[Patents] Re: 80,000 signatures

[xdrudis@tinet.org (Xavi Drudis Ferran)]

El Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 12:52:48PM -0400, Ronald J Riley deia:
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Nick Fleming" <Nick@bigfatpanda.fsnet.co.uk>
> To: "Ronald J Riley" <rjriley@rjriley.com>
> Cc: <epo@mlist.austria.eu.net>; <patents@aful.org>
> Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 6:33 AM
> Subject: Re: 80,000 signatures
> 
> 
> <<Mr Riley,
> As a professional software engineer who has to deal with the very
> real problems created by the current patent system,  it is abundantly
> clear to me that you do not have the slightest idea as to how
>  software is actually written. (My apologies if you
> do , but it is not apparent to me in your writing).>>
> 
> You are dead wrong.  I have programmed with everything from in raw machine
> language without the benefit of an assembler to many high level languages.
> 
> [skipping bio - C.V., in brief, Mr Riley has been programming half his life]

And you still don't understand.
You just showed me that it is possible to have something in front of you 
for many years and yet don't see it. It's probably that we just have 
different values.

You seem to value more the happy idea of an inspired inventor than the 
hard work of many professionals. Certainly, some ideas are very brilliant, 
useful, fruitful, beauty, etc. And some even could deserve some public 
funded price or grant or something. But I see no correlation between 
those ideas and the ideas behind patents. And there shouldn't be any 
correlation. The patent system is there to provide an economic benefit
to society, to improve the collective wellfare, not to reward talented 
individuals (either alone or in corporations).

I think one problem with software is that there is too many people 
with brilliant ideas and too few people simply getting the work done.
The work that is more useful is rarely the most glamourous, and since
fame and honor go to people coming up with great ideas and promising 
prototypes instead of going to people who actually provides solutions 
for real problems within real constraints, people tend to present 
everything as the next big thing, even if it is a remake of old concepts 
with new hype, and users tend to get allienated and perceive that the 
whole market is a big lie or an inaccessible and complex truth, both 
options quite frustrating. Nobody cares for documentation, training, 
user support, maintenace, quality control. Only new technologies 
and acronyms are given credit. 

Even though experts agree that patents do not need to be on difficult
concepts
(at least as they are now), people keep putting their patents in their 
curriculum vitae, as if having obtained one was some proof of merit 
or intelligence that they can't otherwise claim. Companies try to 
raise money from the fact they hold a patent instead of from the fact 
they are able to solve their customer's problems in a more satisfactory
way than others.  
 
This corruption of the "moral virtues" in the field alone is 
sufficient to banish software patents. I think it was Ramon's paper
that cited Joel Spolsky explaining that the important thing in a software 
factory are not the ideas but getting the work done efficiently. 

So don't come to me trying to tell me that you inventors are such
a brilliant and exceedingly superior people that should receive 
temporary monopolies from the bulk of us as a tribute to your 
greatness. This is too similar to aristocracy pretending to rule 
the world because they are the most refined elite.

Creativity is all very nice and fun, but it has no relation to 
patents. Even if it had:

Do you mean that since creativity is all 
that very nice and fun, inventors must be 
so much well prepared to compete with the rest of us that we, 
patentless inferior mortals without a grain of ingenuity 
in our head, who are 
already in disavantage, should increase your advantage by granting 
you monopolies. Do you really expect us to buy this?. 

You can only expect society to grant monopolies in exchange 
for some benefit to society itself (and some benefit that it 
can't obtain without granting them).

Making people think how to solve a problem that has already 
been solved, working around a patent, is too small a benefit to 
renounce to any freedom. If the problem has already been solved,
I want people to concentrate in another yet unsolved problem,
not to reinvent the wheel or to wait idly for 20 years.

Before anybody suggests that all my arguments are equally valid 
or invalid for any field, let me anticipate:

When research requires costly equipment to perform the experiments,
and it is probable that no one will expend so much money in that 
equipment without the incentive of a temporary monopoly, then 
society may either raise the money and buy the equipment for 
a public research institution, or grant the patent. But we cannot 
wait until the research is done to decide whether it was worth 
for society to grant that patent, because without some certainity 
that the patent will be granted no company will invest the money 
to do the research. The sane way to sort this is to specify some 
areas of research that are fit for patents and some that are not. 
Software never requires costly equipment for experimentation, or 
hardly ever, so it is not fit for patents. 

Software, like music, poetry, VHDL, etc. does only require thinking 
(= time) in order to do research, and investments on thinking 
are too hard to evaluate (for any invention, but even more 
for a whole field) to enter a patent bargain. And people does 
think spontaneously to solve their problems, they don't need 
so many incentives. Granting a patent to a human for an 
activity that only requires thinking is like granting it to
a fish for swimming. Saying to a computer researcher, "OK, 
since you have thought up 
RSA, we won't use the idea for 20 years" is like saying to 
a fish "Ok, since you have spent all your life swimming we 
are not going to swim in this beach for 20 years". To motivate
people to think it is much more useful to set up public 
research institutions or grants that allow them to think full time 
and not starve or to set up Nobel prizes and the like. This 
way the raw material for thought, which is other people's 
thoughts, is available and unimpeded.
  
Patents should not be a prize for bright inventors, but an 
enabler for costly experimentation.

So I'm happy that there are some bright inventors like you
may be, Riley, but I think if you are really such a big inventor
you deserve a prize, a grant or a job at a public university
if you care, not a privilege. I am happy that there are 
bright inventors, but we don't need them so much as 
hard workers. The time when the art and science advanced 
on the shoulders of geniouses is gone. In the information 
society, arts and science advance with the sweat of 
less genial but much more abundant knowledge workers.
And they advance faster, so, please geniouses, get out 
of the way or join the team. There's much work to do.

-- 
Xavi Drudis Ferran
xdrudis@tinet.org