On Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:43:00 -0400, Terry Reedy wrote: > Anyone here who does not understand how absurd software patents can get > should contemplate the following (based on a real patent from about 20 > years ago, when CDroms were new. > > A Methods for Ensuring that the Correct CDROM is in the CDROM drive. > > While the correct cdrom is not in the drive: > Display a message asking the user to insert the correct CD. > > Buried in a page of verbiage, that was it, completely obvious and > unoriginal.
There's no doubt that, for some reason, the US Patent Office has an institutional blind-spot in certain areas. As the joke goes, you can take any existing patent, scrawl "on the Internet" over it in red crayon, and they will grant you a patent on it. But I'm also sure that if you look hard enough, there will be hardware patents that are as inane. For the longest time, you could patent perpetual motion machines. Now you can patent perpetual motion machines so long as you don't use the words "perpetual motion" or "free energy". The real question should not be "how bad are the worst patents?", or "how good are the best patents?", but "overall, does the patent system make things better or worse in general, and how can we reduce the harm done in favour of more good?". (I'll also point out that there's remarkably little evidence that *hardware* patents promote and support innovation and invention, even though it is conventional wisdom that it does. People on *both* sides of the debate are amazingly resistant to the idea of evidence-based policy.) >> That is what made the last Supreme Court decision (from this argument >> in part) so important... because for the first time the U.S. Supreme >> Court is beginning to buy it ... in part. > > What might help lawyers understand the obsurdity of software patents > would be to have them contemplate the possibility of patents on laws and > legal arguments, so that a legislature could not write a law, nor a > lawyer submit a legal brief, without possibly having to pay royalties or > violate a patent. That would be a patent on a business process, which is allowed. In fact, as I recall, at least one lawyer has made an attempt to patent a business process relating to law. Too-lazy-to-google-for-it-ly y'rs, -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
