{"id":17595,"date":"2012-11-04T00:01:03","date_gmt":"2012-11-04T05:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17595"},"modified":"2012-11-03T09:54:52","modified_gmt":"2012-11-03T14:54:52","slug":"rethinking-software-patents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/11\/04\/rethinking-software-patents\/","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking software patents"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Software patents are becoming a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/timworstall\/2012\/11\/03\/perhaps-richard-stallman-has-the-solution-to-software-patents\/\" target=\"_blank\">clear and present danger<\/a> to innovation:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The basic problem being that there are so many patents, covering so many things, that the system is in danger of eating itself like Ourobouros.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>When Dan Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation studied one large program (Linux, which is the kernel of the GNU\/Linux operating system) in 2004, he found 283 U.S. patents that appeared to cover computing ideas implemented in the source code of that program. That same year, it was estimated that Linux was .25 percent of the whole GNU\/Linux system. Multiplying 300 by 400 we get the order-of-magnitude estimate that the system as a whole was threatened by around 100,000 patents.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>If half of those patents were eliminated as \u201cbad quality\u201d &mdash; i.e., mistakes of the patent system &mdash; it would not really change things. Whether 100,000 patents or 50,000, it\u2019s the same disaster. This is why it\u2019s a mistake to limit our criticism of software patents to just \u201cpatent trolls\u201d or \u201dbad quality\u201d patents. In this sense Apple, which isn\u2019t a \u201ctroll\u201d by the usual definition, is the most dangerous patent aggressor today. I don\u2019t know whether Apple\u2019s patents are \u201cgood quality,\u201d but the better the patent\u2019s \u201cquality,\u201d the more dangerous its threat.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It\u2019s near impossible to develop new software when there are so many such patents out there. Further, even if you tried to get clearance (or signed up to licenses and so on) to use them it would be near impossible.And we do need to recall what the purpose of a patent system is. No, it isn\u2019t to provide and income to those who create inventions. That\u2019s only the proximate aim: the ultimate aim is to maximise the amount of invention and innovation.<\/p>\n<p>The economics of patents accepts that there is a tradeoff here. Yes, we\u2019d like people who come up with useful new things to make money. Because that incentivises people to work on coming up with interesting new things to all our benefit. However, we also want people to be able to create derivative innovations and inventions. If our protection of the original inventors is too strong then we limit this. What we want is a system that hits the sweet spot, of encouraging the maximum amount of both, original and derivative. The problem of course being that to encourage one we weaken the incentives to do the other, either way around.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Software patents are becoming a clear and present danger to innovation: The basic problem being that there are so many patents, covering so many things, that the system is in danger of eating itself like Ourobouros. When Dan Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation studied one large program (Linux, which is the kernel of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,9,15],"tags":[160,755,174,241,380,92],"class_list":["post-17595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-law","category-technology","tag-apple","tag-incentives","tag-innovation","tag-intellectualproperty","tag-patents","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4zN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17596,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17595\/revisions\/17596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}