All your points are easily proven wrong. Nokia's research budget is gigantic, far, FAR larger than apple's. Recently they released a new OS of some sort (Meebo? Meego? It sucks, nobody cares about it). Europe has no software patents. Clearly the lack of software patents does not stifle research budgets. I grant you apple is doing a far better job at it, but I don't see what patent law has to do with this. That's like stating that buying more oranges from mexico leads to reduced crime (there is a very strong correlation between those two, but rather obviously there's a third factor involved there!) - you need to prove one is the cause of the other, you can't just point at correlations.
You argue: If software patents didn't exist, companies may not bother with research. Well, nokia has the biggest budget and they live on an entire continent without software patents. Trying to kill chinese knockoffs based on patent law just doesn't work. The chinese government doesn't care. Indeed, iPhone knockoffs exist in droves, and the (patented) basics of the iPhone UI are showing up all over the place. Just walk into any korean, japanese, or chinese high street electronics shop and have a look around. While you can make an iPhone knockoff, what you cannot do, is load Apple iOS on it. Because of copyright law, not patent law. Recreating something like iOS is expensive and requires experience and vision. You also want to take a slightly different approach if only to increase the size of the total pie both your company and Apple will be partaking from. Hmm, sounds a bit like android, no? Which was doing nice and innovative things until some company decided to bother them with such patent gems as "If a piece of code wants to do something, check if it has the permission to do so. If not, don't run it. If it does, allow it to run". Wow. I bet oracle spent 5 million researching that one. Seriously, how can you not call that kind of patent attack a complete farce of justice? You argue that Apple and Tivo are seeing a reduction in knockoffs because of patent law. Actually, there are plenty of knockoffs, and the only obvious reducer in knockoffs is copyright and trademark law, which is nobody (or at least I'm not) arguing should go away. I can't tell much difference between Tivo's UI and that of XBMC either, by the way. I've got a bunch of arguments based around patent law being sufficiently close to thought crime that even if there was proof it did more good than harm, it still should be tossed, but I'll stick to the "helps software innovation" part of it. Proving that patents hurt more than they help is easy enough ;) There still is innovation, but there is no proof that the innovation that is happening is being boosted by the US patent system. For example, a large amount of startups don't patent anything, yet they appear to be one of the main drivers of innovation. I can point out a number of cases where patent law is actively stifling innovation, but I can't think of any situations where a company in the business of software innovation is uses software patents to get rid of a competitor that's actively trying to shut down that innovation, for example by making a knockoff of some sort. In the mean time, I can point at various scenarios where an innovative company _WAS_ shut down or slowed down due to a knockoff of some sort, and where apparently the patent system should have helped, but didn't. Such as 90s and early 00s microsoft using embrace-and-extend on a bunch of technologies. Note that the only major case of knock-off legal protection that I can think of, sun vs. microsoft, did not, AFAIK, involve any patent law. That was about licensing and especially trademarks. More often than not, an innovate company is minding its own business and is being slowed down considerably by a non-innovative company who is using patent law to threaten them into accepting a low buyout bid or simply chase away investors. Then there's the silent and immeasurable whatifs. How many people who had a great idea decided not to bother because they didn't want to risk patent lawsuits? This knife cuts both ways, of course (how many companies decided not to bother trying to undercut an innovative company, because they had patents on their side)? which makes this a bit of a wildcard in the discussion. However, just assuming that patents are doing more good than harm here is something I vehemently oppose: When in doubt, make less laws, not more. The burden of proof is on those supporting patent law. Going back to some of your points: There ARE iPhone and iPod Touch clones, especially iPhone clones. These aren't successful because being the first mover is important (you can be first, cheapest, or best. If you're none of those three, you've got no chance). Also, patent law basically doesn't cover china. Which so happens to be cheap knockoff central, so your main point there just doesn't add up at all. I'm guessing the iPod touch clones are hard to find in particular because making such a device for that price with that kind of hardware is a lot more difficult than it sounds. They also can't call it an iPhone or iPod, legally, as that'd be breach of trademark law. I have claimed I couldn't think of any benefits. That doesn't mean I said there aren't any, nor that finding a single beneficial use of them justifies their existence. Patent law almost comes down to thought crime. In order to do it right, any innovator has to splash down about $20,000 dollars to hire a patent lawyer to check the new product against the list of millions of software patents. It's basically impossible not to breach any of them, and getting a license going would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars more. Patent law advocates need to be making an extremely powerful case that they are most definitely doing more harm than good. In practice the situation is reversed: There's more proof out there that they hurt the system compared to them helping. In the mean time, On Sep 5, 5:44 am, Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Reinier Zwitserloot <[email protected]>wrote: > > > There is absolutely no proof that the current US patent system (which > > lets you patent software, and which is based around granting every > > patent and putting the burden of overturning them on the court system > > and any future defenders of patent lawsuits) is good for innovation. > > I'm going to play the devil's advocate a bit here but it's pretty obvious > that a lot of innovations are happening in the US software market despite > the current patent laws, so claiming that there is no proof that it's good > for innovation is certainly questionable. > > Hardware and software innovation *is* happening on a daily basis, from the > likes of Apple, IBM, Google, etc... > > The question is more: "Would there be *more* innovations if it weren't > possible to patent software ideas", and this is a much more open problem. > > It's pretty clear to me that in the absence of any software patents, we > would have seen iPhone and iPod Touch clones coming form the major US > manufacturers barely a few months after Apple released these devices. > Similarly, a lot of software features (such as Tivo's UI) would have been > copied to death pretty much right after they came out. > > This might sound like an obvious plus, but you need to realize that in the > absence of software patents, maybe these companies would simply never have > come up with these ideas in the first place because they wouldn't see the > point in investing millions of dollars in researching and developing > innovative ideas that will be copied at no costs by competitors as soon as > they become public. > > I'm not taking any side here and I have very often been on the receiving end > of stifling software patents, but I think the two sides of this debate are > often glossed over by eager software developers who don't bother thinking > this problem through. > > -- > Cédric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. 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