On 16/09/2009, at 7:02 AM, Mike Schrag wrote:
If you were well-versed in ANY field, wouldn't your scenario equally
be true? If I'm a mechanic and you come up with a new engine design,
once I see what you've done and how you've done it, it's probably
pretty easy for me to make one ... I have no idea about Pharma, but
I presume that once a drug is released, it's probably pretty easy
for generics to replicate it. It does seem there should be some
consideration for that, and the patent system is the current answer
to that. Why should software be in some other category?
Also, re: MP3/JPEG (and things like RSA fall into this category too)
-- It's grunt work to do it once someone already has defined a spec,
or figured it out and you cheat off their paper, but it's no small
feat to come up with it in the first place. This is sort of the
point, it seems to me. Stealing the idea is always easier than
making it first, so we have patents to give incentive to people to
bother coming up with it first. There's obviously a failure window
in the patent system for the guy who truly independently develops
it, but I don't really see a way to close that gap -- i think it's a
weakness you have accept for the greater good of the imperfect system.
Personally I have no issue with the concept of software patents in
general, it's how they are often used I object to.
Patents should be a way to protect yourself from having to compete
against your own invention in a commercial market. Ie. Patents should
exist for the purpose of protection from direct competition and
utilising an idea or invention with exclusivity, not a way of
extracting the maximum amount of revenue from everyone who finds value
in your IP in some way.
For example, you invent the next big thing in facial recognition. You
should be able to patent your invention for that purpose to allow you
to use it in your own or your partners / customers products with
exclusivity for a set period of time. If your competitors want to use
it too, then the patent affords you the control to allow or deny their
ability to use your invention to compete with you for that specified
purpose for a limited amount of time. Just because you have a patent
doesn't mean you should be able to prevent someone else from using
your original idea in a new and creative but totally non competing
way, like say in the autofocus function of a video camera.
What you shouldn't be allowed to do is to patent something for an
abstract use case and never actually use it for anything of value,
instead you use the patent as a tool to extort royalties from others
that want to use this IP, and would inevitably have invented the same
thing but were not the first to do so. This behaviour of holding IP to
ransom prevents other people from being able to take a good idea and
turning it into something even better, or combining it with other
ideas and using it in a way the original creator could never have
dreamed of by themselves.
It's a bit of a grey area when your business is selling things like
video/audio codecs, or compression and encryption libraries.
Mind you, I'm not even saying I'm for them at the moment -- I'm
pretty well on the fence about it. I'm certainly not for the way
they are currently implemented/granted in the US, but a bad
implementation doesn't necessarily make the entire concept wrong.
Certainly in the US, the current implementation of the system (both
in granting and in enforcement/litigation) greatly favors the big guy.
Out of curiosity, are you against traditional patents? I still can't
reconcile a meaningful difference -- i recognize there probably IS a
difference, but I just haven't been able to come up with a lucid
explanation of the difference.
ms
On Sep 15, 2009, at 4:42 PM, Anjo Krank wrote:
Sorry, can't resist :) From what I understand is that your supreme
court basically said that everything man-made under the sun should
be patentable. Recently even they finally came to their sense and
said it had to have some physical component.
The reason (as I understand it) is that patents are *not* for the
benefit of the holders. They are to get holders to disclose on
their stuff and to get a limited monopoly in return. This is to
*promote* innovation so that others can simply look at the patent
and build from that.
I find it pretty hard to imagine a concept in IT that is hard
enough for someone well-versed in the field (not IT, the special
application) that you can't come up with too once you see it can be
done. The reason being it's pretty cheap. Look at MP3 for example,
or JPEG. Once you got the idea that you *can* compress images or
sounds with some math crap, it's only grunt-work to do it. LAME
took about a year from a crappy patch-set to the final product.
Cheers, Anjo
--
Seeya...Q
Quinton Dolan - [email protected]
Gold Coast, QLD, Australia (GMT+10)
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