<story><title>Patents on Software: A Nobel Laureate’s View</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/opinion/patents-on-software-a-nobel-laureates-view.html?_r=2&amp;</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brindle</author><text>I&apos;m a chemist and a software engineer. With all due respect there are a lot of similarities. People who do ground breaking research need to have a way of protecting their intellectual property, whether its patents, copyrights, and or reasonable license fees, etc...</text></item><item><author>nitrogen</author><text>Software is different because the cost of materials consumed is effectively zero and the barrier to entry is at most $35 for a Raspberry Pi, allowing anyone to code their way into a patent thicket.  Software is also different because of its rapid pace of change, a pace that is threatened by insanely long patent terms (approaching as long as a good chunk of programmers have been alive).</text></item><item><author>jandrewrogers</author><text>The argument made is not unique to software or computer algorithms. Chemical process patents are identical to computer algorithm patents in this respect, just replace bits with molecules, and are among the oldest patentable subject matters. Long, complex sequential algorithms are a feature of many engineering disciplines.&lt;p&gt;Chemical engineering, to use that example, designs elaborate and complex dynamic systems by chaining together abstract chemical algorithms. Each one of those little algorithms is subject to both patent and copyright. Like with software most of the commonly used algorithms and clever hacks were either never patented or the patents have long expired. It is only on the bleeding edge that some chemical algorithms are under patent; as with computer algorithms there are an unbounded number of potential algorithms but some are more efficient than others. Specific implementations are still covered by copyright and are widely licensed (as libraries).&lt;p&gt;Most of the nominal specialness attributed to software as a domain for intellectual property does not really exist. Yet the rarely questioned assertion that computer software is special in some way has created a dearth of comparative studies that would likely be valuable from both a theoretical standpoint as well as a practical policy standpoint. Either these other areas, like chemical processes, are equally broken at a fundamental level and the scope should be extended beyond software, or there are differences in implementation across otherwise equivalent domains and we should borrowing from the better implementation. It seems like an oversight that no one is attempting to do either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Joeri</author><text>&quot;People who do ground breaking research need to have a way of protecting their intellectual property&quot;&lt;p&gt;Define &quot;ground-breaking&quot;.&lt;p&gt;This is the myth of the patent system: the lone inventor doing dazzling unprecedented work that they can only recoup by being granted a patent. Those people don&apos;t exist. You may find one or two, but not enough to justify the overbearing patent system.</text></comment>
<story><title>Patents on Software: A Nobel Laureate’s View</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/opinion/patents-on-software-a-nobel-laureates-view.html?_r=2&amp;</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brindle</author><text>I&apos;m a chemist and a software engineer. With all due respect there are a lot of similarities. People who do ground breaking research need to have a way of protecting their intellectual property, whether its patents, copyrights, and or reasonable license fees, etc...</text></item><item><author>nitrogen</author><text>Software is different because the cost of materials consumed is effectively zero and the barrier to entry is at most $35 for a Raspberry Pi, allowing anyone to code their way into a patent thicket.  Software is also different because of its rapid pace of change, a pace that is threatened by insanely long patent terms (approaching as long as a good chunk of programmers have been alive).</text></item><item><author>jandrewrogers</author><text>The argument made is not unique to software or computer algorithms. Chemical process patents are identical to computer algorithm patents in this respect, just replace bits with molecules, and are among the oldest patentable subject matters. Long, complex sequential algorithms are a feature of many engineering disciplines.&lt;p&gt;Chemical engineering, to use that example, designs elaborate and complex dynamic systems by chaining together abstract chemical algorithms. Each one of those little algorithms is subject to both patent and copyright. Like with software most of the commonly used algorithms and clever hacks were either never patented or the patents have long expired. It is only on the bleeding edge that some chemical algorithms are under patent; as with computer algorithms there are an unbounded number of potential algorithms but some are more efficient than others. Specific implementations are still covered by copyright and are widely licensed (as libraries).&lt;p&gt;Most of the nominal specialness attributed to software as a domain for intellectual property does not really exist. Yet the rarely questioned assertion that computer software is special in some way has created a dearth of comparative studies that would likely be valuable from both a theoretical standpoint as well as a practical policy standpoint. Either these other areas, like chemical processes, are equally broken at a fundamental level and the scope should be extended beyond software, or there are differences in implementation across otherwise equivalent domains and we should borrowing from the better implementation. It seems like an oversight that no one is attempting to do either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kbutler</author><text>How many patentable steps are there in useful chemical production paths?&lt;p&gt;I expect that any trivial software application has many (many) orders of magnitude more patent-vulnerable elements than the most complex commercially produced chemicals.&lt;p&gt;Software is much more free to include complexity because of the low cost of each element - there&apos;s no need to create a physical plant that implements the software.&lt;p&gt;This makes progress in software much more vulnerable to impedance by patents, because patents cause a greater increase in the relative cost of each element and because there are more elements involved.&lt;p&gt;And I think if we only allowed patents on &quot;ground breaking&quot; inventions, there would be many fewer patents and much less basis for anti-patent opinions.</text></comment>