Archimedes: YAY 8)
The problem isn’t with patents themselves - it’s with the patent office. They issue patents for ridiculously obvious things. E.g. I think it is Apple that has a patent on using XOR to draw a cursor on a graphic… you know, so you can get the original background back by simply redrawing the cursor at the same spot. It was far too obvious (even back then) for it to deserve a patent…and if anyone could afford to fight it they would surely win and the patent would be nulled.
If you do come up with something truly revolutionary that other people in the same field would not consider a relatively straight-forward application of the knowledge and technology if they considered solving the problem themselves then surely you deserve a patent. The problem is that that almost NEVER happens with software, but the patents will get issued anyway because too many patent clerks are morons - if they weren’t morons they would be making money with their own patents instead of reviewing the patents of others. No offense to the 3 or 4 patent clerks that have a clue. 
[quote]but the patents will get issued anyway because too many patent clerks are morons - if they weren’t morons they would be making money with their own patents instead of reviewing the patents of others. No offense to the 3 or 4 patent clerks that have a clue.
[/quote]
…including Albert Einstein? Sorry, couldn’t resist it :).
As far as I am aware Albert Einstein is not currently a patent clerk But if he was, he might be one of those few that knew something about the patents he was reviewing. I probably shouldn’t have used the word moron (I suppose that goes for pretty much every time I use that word:) )… that was a bad choice… I think “ignorant” fits closer. They might be bright people, they just aren’t aware of what would be considered obvious to others working in the specific field relating to the patent. That much is self evident based on the examples I have seen. Did you hear about the fellow in Australia that got a patent for the wheel… shows you how well the patent system is working these days.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1418165.stm
I don’t disagree with patents in general (in fact I have a much stronger opinion on copyright and the length of it…) but there are serious problems in software copyrights as they are now. I think part of the problem is that you could only patent software from 1985(?). What about all the prior art that went before that?
It’s not easy to find prior art as a patent clerk unless it already exists in the patent database. So all that went before is generally hard to find and ignored. Hmmm… I’ve convinced myself. Patents in software are a bad idea and stifle creativity and innovation.
Bill
[quote]As far as I am aware Albert Einstein is not currently a patent clerk But if he was, he might be one of those few that knew something about the patents he was reviewing… Did you hear about the fellow in Australia that got a patent for the wheel… shows you how well the patent system is working these days.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1418165.stm
[/quote]
Yup, Albert was a clerk, in Switzerland IIRC.
IIRC the wheel patent wasn’t actually a “patent” at all, it was part of a new fast-track system designed to relieve the pressure on the patent office; you still have to apply for a “real” patent afterwards.
I’m against patents in general - only because in the last 25 years it’s gone completely to pieces for many industries. I’ve often been challenged “well, can you suggest something better?” which is the nub of the problem. The situation now could only be salvaged via massive investment from govts, and this really isn’t a vote-winning issue (especially in the US, where big corporations would lose lots of money, and political campaigns would find their donations drying up).
IIRC, the actions of a few bad men in the USA, who arbitrarily changed the rules about 15 years ago (?) have accelerated the collapse of the whole system (it worked moderately well for hundreds of years). US-style governance - he who has most money, or richest friends, does whatever he wants; the govt will hold no-one accountable until/unless a civilian sues - allegedly still hasn’t done anything to rectify this. It seems that US-style democracy - tell everyone else to follow suit or else - has been doing very well at corrupting other patent offices worldwide in the same way the USPO was undermined.
(but I don’t “blame” the US - if the other nations’ govts were less corruptible/incompetent/whatever they could resist the pressure from the US more strongly than they have been…)
However, it’s been a while since I checked my facts on this :), and there’s so many very expensive vested interests it’s hard to know who to trust. IIRC IBM makes more than the GDP of many countries SOLELY from it’s patent portfolio (licensing, cross-licensing, etc). That’s big money. They certainly try to get everyone in the company to “patent soon; patent often” - especially if it seems irrelevant now (it may become valuable later). Other corporates are the same - espcially IT and biochem companies, where it’s easy to register hundreds of patents a day.
In all fairness, companies like IBM also have more nobel-prize winners etc than many countries. As I said, it’s hard to unentangle the vested interests and find any way to improve the fairness, wihtout ending up with a system even worse than what we have today. (I sometimes wonder if the actions of some people in the last 25 years to damage the system were a deliberate, cynical attempt to make it so bad that govts would be forced to come up with something better. Hmm…;))
I know Albert was a patent clerk. But since he’s dead, I doubt he has reviewed any patents recently. Yes the wheel thing isn’t entirely a good example… but I think it shows the direction things are heading.
I think the main problem is in the legal system. It should take all of five minutes and almost no expense to prove most of the invalid patents are in fact invalid… that way everyone could see an obvious bogus patent and safely ignore it. But, since lawyers are evil and the legal system is a complete joke… it costs too much to prove the patent is invalid and thus a lot of companies end up settling things and paying a small royalty instead. Unfortunately this only serves to reinforce the bogus validity of the patent. I worked at a company that was sued by a lawyer that made it his business to file bogus patent suites against people and collect settlements… often in the form of more bogus patents that he could then go on and sue more people with. This is how he made his living. We also had to avoid a particularily obvious feature in our products because some weasel owned a patent on it. Just for the sake of collecting bogus royalties mind you… he faked any real interest in the “technology” to maintain the patent so everyone else that really needed the feature would have to pay. Big companies like Adobe paid royalties to use the feature and our customers wondered why we didn’t do the same… the feature was so obvious it just wasn’t right.
For those on this list who aren’t familiar with the patent process, there are a lot of misconceptions, so it’s probably worth providing a little background info.
For a patent to be issued it is supposed to fit three criteria. It must be useful, novel and non-obvious.
By useful, it means of use to someone in the field in which it is granted. It doesn’t have to be very useful or even useful to a large number of people, but you must demonstrate that it is useful to someone.
By novel, it means that it hasn’t been done before. There doesn’t have to be an existing patent on the invention, only evidence that someone had done it before (which takes you back to the beginning of recorded time). “Defensive publication” is commonly practiced by big companies who don’t want to bother patenting something, but at the same time don’t want to get screwed by someone else’s attempts to patent the same thing.
By non-obvious, it means that the invention described would not be obvious to the average practitioner in the field. If you invent a silver rocket-pack, someone can’t come along and patent a blue rocket-pack of the same design. It also means that if you come up with a new rendering technique for generating realistic hair, someone else can’t use the same technique, change the color to green, shorten the strands, and patent it as a technique for making grass.
In addition patents have a limited lifespan (currently 17 years) after which the technology becomes public domain.
I don’t personally think any of this is particularly controversial. The whole point is to encourage the dissemination of new knowledge while protecting the inventor’s ability to profit from contributing this knowledge for some limited period of time, thereby encouraging the inventor to continue their work. The same rationale is used to justify copyright law.
However there are some gotchas. The biggest being that these criteria must be met at the time of the filing, not the time the patent is issued. So what may have been novel and non-obvious at the time a patent was filed for, may be completely commonplace by the time the patent is issued and announced. Especially if the inventors have spent the intervening years publicizing the work.
I find it interesting that the same game developers who are so protective of their copyrights are so dismissive of patent rights. The argument I hear time and time again is that the code doesn’t matter; what your selling is content (good design, etc) and that there’s plenty of room in the market for hundreds of titles that use the same technology but do so in different ways to provide a unique experience.
This is all well and good if you’re a game developer, but the same argument can’t be made for tools and middleware developers. If I spend three years inventing a revolutionary new facial animation technology for instance, what’s to stop a company like Discreet, Alias|Wavefront or Softimage from just stealing the results and incorporating it into their products? They’re established corporations with existing customer bases and bigger martketing budgets than I can hope to muster. BANG! they get all the benefits of my hard work and I get squat.
And yes, this happens all the time.
I’m not saying that there aren’t problems with the current patent process, or that bogus patents aren’t mucking it up for all the legitimate ones out there. I do think there need to be measures taken to ensure that patents are issued in a timely manner and the lifespan for software patents should probably be shorter than it is, but until someone comes up with a better way to ensure independent inventors are compensated for their work and protect them from getting raped by big corporations, it’s the only system we’ve got.
And as for the Quake argument: Sure you can get Q1 and Q2 for “free” (if you’re willing to distribute your source with your game) but just try getting the source for Q3 without licensing fees. $250,000 against 5% royalties is not exactly “giving it away” For more info see:
[quote]but until someone comes up with a better way to ensure independent inventors are compensated for their work and protect them from getting raped by big corporations, it’s the only system we’ve got.
[/quote]
My guess is that a lot more independent inventors are hurt by the abuses of the patent system than manage to win cases against big corporations trying to rip them off. I’m mainly thinking of the businesses that make their living on forcing smaller companies to license frivolous patents since they know that it will cost the smaller company a lot more to defeat the patent in court than to pay the license.
Big companies also defend their filings of frivolous patents, such as Microsoft’s patent on style sheets, by saying that they are for defensive use. So when an independent inventor tries to sue a big company for stealing their technology, the big company can bancrupt the inventor by filing a “defensive” countersuit with a bunch of friviolous patents and finally offer to graciously settle the deal by taking the inventors’s patent from his hands.
I guess this is mainly a problem with the US legal system than with patents though. It doesn’t really work in countries where the loser of a trial pays the winner’s legal costs. Clueless patent examiners and lax demands for non-obviousness still remain as problems though. Anyway, it might be part of the reason why few smaller developers in the game biz bother with patents.
At least the good old Albert was doing something interesting while being a clerk at the patent office. Fortunalety he forgot to patent relativity ;D
Let us hope there is another Albert who is doing something valuable beside granting a patent for the 1 click buy !
As for the definition of a patent, it is nice. Maybe we should send it to these patent offices …
PS: AndersDahlberg, we have you are name and you address … we are coming …
I just re-read my last sentence (of course after clicking on post).
Man ! It is time for a break … or a translator !
Yep, If the patent system actually followed the rules it wouldn’t be a problem. The problem is mainly in the ‘non-obvious’ bit… I think that is rarely enforced. I have seen far too many obvious ideas get patented. Often there are patents for the very first thing that would come to mind if you were out to solve the same problem. Maybe the patent clerks are forgetting that it has to be non-obvious for someone competent in the field - not just some random dude off the street. That being said… how can they possibly test for this? You would have to at least poll a panel of the submitter’s peers. I don’t think non-obviousness can be determined by a single person.
[quote]You would have to at least poll a panel of the submitter’s peers.
[/quote]
Actually, that is the way it’s supposed to work. I don’t know how often this is the case. During the internet boom, one of the biggest reasons for bogus patents IMO was that it was impossible to know who ws an expert in the field. I think this is less the case with more mature industries. Unfortunately, a few bad apples…
As I pointed out earlier, one of this biggest problems is that an idea that was non-obvious at the time of the filing, may seem like a no-brainer by the time the patent is issued. It’s kinda like learning a magic trick. It seems impossible when you first see it, but once someone shows you how to do it, it couldn’t be more obvious.
I agree that the legal system has largely subverted the intent of the patent process. The patent process was designed to protect the independent inventor from abuse by large corporations (this is why only individuals, not corporations, may be granted patents. Before anyone points out the obvious, yes, inventors can assign all their patent rights to a corporation, but the patent still “belongs” to the inventor). Unfortunately, the economics of filing, prosecuting and defending patent claims have made it extremely difficult for the independent inventor and much easier for the corporations to take advantage of these protections.
Don’t forget Amazon.com’s one-click ordering system patent. Or despair.com’s 
trademark.
And aren’t software patents void in the UK?
[quote]Don’t forget Amazon.com’s one-click ordering system patent. Or despair.com’s trademark.
[/quote]
See my point about patents during the internet boom.
There’s a popular misconception about patents that you can patent a concept like “one-click ordering”. The reality is that you cannot patent an idea, only the methods and process by which an idea is realized, so what Amazon patented was the combination of procedures required to enable their one-click ordering system to work, which is obviously useful and may very well, for all I know, be novel and non-obvious. Someone else could certainly come along and enable one-click ordering using a completely different set of procedures, and not infringe upon Amazon.com’s patent. However, merely implementing the same procedure in a slightly different way, still constitutes infringement if it can be demonstrated that the underlying procedure is the same.
This is not meant to be a defense of Amazon.com’s patent as I know very little of what the patent actually entails, and it may be truly frivolous for all I know. My point is that while outrage over ridiculous patents makes for great media buzz, the process is (a little) more subtle and complex than most people are aware.
Now trademarks on the other hand… :
[quote]Don’t forget Amazon.com’s one-click ordering system patent. Or despair.com’s trademark.
And aren’t software patents void in the UK?
[/quote]
AFAIK the patent system in many European countries is different from the American way of … patent system. (Don’t know about the newst “fantastic” plans of the European Union though.)
But… isn’t it that many national patents also claim to be valid for the whole world?
[quote]AFAIK the patent system in many European countries is different from the American way of … patent system. (Don’t know about the newst “fantastic” plans of the European Union though.)
But… isn’t it that many national patents also claim to be valid for the whole world?
[/quote]
Many countries recognize American patents, and most patents nowadays are filed internationally at the same time they’re filed here in the US (a very expensive process). The process is somewhat different from country to country, but mostly in terms of deadlines, etc. AFAIK the criteria is essentially the same in most countries (they’re all based on the American system), though there may be some variation in what can and cannot be patented.