foss community makes a living? For most, I think it's just a hobby. Can an innovation really be that hard to make in the first place if a few hobbyists can code the same thing in a month?
I wouldn't downplay the technolgy input that FOSS software has. Quite a lot of OS X is based on FOSS. Safari's rendering engine is based on Konqueror, the printing system heavily uses CUPS, the execution environment is based on BSD, the compiler that compiles most of the software is from GNU. SAMBA does the Windows file sharing compatibility.
MP3s have been around for HOW MANY YEARS? and this company is just coming out of the woodwork NOW to claim its share of the royalties?
I call Patent Troll.
I also think that the court needs to address a MUCH NEEDED statute of limitations on royalty collections.
to Alcatel-Lucent:
I'd say if you were too busy to try and get those royalties in the same YEAR that fraunhoffer got theirs then you missed your oportunity. Shame on you for waiting so long. I personally plan to boycott anything with Alcatel or Lucent technology inside if this court decision is not overturned.
I called the same thing when they sued The Empire over yhe 360. I'm not sure how it turned out or if it turned out yet,
Sebastian
That is what Copyrights are for, to protect someone from flat out duplicating an existing work. Probably also worth noting that by default ownership of patents leans toward the inventor, not the company paying his/her salary, it depends on what kind of IP agreement you sign. As a software developer, you should realize that signing a heavy-handed IP agreement can severely limit your job marketability. It's like you learned to pump gas at one gas station, and now even though you're good at it, you can't pump gas anywhere else.
You appear to have a severe misunderstanding on where the value lies in an innovative process. The value is not in the particular implementation, but the approach that lets an idea be profitable and productive. In addition, almost any company requires work-related patents to be assigned to the company (my patent was assigned to that company, too), and rightly so. That's what they're paying you for.
People who equate real software engineering with some sort of automatic process that requires no creativity and contains no innovation bug me. That's "computer programming" and it's a 2-year associates degree at a community college or what a teenager picks up in his basement.
Yes, patents are sometimes abused. But they're also used the way they're supposed to more often than not.
I really don't know what to say about your first example, it sounds like a software patent being used to make up for forgetting to make people sign a non-compete agreement.
There was a non-compete agreement. Those are extremely hard to enforce, never last very long, and IMHO, are much, much worse for innovation and the industry than patents will ever be. No, it was the patents that saved the company.
The Foss community makes a living? For most, I think it's just a hobby. Can an innovation really be that hard to make in the first place if a few hobbyists can code the same thing in a month?
YESSSS!!! That's my whole point. All great inventions seem "obvious" in retrospect, and they're often orders of magnitude easier to reproduce than to produce. Look at the Wright Brothers... Curtiss copied their designs easily, but he didn't invent flying. It was patents, and winning every patent lawsuit, that kept the Wright company in business.
I wouldn't downplay the technolgy input that FOSS software has. Quite a lot of OS X is based on FOSS. Safari's rendering engine is based on Konqueror, the printing system heavily uses CUPS, the execution environment is based on BSD, the compiler that compiles most of the software is from GNU. SAMBA does the Windows file sharing compatibility.
Samba is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. There's nothing at all innovative in Samba, it's just a free implementation of something.
And I didn't say innovation is non-existent in FOSS, just that most FOSS projects seem to be "let's reproduce this technology that some company put a lot of resources into creating because we don't want to pay them". And I don't think that increases innovation or helps our economy.
If software developers from the 60's and 70's would have been as patent crazy as technology firms are today, we wouldn't have half of the amazing technology we do because everyone would be tied down in lawsuits trying to prove that their technology is a "clean room implementation". And the only people who'd be better off are the lawyers.
I mean, I consider that I've done some pretty innovative work in my years as a software developer, but most of it has come out of mathematics textbooks and looking at prior work to come up with something innovative. While the bigger project that I was working on is something which should be protected -- the little steps which created it certainly shouldn't because they were based on prior knowledge. Unfortunately, that's not how patents work. You have to patent all of the little details rather than the bigger invention. That's why I never cease to point out prior implementations when I see patents being shown here on AI.
In the example you give with the Wright brothers, they wouldn't even have been able to build their airplane because they wouldn't be able to use the propeller motor since all of the implementation details for the motor would have been patented already. They would have had to invent every single component from scratch rather than being able to reuse existing technology to build something bigger than the sum of it's parts.
That's the problem I have with software patents. That it's become more about patenting every little implementation detail rather than the main invention. This is what I forsee will cause technology to stagnate in the coming years because it will tie developers hands. Patents should be about protecting outright copying of end products and not about preventing others from using innovative building blocks to create entirely different products.
Samba is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. There's nothing at all innovative in Samba, it's just a free implementation of something.
Was anything about Microsoft's networking protocol innovative? I think you'd have to argue that first. I think it's only used because it's the one that's built into Windows.
Using SAMBA on my Mac as a server is far more reliable for me than using a Windows computer for a server to Windows clients. I think that's a worthwhile improvement.
Arguably, none of Microsoft's or Samba's implementation is particularly "innovative"; most of it is inferior to alternatives such as AppleShare, NFS or AFS.
If software developers from the 60's and 70's would have been as patent crazy as technology firms are today, we wouldn't have half of the amazing technology we do because everyone would be tied down in lawsuits trying to prove that their technology is a "clean room implementation". And the only people who'd be better off are the lawyers.
Actually, all those would be in the public domain after 7-14 years, besides the fact that patent law didn't allow patenting of software back then.
In the example you give with the Wright brothers, they wouldn't even have been able to build their airplane because they wouldn't be able to use the propeller motor since all of the implementation details for the motor would have been patented already. They would have had to invent every single component from scratch rather than being able to reuse existing technology to build something bigger than the sum of it's parts.
I see your point, but the Wright brothers don't prove it because they DID have to build their own internal combustion engine because in 1902 no existing engine had the power-to-weight ratio to enable flight.
It's interesting that the Wright brothers, in fact, only patented one thing: their mechanism for changing the angle of attack of wings independently in order to coordinate roll and yaw while steering. They were SO paranoid that their inventions would be easy to copy and that patent law at the time wasn't strong enough that they worked in secret for the better part of a decade. If the airplane had been built under today's patent laws, it probably would have reached the market years sooner. The whole point of patent law is to get things into the public domain quicker in exchange for some exclusivity.
I agree that the current system is somewhat broken, but to claim that software shouldn't be patentable is to claim that it contains no innovation and costs nothing to advance the field.
Funny, I've had Lucent stock for years (now called Alcatel-Lucent since their merger) and it hasn't budged since this announced... Still sinking like a rock.
Don't expect it to move until MS actually parts with the cash.
Don't expect it to move until MS actually parts with the cash.
I don't know who to root for anymore... I own Microsoft, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, HP AND Apple stock... thankfully, Apple has performed like a champ, and HP is doing very well also.
Actually, all those would be in the public domain after 7-14 years, besides the fact that patent law didn't allow patenting of software back then.
7-14 years is a long time in the software industry. Consider how much software innovation took place between 1970 and 1984. C, UNIX, the GUI (and computer graphics in general), computer networking to name a few innovations.
You decry the open source movement for lack of innovation, but did you ever consider that as many (if not more) of the major innovations in computer hardware and software have come out of academia and government research as have come out of corporate environments?
Much of my own software is built upon publicly available knowledge from mathematics and computing science which came out of such institutions. If it hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to write a lot of the software I have because the knowledge it's based on would have been covered by patents which may or may not be expired.
This is where I think that looking at the world through monetary colored glasses fails. I consider the fundamental algorithms and programming languages which are used as building blocks to be things which should not be patentable. Just as language and mathematical formulas shouldn't be.
I see your point, but the Wright brothers don't prove it because they DID have to build their own internal combustion engine because in 1902 no existing engine had the power-to-weight ratio to enable flight.
Right, but they didn't have to re-invent the combustion engine. Only optimize it.
I agree that the current system is somewhat broken, but to claim that software shouldn't be patentable is to claim that it contains no innovation and costs nothing to advance the field.
My main point is that only end products should be patentable, not the building blocks those products are based on. So that even if someone copies your design, they can't sell the same end product as you without paying you royalties.