I oppose patent trolls and trivial patents. Beyond that I think it's a bit
more murky. My a basic rule of thumb would be: If I can think of a
mathematical or algorithmic solution to some random problem in my field in
less than a month I don't expect that solution to be patented or patentable.
I have no PhD qualification in anything, let alone in software, engineering
or mathematics. By these measures I'm not even "skilled in the art". I
rarely apply myself to solving a single problem for more than a month or
two.
On the other hand, if I'd spent 5 years banging my head up against a single
problem in my field of knowledge/expertise, had developed unique theories
and approaches, perhaps built an industrial research team around it, and no
one else had thought of the same thing, I _might_ consider it reasonable to
patent it, which is not to say I would patent it but it would at least make
some sense to try to derive an income stream from my efforts.
The problem with that is that things that are non-obvious today might be
completely obvious in 5 or 10 years. Interval research is a good example of
thinking ahead of the curve and patenting things that only become relevant
later.
Andy Farnell wrote:
More: By publishing you make the advance unpatentable. Therefore
a patent can _only_ be interpreted (in a modern context) as a
desire to inhibit progress.
Sorry Andy, I can't agree with you on that. There are far too many
subtleties to the question of patents to paint a black and white picture
about the interpretation of the intent of filing a patent.
Patents may inhibit many things but I'm not sure "progress" is one of them.
Whose progress are we talking about, a Corporation's? a State's? the
individual? "society's" progress? I'm not sure these are even concrete or
separable concepts. Is the priviledged progress of a Corporation (for
example) necessarily detrimental to the progress of the broader group of
humans the Corporation is embedded in -- you'd have to adopt a particular
economic-theoretic position to even argue this point and then there would be
arguments over the position you've taken. Replace Corporation with "State",
"research group", "individual", etc in the previous paragraph and repeat.
Patents provide limited monopoly rights to the holder, which arguably
supports progress and innovation by the group/company/etc who have already
proven themselves to be capable of undertaking the necessary research to
create the idea.
In the sphere of corporate production, industrial and state research those
that hold the patents _are_ progressing. Fraunhofer and CSIRO (for example)
have derived income from their patent holdings which allows them to do more
research. Without patents where would these organisations get their funding
from? (a serious question)
Patents do inhibit direct competition in production to be sure, but this
forces competitors to invent non-infringing technology which could be argued
to actually increase diversity and therefore progress. I suspect that the
tension between Patents vs Anti-patent producers is actually stimulating
"progress".
I have never filed a patent and I have benefitted from (for example) the
work of the Xiph and IETF folks on the CELT codec that Gregory Maxwell
mentioned -- but if Xiph hadn't done that work, then perhaps my individual
progress would have been limited. On the other hand, none of existing patent
encumbered codecs have low enough latency for my application, so without the
motivation that Xiph has (partially related to the creation of free IP),
perhaps I wouldn't have a solution at all.
As a scientist, teacher and human being I find I'm morally
obliged to oppose such madness.
Fair enough. I'm a pragmatist, I don't see direct opposition "patent
madness" as a whole as a particularly useful stance. I don't see patents as
dirrectly in oposition to Science or teaching either. I actually think they
do more harm to ISVs than they do to the march of scientific progress or the
development of ideas.
<rant>
What I don't like is having a random (and not particularly novel) idea,
googling for a paper or wiki article about it, and finding that it's
patented -- that's not cool. It's a bit like thinking "perhaps if I put salt
on this stain on my carpet it will clean it" and then discovering that
"Method for cleaning carpet stains using sodium chloride" is patented
because someone already tried it and took out a patent on it. Of course,
then I just go and use copper sulphate instead and I'm golden.. but I had
the sodium chloride in my kitchen and now I've had to go and get some copper
sulphate from somewhere.
A big part of the problem is that obviouness/non-obviousness is a difficult
thing to assess. However, if I go to the MIT open courseware website and
watch a first year lecture on stains and crystal absorption and the head of
the American Society for Stains and Crystal Absorption (a lecturer there)
says "Sodium chloride is the standard, first choice, go-to solution for
removing stains from anything and everything" then you've got to ask
yourself, is that patent non-obvious?
OTOH perhaps copper sulphate works better than sodium chloride and now I've
actually progressed due to a trivial patent on the most obvious solution :-)
</rant>
I think there are at least three separate issues here:
1. Whether one believes that granting 20 year monopoly rights for an
invention should be acceptable in our society. In other words, whether the
patent system should exist at all, or perhaps that its structrue should be
altered.
2. Whether one believes that the standards applied in granting patents are
sufficiently rigorous to protect truly novel inventions while rejecting
trivial, obvious and redundant inventions.
You can apply the above two points to the patent system as a whole, or
narrow them to apply only to software patents or some other subset.
I don't know about patent reform as a whole, but I'd sure like those pesky
patents on obvious things to go away. Does anyone know the most effective
way to lobby for reform in this area? Is there are group that focuses on
calling for re-examination of obvious patents that I could support?
Thanks
Ross.
--
dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website:
subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, dsp
links
http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp
http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp
