From ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es  Thu Jul 26 19:42:25 2001
From: ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es (Ram'on Garc'ia Fern'andez)
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 20:42:25 +0200
Subject: [Patents] Re:  what rules promote progress?
In-Reply-To: <200107251805.OAA03652@world.std.com>; from srctran@world.std.com on Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 02:05:49PM -0400
References: <200107251805.OAA03652@world.std.com>
Message-ID: <20010726204225.A9703@jl1.quim.ucm.es>

On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 02:05:49PM -0400, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> If software patents are so bad to the software industry, you would think
> then that the US software industry would be in disasterous shape, unable
> to compete anywhere.  Quite the opposite.  And unable innovate.  Again,
> quite the opposite.
> 

What is the opinion of Greg about business method patents?


On the other hand, your reason seems to be that thanks to patents the
US software industry is in better shape. Am I right?

In that case, how do you explain that the film industry is in better
shape in the US compared to Europe? They have exactly the same legal
protection in Europe and the US.

Patents were very rarely used on software before the 90's. At that
time, the US was already leading the software industry. Therefore,
patents do not seem to be the reason for the leading position of the
US.

The US software industry is not exactly in a great shape. It is
controlled by a small group of companies. These companies are exactly
the same as in the 90's. It is not innovative. All the current
windowing user interfaces are clones of Mac. Innovative ideas such as
Oberon or Acme have not succeed commercially. Word processors are not
in better shape. Take a look at Sun's StarOffice, Lotus Word Pro,
Corel Wordperfect and Microsoft Word. There are so similar.  We see
the same patter with operating systems: they are Unix clones (Windows
NT has some ideas borrowed from VMS and Mach). Innovative ideas like
Plan 9 have not taken off. Even putting it open source to encourage
people to use it is not enough. Rob Pike complains about the
irrelevancy of operating systems research (See
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/rob/utah2000.pdf ).

Patents are not protecting innovative companies. Microsoft, a company
known for imitating the ideas of other companies, is one of the most
important holders of software patents. Patents, instead of protecting
the innovative Apple against the imitator Microsoft, they are working
exactly in the opposite way. They block file formats and protocols to
the Wintel platform. As soon as you regard anything minimally creative
as innovation ("non-obvious"), even Microsoft can appear as
innovative. For example, the patented Windows Start button.

(And no, I do not believe that Apple ideas should be patented.  But
that is off-topic).

If patents are here to protect the small innovative company, they
have failed miserably.

Ramon


