[Patents] Counterexamples to John, Hartmut, Edward

[John Tobey jtobey@john-edwin-tobey.org]

Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com> wrote:
> 
> John Tobey writes:
> 
> >
> >This fallacy has been used too often in defense of software patents.
> >The program and the circuit did *not* take equal amounts of
> >brainpower, time, and cost.  Let me explain.
> >
> >The effort that goes into a software implementation like Amazon's web
> >site is quite different from the construction of a factory:  It
> >involves no risk, and its completion gives no benefit to society.
> >Only the patent-bearing *idea* of the software deserves to be
> >considered when comparing research/development costs.  As PILCH
> >Hartmut has observed, the core idea seldom requires more than an
> >afternoon on a train.
> 
> You explain nothing here.  Amazon's one click is a lousy example to use
> to justify software patents.  Consider instead, natural language
> translation, a software problem that has yet to be solved after forty
> years of research.  People have invested (i.e. risked) lots of time
> and money, with few useful results.  So if someone new decided to take
> another crack at the problem, and spend lots of money and time, it is
> no less a risky and time consuming effort than any hardware design
> problem.  So stop attacking all software patents by pointing to some of
> the more obvious and simple patents such as Amazon's 1-click, or my
> favorite, a 1996 US software patent for nothing more than 3D pie charts.

All right, but you go too far in the other direction with your natural
language example.  Many people have underestimated the difficulty.
Despite their efforts, the field remains in its infancy.  Most likely,
any significant progress will build on existing knowledge.  If that
knowledge is proprietary, progress is hindered.

If some company does make an amazing breakthrough in natural language
translation, its profitability will be safe if it keep its knowledge
secret and can prevent people from reverse-engineering the product.  I
imagine that reverse-engineering such a product would be difficult,
and by the time it happened, the discoverer would probably have a good
market lead and name recognition.  No patent protection is needed for
software.

A more interesting example, between the infamous one-click and the
intractable natural language problem, is given by MP3.  It was claimed
that only a team of dozens of mathematicians working for months or
years and financed by expected patent royalties could possibly have
devised an audio compression algorithm of such high quality.  I
suspected this was false when I first saw it, and now it looks as if
Ogg Vorbis is disproving it.

Software patents just never help.

> There are many software problems as intellectually difficult and time
> consuming to solve as hardware problems.

If you mean writing, testing, and debugging the code that implements
the patented algorithm in a commercially useful product, then yes.

Discovering the patented algorithm is not so difficult, though.

>  And there are many stupid
> mechanical and hardware patents being issued as well - should all
> mechanical and hardware patents be rejected because of the stupid
> ones?

No, of course not.  You reason too much by analogy, or you wish that
we would do so and thereby enter your logic traps.  Software
patentability is harmful, so it should be abolished where it exists
and avoided where it does not.

Patents in general are not so clearly harmful, so they should not be
abolished.  Posters here have cited drug development as an area where
the patent system works, and I think that there are plenty such
areas.  However, none of them is as dear to my heart as software.
That is why I am all riled up against software patents.  It feel as if
the system holds a gun to my head with every piece of code I write.

-- 
John Tobey, late nite hacker <jtobey@john-edwin-tobey.org>
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]]]             With enough bugs, all eyes are shallow.           [[[
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