Hockey wrote:I'm already convined that software patents are a good thing...
Well, lets start there, because I completely disagree.
Perhaps you want to make a webpage where people can upload images, and have them automatically resized and formatted. Something similar to Flickr, perhaps.
You spend a year or two coding out all the bugs, polishing it up, and making it work well.
Then, someone contacts you and informs you that the equations you use for resizing are patented, along with the image format itself. You literally cannot make a resizing function without violating the patent.
Its not an abstract example - its what literally occurred for over a decade thanks to the patent on LZW, which impacted GIF's.
It is playing itself out again with browser plugins, click-to-buy (one click shopping patent), and even streaming media (burst).
Patenting an *idea*, with no specific implementation wasn't ever the intention of patent law. There is a reason why traditional patents require a diagram, and a specific implementation. Its meant to be limited to a specific way to do things, and was originally meant to reward
for a short term, the investment needed to develop new technologies.
Software patents arent a unique method, arent short term, and don't reward new technology - just the opposite. They are overbroad, long-term, and prevent early implementors by making them do research on every possible patent thats out there before implementing anything.
I'm interested in hearing what you think are positive about software patents.
Hockey wrote:However, while reading a newsletter from the Green Party (Who I was thinking of voting for this next Canadian election) I noticed one of there objectives is to reduce software patents to 7 years instead of 20 or whatever it is now....
Silly IMHO...it could take that long to get everything off the ground financially, marketing, etc...
Name *one* software solution in wide use today that has not changed fundamentally since introducing it to the market
seven years ago. Not Windows. Not Unix. Not Novell.
Software changes dramatically fast. Two years means obsolete. Patenting a process - a nonspecific method of doing something - means that no one can produce anything similar. No competition at all. Imagine if yahoo patented internet searching when it debuted - we'd have no google, no ask jeeves, nothing else. Is that an ideal you want to strive for?
Hockey wrote:The way I see it, I dedicate time and effort into developing and conceptualizing something and someone makes money off my work, I should profit too...
Nothing stops you from profiting off of freedom/opensource software. A huge variety of companies do exactly that - mysql, zend (php), linux (redhat, suse, etc).. You can profit without owning the exclusive ability to anything remotely similar to what you do.
In fact, market examples prove the value in *not* having patents. The internet (built on the no-patent implementations of smtp, tcp/ip, and more) has produced more unique products than virtually any other invention in the modern age, save the computer. Even the computer proves that point - the closed architectures, held under patents, failed, withered, and become a minority member of the market, while the fast moving competitive open architectures (x86) ended up the dominant force, providing not only tremendous profit, but also providing more value to the world in general.
Remember, patents aren't meant to ensure a profit. They are there to reward investment in research. When you remove the limits on patents, as we've done with software patents, you end up reducing the value to the world, and often, also the potential profit.
Hockey wrote:I see no harm in patents...they don't stifle innovation...they prevent someone more business oriented than the inventor from taking the idea and making more money from it without you benefiting...
On the contrary, they stifle innovation in a wide variety of ways. They put a cost into the simple act of developing a product. When *ideas* cost money to even try, innovation
by definition is stifled.
Hockey wrote:Mostly because, they likely never had a unique enough idea to bother patenting...
I have contributed to multiple patent applications, and have several that I plan to patent in the future. That doesn't change my stance that *software* patents, and the current length for patents in general is wildly non-beneficial.
Hockey wrote:Amazons one click or Netflix and their business process of renting movies online via the USPS...those are silly patents...
And yet those are both prime examples of *software* patents, and they've both been upheld after multiple examinations as "unique" enough according to the definition used for software patents.
Perhaps it would help if you explain what about software patents you think is beneficial. All your arguments seem to support the original concepts of patents, not the new extensions that are making software patents possible.