On Sunday 20 March 2005 17:29, Joseph Kiniry wrote:
> One can obtain a patent for what I consider a "reasonable" sum give
> the bureaucracy involved. In my experience the intellectual effort
> and time involved are worth far, far more than the patent application
> costs itself.
>
[I'm not Niall...]
On a philosophical note, people often mistakenly think the work they put
into something determines what it's worth to others. But that's crap,
too, counter to free market principles. If it were true, you'd be best
off doing things in the most inefficient way possible as that would
build most value.
Most of below is just restating earlier arguments:
Hmph. Does the money you pay to the PTO racket adequately compensate
me for the abridgement of my freedom? Do you even stop chasing patent
infringements once you've recouped the cost of getting the patent plus
your development cost? (Well, you personally might for all I know, but
"you" from now on is not you specifically).
Uh no. You've just got an absolute privilege (modulo compulsory
licensing and noncommercial use allowances in some domains) to govern
some aspect of my and countless others behaviour for the next 20 years
potentially for as little as a few grand, probably less than I make in
a few months to a year.
_Great_ deal for you. Not so hot for us. What price our freedom?
The disclosure patents are supposed to embody? Unless you're a highly
atypical software patent author, I'd be better off disassembling your
binaries or running them under an emulator (if it was all that
difficult to figure out what you're doing to reimplement it
independently) than reading the gibberish that patents are written in
(incidentally, the same often goes for reverse-engineering machinery -
reverse engineering as a discipline is far more advanced than in the
beginning of the industrial revolution). And that's quite apart from
the US "triple damages for knowing infringement if you've read the
patent" stuff, which leads most software writers to avoid reading
patents like the plague.
The power to get a patent to restrict you in turn? As I've pointed out
previously, it's very poor recompense for being restricted oneself. I
don't _want_ to restrict you or be restricted! And if you don't care
much about writing software yourself, but only litigating (i.e. you're
a patent troll), the power to restrict you from writing some software
would be pretty damn useless anyway as you won't be interested in
cross-licensing but rather getting me to settle for some fee or suing
me bankrupt and stripping my assets (probably including my patent to
add to your extortion toolkit portfolio).
[Aside: that's why I expressed skepticism about some Microsoft's
proposed patent reforms, especially making it cheaper for small
entities to get patents: The I"P" holding companies core
microsoft/ex-microsoft people (eg.g. Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures)
and others now run don't produce anything much. They just legally wall
off as much of idea space as possible so they can extract monopoly
rents. As patents are transferrable assets, making it easier for small
companies to get patents just means they have more assets to strip more
easily and cheaply to make larger portfolios to strip more assets more
easily and cheaply...]
[Aside: some asian countries AFAIK have use-it-or-lose-it clauses in
patent law. Your patent is invalidated if you don't make anything
under it within a certain time ]
[Aside: governments also often tax on revenue from patent licensing. Yet
another reason they're not likely to want to see them go]
> Do you believe that patents block progress in fields other than
> software?
>
[Not Niall...]
I certainly do, just check out the oil cartel patent portfolio some
time... It's just with software the effect is particularly nasty and
visible because there's still significant capital required for
real-world engineering, unlike software development (and of course
unless you begin to need significant capital to overcome patent
licensing constraints... This is how patents can be used to raise the
barrier to market entry for new players by established players. An
effect Bill Gates was fully aware of in 1991 and chose to exploit
rather than oppose. I'm old enough to remember people cheering
Microsoft on against the Evil IBM. Turns out that, as usual, the guys
overthrowing the dictators just wanted to be dictators themselves, not
wanted freedom...)
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