On Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:52:18 -0400, Kagamin <s...@here.lot> wrote:
Steven Schveighoffer Wrote:
You can profit from the fruits of your invention *without* patents.
If a bigger corporation doesn't steal your invention.
Truth be told, patents don't even protect you against this.
What happens when you sue the larger corporation:
1. They have better lawyers
2. They probably have a patent library they can throw at your other code.
Software patents favor the big corporation, not the lowly developer.
Consider that it costs about $10,000 just to *obtain* a patent these days,
much less defend it.
>> Add that to the fact that software
>> patents are *rarely* beneficial to the community.
>
> Does the community want benefits at the expense of the inventor?
The *point* of patents is to benefit the community. The price society
pays to the inventor is granting a monopoly. I'd argue that a 17-year
monopoly on software technology and algorithms is too high a price to
pay
for knowing a "secret" you can't use until it's very obsolete.
Patented technology can be used under terms of GPL right now as example
of x264 shows. With GPL patent holder can be sure he still can make
money on commercial patent users.
Again, this is a choice of the patent holders of x264, this does not
universally apply to all software patents.
The holders could have said "free to use in any open source software that
is available at no charge". This would cover all open source licenses,
even ones that can be shipped as binary-only.
There is no inherent clause for GPL in the patent system. Stop using this
argument, it proves nothing.
>> They are mostly used as
>> weapons to stifle innovation from others. In essence, software
patents
>> have had an *opposite* effect on the industry compared to something
like
>> building cars.
>
> Let's look at the H264 technology. Would it exist in the first place
if
> its creators had no chance to patent it?
What if is not a fair game. It's impossible for me to say because I did
not invent it. But I believe most people who come up with ideas for
software are not in it for the patents. Even in the company I worked
for
which got several software patents, they were an afterthought --
Software
is invented to *solve a problem* which needs to be solved whether it can
be patented or not. Did the inventors of H.264 do it for the patents?
Maybe.
If it's impossible to say, then your opinion has the risk to be
unfounded. If we eliminate patents, it will be impossible to say,
whether things became better or not - who knows what inventions were not
invented because their authors had no resources for it.
It's impossible for you to say also. So is your opinion unfounded?
In all likelyhood, a patentless, but trade-secret-enforced video standard
would have emerged, done well, then an open source equivalent would have
emerged. Both the H.264 owners and the community would be in competition
to see who can make the better video stream, everybody wins.
I'm not sure h264 solved a problem. Video encoding worked just fine
before it. It's just a better algorithm. The experts may be not for
patents, but they are paid by big companies which are for profit.
Better algorithms solve the problem of efficiency, implementability, and
features. It's like saying DVDs didn't "solve a problem", because there
was already Laserdisc.
Big companies still have incentive to create a better codec for video,
because it helps them sell videos.
But I firmly believe if software wasn't patentable, we would have
equivalent video streams today (maybe even better than what we have),
because it *solves a problem*.
Equivalent - yes, but not today. The story of h264 became at 1998, it
took years to complete it. It also took quite a while to get Theora
right. Innovation in XviD were incremental and backward compatible with
stock MPEG4 ASP decoder.
Are you sure the open source community would not have done a better job at
fixing the codec? Or any other myriad of companies who currently do not
hold that patent? As you loosen the grip on your IP, the benefit you see
is that more people can help you improve your software -- open source
development has shown that it works.
This is a strawman -- GPL is not required by patent law to be licensed
at
no cost for software patents. The inventors of H.264 have chosen this
route, so good for them. But it is not a benefit of GPL or a strike
against boost, it's just what they chose.
Can you make money with boost license?
Yes. You can make money with any license.
You cannot copyright a design. You can copyright implementation. And
if
you don't make the design public, people have to spend vast amounts of
time and effort to just *figure out* your design, then they have to
write
their own implementation (which is not cheap). Meanwhile, you have
improved your design to something better and already sold thousands or
millions of copies, sucking up all the market share.
So open source is out of game?
huh?
> The same is for software world. A program may require quite a large
> investment before it could be made usable. Let's consider D: who would
> get quality implementation first - Digital Mars or Microsoft? If DM
> doesn't patent D, it will sell *nothing*.
I think if Microsoft decided to implement D, Walter would be the first
one
jumping for joy :)
That's only because he doesn't sell D.
You sure about that? I think Digital Mars would sell support contracts
for D, and businesses would pay for those if they were to use the language
in any real capacity.
> Even if DM manages to get some market share, it won't survive
> competition and eventually lose. IE lost its market share because
there
> was more effort put into Firefox than IE.
DMC is still being sold AFAIK. There is always a market for cheaper
software, or a more agile software company.
One might pay for DMD if one gets specific support. For example, if I
wanted to buy a D compiler for ARM, would Microsoft be willing to
implement it for a fee? Would they even respond to my request?
Windows 8 supports ARM for some reason.
Then some other arch.
> I suppose trivial patents are also a problem for physical industry as
> the wheel patent shows.
The wheel patent is a test of a poorly designed patent system (as the
article indicates). It is not representative of most patent systems.
See this quote from your linked article:
===========
Keogh, who is a freelance patent lawyer himself, says that he applied
for
the patent in order to test this new class of new patents. He says that
innovation patents are not examined in detail by the Australian patent
office.
"The patent office would be required to issue a patent for everything,"
he
told The Age newspaper. "All they're doing is putting a rubber stamp on
it."
===========
Note that this is not a trivial granted patent because of a flawed
review
process -- THERE IS NO REVIEW PROCESS, ALL PATENTS ARE GRANTED! This is
not a fair comparison of well-established patent systems.
Do you call patent systems granting trivial (software) patents
well-established?
Regardless of the quality of the review, at least there *is* a review.
What I meant was, a review-less patent "rubber-stamping" system is not
comparable to one which goes through a review process to weed out trivial
patents.
>> When was the last time you did anything with a patented software
>> technology except *avoid it like the plague*?
>
> I would like to avoid H264 but unfortunately I can't.
Right, and if software patents did not exist, the web would have
standardized on some other video codec, which would be freely available
by
now.
I actually avoid h264 in the web :)
Well, in fact I use firefox and avoid flash, which results in avoiding
h264.
Webm is enough for me in the web.
I can't avoid H264 for "real" video.
I meant as a developer, not as a user.
-Steve
