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I did an email interview with Arno Gourdol, co-inventor of a gui theming related patent that was obtained while he worked at Apple. It's a nice insight to a non-lawyer perspective of how patents work by someone that has been there.

http://www.osdev.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=12117

I'm disappointed that a person like him (i.e., a developer type) actually echoes the drivel about patents "protecting intelectual property", and patents as "sharing knowledge". ::) :-[

I have a confession to make. I am also named as an inventor on a patent application (not sure if it has gone through yet). No, it's not a frivilous, obvious, morally objectionable patent. It also has nothing to do with operating systems, and furthermore would bore you to death, so don't ask. ;D

I'm disappointed that a person like him (i.e., a developer type) actually echoes the drivel about patents "protecting intelectual property", and patents as "sharing knowledge".

I think he was talking about the idea of patents in general, not their application to software in particular, which he acknowledged is quite broken in many ways.

I am not categorically against software patents (else I wouldn't have my name on one), but I do think that the review process at the USPTO is horribly broken. The suggestion to shorten the protection period is a very good one IMO. I think 2 years ought to be plenty, given the speed at which this industry moves. 20 is just outrageous, while 2 is probably enough for a company to do something useful with their "invention".

Yeah, if you don't do anything with it within two years (by which time the industry has moved on substantially) then in general you only got the patent to stop other people having fun.

i have a mate who worked at cannon and has half a dozen or more patents in his name. for real world things, they are good to stop competition from abusing _your_ r&d. software is diff story tho

Solar wrote: I'm disappointed that a person like him (i.e., a developer type) actually echoes the drivel about patents "protecting intelectual property", and patents as "sharing knowledge". ::) :-[

Patents are like telling everybody exactly what you've invented insofar that you can claim that if they do the same, they got it from you, and then to threathen everybody to sue them to bits if they try to make something like it. Of course, you needn't tell everybody, you only need to tell the patent office.

Allow me to explain babies to you *cough*.

Candy wrote: Allow me to explain babies to you *cough*.

Is it anything like an explaination i was given of serverlets which started "When a Mummy server loves a Daddy server very much..."

Bob the Avenger wrote:

Candy wrote: Allow me to explain babies to you *cough*.

Is it anything like an explaination i was given of serverlets which started "When a Mummy server loves a Daddy server very much..."

Oh wait, should've patented the method of creating babies first.

The main problem with patents is that they don't work in the initial stages of a field. Computer science is still too young to apply it, although I have seen ideas that were novel enough to allow some protection. It's going too fast for the 20-year term and it's not developed enough, there are not enough examples of what "simple" and "hard" mean. I've seen patents for stuff I wouldn't think up but I've also seen patents for stuff I wouldn't even consider thinking about.

The main problem with young sciences is that the development sort of develops like a tree, with a constant amount of branching. At first, each new branch branches away quickly and is required in new branches. After quite a while, the branches reduce in speed and increase in refinedness. That is the time when patents help R&D companies and departments make ideas public, since the widest branches aren't advanced upon for years to come and won't be created if there isn't any assurance that you'll make some money with it.

Until the time that the R&D tree of CS is wide enough to do so, patents greatly stifle innovation by limiting the use of a branch in sub-branches. There are CS patents for just about every branch in the tree, including a few that are plain impossible. Ideas are being patented before people have given the ideas enough thought.

The Apple patent would fit in the tree under the "protection for 5 years" category, imo, since it is an idea that deserves some protection, but not so much as to punish everybody not thinking of that way yet. In more than one way, however, you could consider numerous common examples to be prior art. For the record, IANAL and I didn't read the patent itself (gee, feel like a slashdot reader now) so I cannot speak for it.