Never going to happen; too much investment. Not without something resetting the whole patent system all at once.
And hey, I’m not actually opposed to all patents. H.265 - if you put tens of millions into compression research, or hundreds of millions into database scaling research at PlanetScale, a temporary exclusivity period makes sense.
95% of software patents don’t reach that level.
I think some of the bad rap also comes from technology advancement. Amazon’s 1-click Checkout patent is notorious; but nobody talks about how much of an accomplishment that technology was in 1997. It actually was very impressive when that patent was granted, particularly in getting the credit card networks to agree to the security design.
Because of the nature of software patents the investment is worthless anyway.
One of the biggest problems with software patents is that they're unreasonably broad or ambiguous and then the claims read on arbitrary software the authors of which have never even heard of the patent.
Another is that companies purposely patent interfaces that are needed for compatibility, and then the patent isn't needed because it's so great, it's needed to interoperate with existing systems and thereby offers no ability for competitors to design a better alternative because better is different is incompatible. You have to license H.264 even if you build something better yourself -- or you've already licensed H.265 -- because you still have to be able to interact with media and clients that use H.264.
Then as between large companies, they all need each others' patents and just end up cross licensing everything. All the effort is for nothing because it just cancels out.
As between large companies and small companies, the large companies can sue the small one, but the small company probably doesn't have any money anyway and the suit makes the large company look like a bully and creates PR losses that likely outweigh any benefit from filing the suit. The small companies, on the other hand, can't sue the large ones because the large company would just file counterclaims and (at best) force the same cross-licensing that exists between large companies. So that's worthless.
Which leaves the only entities that really like software patents: Patent trolls. Eliminating them is a major economic benefit of eliminating software patents.
> Then as between large companies, they all need each others' patents and just end up cross licensing everything. All the effort is for nothing because it just cancels out.
As you explain in the next paragraph, that creates a moat the protects the large companies from the small ones.
They compete against each other but they also collectively defend their own kind.
You're describing another major benefit of eliminating software patents.
Even large companies don't actually benefit from that because their suppliers and companies in complementary markets do the same thing, and you lose any time any of those companies can maintain a moat with which to extract rents out of your own market.
These are deadweight economic losses. They hurt everybody to benefit the company doing them, but even that company is suffering a net loss because of all the companies doing it back to them. Yet they still do it because it's a tragedy of the commons, unless you remove the mechanism that enables it, i.e. software patents.
H.265 is a great example of software patents going wrong. As it was the first MPEG video standard created after the rise of widespread commercial video streaming, all the patent owners involved wanted to be able to get as much money as possible from the streaming companies. Because of this, we went from the relatively reasonable H.264 licensing terms (pay one patent pool a per-device licensing fee, capped at a total royalty payment of $14 million) to H.265 being covered by three separate patent pools. Between all of them you have to pay royalties on decoding hardware, software, and per-item encoded, and some of the pools don't have caps on royalties. Additionally, some major patent holders aren't in any pools and you have to work out deals with them individually. Here's a summary of the H.265 licensing situation: https://www.slashcam.de/images/news/HEVC-Patent-Pools-14134_...
The result is that H.265 hasn't gotten much commercial adoption (the one major use is 4K Blu-Ray). Instead, most major streaming and tech companies have been pushing AV1, which doesn't have licensing fees and takes a "mutually assured destruction" approach to patent enforcement (the AV1 patent license states that if any patent holder tries to sue an AV1 user for patent infringement, they automatically lose the rights to all AV1 patents, opening them up to a countersuit).
In an ideal world, all intellectual property would become public domain after 10-15 years, including all research, schematics, wire diagrams, source code, marketing materials, etc. When you go to the various offices to get your IP recognized you must also submit various materials and continue to do so for the life of your property rights.
Again though, in an ideal world. In reality any major changes to something like copyright would probably get you killed even faster than judges who are hard on drugs. The most that we, the people, can do until there’s some amount of backbone in our various countries is to remove ourselves from the primary market wherever we can. For instance, I have been on a successful Nintendo boycott for the last 8 years, and it’s been even longer for Disney. I buy anything I want secondhand or pirate it directly, I don’t pay into SaaS but use alternatives, and I feel a lot happier being ungovernable in this way.
Patents already require that all information be available, for someone similarly invested in the craft, to be able to completely reproduce the invention.
That doesn’t require an implementation - but that mirrors our regular patent office, which does not require physical functioning prototypes to demonstrate.
Have you filed or read any software patents? Many are so vague that they do not embody any significant "idea" or contribution, and are mostly just a hindrance to actual innovation. And some are just plain stupid, like the patent to average two integers without overflow.
Like the parent said, a compromise could be "source or GTFO". But even that seems of questionable value.
The shit show gets to the point where many companies file patents defensively. They'll file a patent just in case their competition does it first, even if they have nothing to show for it. And this naturally affects smaller companies disproportionately because they do not have the funds to pay lawyers (there is a hilarious interview on Youtube of a small startup CEO that explains how his company spends more on lawyers than engineers.)
So tl;dr, we'd probably be better off without software patents altogether.
A wiki specifically on the topic written by non-lawyers is interesting; but I don’t see why it should be considered an unbiased list of ideas. Sometimes the status quo is imperfect but okay.
Why did you specify “non-lawyers”? Did you mean to imply that something written by lawyers would be unbiased? And where did I ever claim that this was unbiased? It’s the “End Software Patents Wiki”; it’s about as biased as it gets. But I thought you wanted arguments, so I linked it. If you want to dismiss them without reading them, that’s up to you.
