That would be the opposite of what happened with gene patents and patents on genetically modified organisms. The US embraced them, Europe and Japan did not, and now the US biotech industry is leaps and bounds ahead of theirs.As a software developer, the idea of making the software industry like the bio-tech industry sounds absolutely horrible. With biotech, it intrinsically takes millions of dollars to research and develop products. A $700 patent fee and a few thousands in legal fees isn't a big deal, obviously. With software, the startup costs are zero.
Forbes suggests some solutions, including abolishing software patents.Actually writing for Forbes was Tim Berners Lee, widely known as the inventor of the WWW. He invented HTML and the HTTP protocol to transport it. But what if Douglas Englebart had enforced a patent on hypertext? TBL could never have created the web.
*blink*. Um, whoops. Well, the author has a similar name to TBL and anyway what I said about TBL and patents is still accurate, if somewhat superfluous.Actually writing for Forbes was Tim Berners Lee, widely known as the inventor of the WWW. He invented HTML and the HTTP protocol to transport it. But what if Douglas Englebart had enforced a patent on hypertext? TBL could never have created the web.No it wasn't.
The Patent Office budget should be dramatically increased, and multiple satellite offices should be established in tech hubs. It's the only way to improve examination on the front-end.It would be simpler and cheaper to get rid of software patents.
what small company would ever take the risk of trying to bring something genuinely new to market, knowing full well how what will probably happen when they do is that, immediately, bigger companies will simply push them out of the market, having unfair competitive advantages due to their size?A patent is no use in these cases, as it takes millions of dollars to prosecute them. If you got $2-5 million in capital to develop your device, you have no money left over to defend yourself in the courts.
delmoi--but then what small company would ever take the risk of trying to bring something genuinely new to market, knowing full well how what will probably happen when they do is that, immediately, bigger companies will simply push them out of the market, having unfair competitive advantages due to their size?Has that ever been a problem in the past? Name one popular software product that only succeed because they sued competitors out of existence using software patents. We got to where we are today without small companies having their innovations protected due to software patents
No, I'm not saying they will necessarily sue them out of business w/out patent protection, but that the small company won't be willing to invest the capital needed to get into the new line of business at all, because even if they manage to bring a new product or service to market first, they'll stand no chance of competing on a resource-basis with larger, predatory competitors who can easily copy the innovation and then outmaneuver the smaller player on the basis of their superior financial resources and other competitive advantages of being a larger playerI think it's well established that small companies are much more concerned about being crushed by patent trolls. But again, do you have a specific example of anything like that happening, ever? Because it just doesn't sound like how software companies actually work.
Apple and Microsoft, to cite two examples, have sued over the allegedly infringing use of technologies that they implement in their own products. TiVo did the same thing in its long-running case against Echostar. i4i, a company that sued Microsoft, makes various software products related to XML. z4, another company that sued Microsoft, makes DRM software. Oracle has sued Google over software patents.All of those examples (except for i4i and z4, I guess) are examples of huge companies suing eachother. Not small independent companies being able to create a successful product on their own due to patent protection. And I'd never heard of i4i or z4 other then in the context of them suing Microsoft for patent infringement.
You shouldn't. That's the purpose of the nonobviousness requirement.Which the patent office doesn't seem to bother with in the case of software. How can you even tell if something is 'obvious' or not if you haven't come across the same problem? Everything seems obvious in retrospect.
"I tried to put you in touch with other people in this community to talk to you about this and they almost uniformly said they couldn't talk to you," Sacca told us. "They were afraid to." IV has the power to "literally obliterate startups," Sacca says.posted by Nelson at 2:45 PM on July 29, 2011
One of the useful functions of patents is that they provide a way for investors to recoup their investment in a company even if the company fails before it has much in the way of tangible assets.Right, so failures have the opportunity to act like parasites and prevent anyone from using ideas similar to theirs. Exactly the problem that will be solved by eliminating software patents.
a) How do you define what is a patent troll? An entity which doesn't itself practice the invention? That would cover most universities and research centers. An non-practicing entity without its own R&D? That would cover most legitimate patent pools, but not IV.It would be more then just patent trolls, any company that makes it's money by threatening to sue people for patent infringement, and settling would be targeted.
b) What if the "troll" has a good patent and wins in court?The pool would, itself be a patent troll. It wouldn't produce any product, so it couldn't be shut down. If the 'troll' wins in court, then the product that infringes on the trolls patent, and our patent, then the product can't be sold. The end. The point is to destroy the software patent industry, and people will have to choose or move to Europe.
And this was when, exactly?First of all, that patent clearly shows an electronic circuit, that patent is very clearly for a hardware device, and references hardware features like registers. You do understand the difference between hardware and software, right?
If TAL wants to be unbiased, it shouldn't use a derogatory term to refer to a subject of its reporting.Why would they want to be unbiased? Non-bias and dishonesty can't be decoupled. If one side is right, and the other side is wrong, then the only way you can be 'non-biased' is to lie. "Patent Troll" is a common term
Sorry, I can't quite parse this sentence, and I believe it's simply because you just still don't understand what patents are. Patents are negative rights. A patent is a right to forbid others from exploiting what's covered by the patent claims. Whether these others hold a license for a different patent which also covers at least part of their product is completely irrelevant, if they are infringing on your patent.What are you talking about? I understand how patents work. I don't think you understood what I was explaining, even though it's quite simple.
Second, patent litigation is expensive, even more so in the software field where discovery may involve poring over many, many lines of code. It is expensive for both parties, not just the defendant.Exactly. Patent litigation is far more expensive then actually writing the software in the first place, thus, software patents are economically distortion and do damage to the software industry by increasing the costs of 'innovating' and actually bringing a product to market.
I'm trying to persuade the company I work for to develop and bring to market a new line of business services supported by specialized software. I'm not sure if it's what you would call a "pure" software patent.Well, that's actually kind of worse if it's a 'business process' patent. If it was a hardware device, with a software component that would be an edge case. A pure business process without even software to back it up is the worst kind of patent. A mix of software and business process stuff is pretty bad. Again, that's just my opinion.
It's a suite of services, business processes, and a software app.
It doesn't make you a parasite to take a risk on a new idea and fail, does it?It does if you then try to prevent anyone else from trying to do the same thing, even if they think it up on their own, IMO. Or prevent them from trying without giving you a cut.
I seldom see major new system implementations, involving complex business rules and lots of special requirements, that don't require at least a few months of development time, for a proper implementation.Well, when it comes to software a new idea in software you would have a core idea, which should be pretty simple, and then a lot of extra - but straight forward - stuff around that to make it into a product. It should be pretty simple to code a prototype of the 'patentable idea' The rest of the stuff should be pretty straight forward: Database access code, web wrappers, UI code and so on.
What kind of APIs do you develop in OAuth? Or is that what you--oh, never mind. That's totally off topic.I was working on a facebook app, which uses OAuth to let users authorize applications.
On the other hand, I might like some reasonable window of time to develop the idea and bring it to market with a protected status (2-3 years), in order to have a reasonable chance to .So do you want patent protection to prevent someone else from creating a similar service while you start up? Even if no one does something exactly like what you're doing, you're still going to need a lot of extra code just to make it work, and you could still get hit by a patent troll. How could your product work without violating the claims of this patent for example, the owners of which recently tried to sue a Cake PHP developer. The patent seems to cover pretty much anything on the web that uses forms (in this case the suit was dropped later)
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