[Tfug] Microsoft reportedly wants open source software users to pa y rolyalties

[Jeremy D Rogers]

On 5/17/07, Claude Rubinson <rubinson at u.arizona.edu> wrote:
> Can anyone point to a decent justification for software (or business)
> patents?  Because, to me, the whole idea sounds absurd.  As I
> understand it, patents are to protect implementations so as to
> encourage research and innovation which, ultimately, benefits society

My (uncited) impression was that patents were originally conceived for
two purposes:
(1) offer government protection for inventors so that an inventor
could have the right to make money from his/her invention, thereby
encouraging innovation. In some cases, the alternative is to keep
something a trade secret. But that only works for something that is
kept in-house and can't be reverse engineered. So maybe patents also
helped to open up ideas and stimulate more invention.
(2) I also thought there was a second motivation to develop patents
and that was to give government access to the ideas. If someone
invents and patents a widget that would be useful in national
security, the government can swoop in and seize that patent. I can't
find the info on provision right now, anyone know more?

> as a whole.  (This, of course, assumes a neoclassical economic model
> which is a questionable assumption, but that's a discussion for
> another time and venue.  Yes, I'm looking at you, Jude...)
>
> What I'm thinking, though, is that I've only heard the FLOSS side of
> the story.  Could it be that I'm misunderstanding the
> [theoretical/social] benefit of software/business patents?  Can anyone
> point to a discussion that argues that software patents do, in fact,
> serve the greater good?

This page has a really brief history:
http://www.thomsonscientific.com/support/patents/patinf/patentfaqs/history/

>From US patent history, it quotes:
"The Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of
science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and
inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and
discoveries."

That does definitely sound like it includes software when it uses the
term 'writing'.
<Devils Advocate>  A company has a revolutionary idea for a new piece
of software that is able to diagnose cancer based on image processing
of images taken of your tongue. However the software will not work
well until the company invests several years in collecting statistics
and doing clinical trails to fine tune the algorithm. Furthermore, the
government requires lengthy and expensive approval processes for this
new technique. The whole investment takes $1million. If the company
can not patent the software, the company has no hope of ever
recovering the R&D costs because a second company could rewrite the
software in a week to do the same analysis (once the approval is given
for the technique and the key image properties are identified) and
sell the software for a fraction of the first company's price. So
without patent protection no company would ever want to pursue
development of this simple cheap technique for diagnosing cancer.
Society looses.
</Devils Advocate>

I'm against software patents in general, but I think the bigger
problem is the patent office awarding invalid patents for which prior
art exists.

JDR



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