|
Reducing the term of patent would definitely help, by far the biggest problem of software patents is that independent reinvention is assumed by the patent system to be rare, and since independent reinvention is fairly random, reducing the pool of potential accidental infringements would help tremendously. As for what you could call a "software patent," a rough description would be any patent that only claims an invention that reads information from a device, component, or other software, executes an algorithm on that information, and sends that information to another device, component, or software. If that's the entirety of the patent, then it's effectively patenting something that is no more novel than the algorithm itself, and should not be enough to turn an otherwise-unpatentable algorithm into a patented process by just saying "do it on a computer." OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Dec 9, 2013 |
#
¿
Dec 9, 2013 01:16
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 23:08 |
|
|
I think one of the key problems with software patents too is that they're frequently not necessary due to the obfuscating nature of software. The RAR format, for example, has made the decompression algorithm public as source code, with the caveat that the source code is not permitted to be incorporated into a compressor. Despite that head start and considerable popularity, to my knowledge, there still aren't any third-party compressors. There are plenty of proprietary products out there that do exactly the same thing, they simply refuse to disclose their secrets and the difficulty of reverse-engineering the software protects the commercial viability of them on their own, and they stimulate advancement via competition anyway.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2013 04:18
|
|
|
Kalman posted:(which large industries will promptly take without any compensation, since now they're allowed to)
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2013 01:28
|
|
|
Kalman posted:It's almost like the only ones that make the news are the ones that upset people or are borderline. Do you think that there might be a selection bias operating? From those, the arithmetic coding patents stunted the progress of data compression in general for an extremely long time because everyone decided to avoid it by using less-optimal Huffman coding rather than deal with patent garbage. The usual option of inventing a better mousetrap was off the table because arithmetic coding is provably optimal. After over a decade, it's finally starting to get supplanted by range coding, which only started coming into use when someone found out that it predated arithmetic coding and was only slightly worse. To elaborate on how ridiculous the whole arrangement is though, range coding works with an arbitrary base, and arithmetic coding is just a range coding in base 2 rephrased via sixth-grade algebra, so they managed to stunt data compression for a decade by patenting rephrased prior art combined with the number 2. Wavelet patents have done a similarly-destructive job on preventing that technology from being adopted, and everyone is sticking with DCT instead. Video encoding is full of extremely trivial patents, several that can be expressed in under 20 characters of C++ code. Codecs are not just patented as codecs, there's pretty much a separate filing for every little bullshit improvement that took more than 5 minutes of experimentation to develop. The notion that the state of the art is being advanced by patents here seems really absurd because the advancements in those fields mostly consist of deliberate patent avoidance (i.e. Vorbis), improvements made by people in jurisdictions that allow them to ignore the patents (i.e. x264, ffmpeg), and products that are black-boxed to hell because one of the easiest ways to avoid a patent lawsuit is not say how it works (i.e. Windows Media). OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Dec 17, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2013 05:16
|
|