Surely that depends - is this a bunch of generic and vague detail-less patents, or do they provide the actual information required to implement the thing it purports to describe.
The core problem with “software patents” in the US sense is that the patent office appear to grant them by default if they are vague, only accepts specific types of pre-existing evidence that they are not new or novel, and once a patent is granted makes it as hard and expensive as possible to challenge the granted patents, and doesn’t allow you to recover costs if you are sued for a patent that is eventually revoked.
All of those thing mean that the specifics of us patent law remain BS, but at the same time I think that everyone on HN does believe that IP should exist, and people should have rights to what they create.
You can't patent "pure math" but given that describes literally anything that it is possible to do on a computer, including simulating a physical device, we know that there is an intrinsic point where things go from "math" to something patentable.
The rationale for "you can't patent maths" is basically "you can't patent a fact".
Blanket anti-software patent people take a maximalist position: if it's a step of instructions it is maths, so should not be patentable. I think that is absolute nonsense, and it is an explicit statement that if you ever come up with anything idea, no matter how much it cost you to invent it, or develop it, it has zero value - because apparently the hard part of complex and new technology is writing code, not developing the technology in the first place. It also means you get some absurd results: the same invention would be patentable if you made a mechanical implementation, a purely electronic one, probably an ASIC, but probably not if it was an ASIC executing instructions from a builtin ROM. Because suddenly it becomes "math".
As I said originally, the problem is not patenting "software", it's that the idiocy of the US patent office means that you can make a patent document that has no information that can be used to implement the patent, and thus the patents are inherently open to abuse.
The core problem with software (and worse, process) patents is that they let you patent an idea, rather than an actual implementation of an idea, which is what physical object patents are required to do. The whole reason patents are public is so that the public can look at a patent, and use that document to implement the idea being patented, but if all you've done is patent the idea then all the public can do is see that you had an idea but didn't know how to actually build it (which is what patents are _meant_ to be for).
> It also means you get some absurd results: the same invention would be patentable if you made a mechanical implementation, a purely electronic one, probably an ASIC, but probably not if it was an ASIC executing instructions from a builtin ROM. Because suddenly it becomes "math".
Why is that absurd? Here's my attempt to describe a maximalist position: If the machine actually does something then you get a valid patent for the real world. But the patent won't apply to simulations of the real world. So it doesn't really matter whether it's "patentable" or not. We could give patents to both variants, but if someone is only interested in the data the machine outputs, they can run a simulated version without violating either patent.
> it is an explicit statement that if you ever come up with anything idea, no matter how much it cost you to invent it, or develop it, it has zero value - because apparently the hard part of complex and new technology is writing code, not developing the technology in the first place
Math takes tons of effort too! Deep complicated proofs are no more "just a fact" than compression schemes are "just a fact".
> The core problem with software (and worse, process) patents is that they let you patent an idea, rather than an actual implementation of an idea
I worry that there's no good way to make a thorough guideline for what counts as idea and what counts as implementation for things that are code-based.
Though in the strictest sense you could just rely on copyright for implementations and toss out patents entirely.
