Apple-Motorola Judge Questions Need For Software Patents 372
imamac sends this quote from a Reuters report:
"The U.S. judge who tossed out one of the biggest court cases in Apple's smartphone technology battle is questioning whether patents should cover software or most other industries at all. ... Posner said some industries, like pharmaceuticals, had a better claim to intellectual property protection because of the enormous investment it takes to create a successful drug. Advances in software and other industries cost much less, he said, and the companies benefit tremendously from being first in the market with gadgets — a benefit they would still get if there were no software patents. 'It's not clear that we really need patents in most industries,' he said. Also, devices like smartphones have thousands of component features, and they all receive legal protection. 'You just have this proliferation of patents,' Posner said. 'It's a problem.' ... The Apple/Motorola case did not land in front of Posner by accident. He volunteered to oversee it."
Oblig: TED Talk (Score:5, Interesting)
Johanna Blakley's TED talk [ted.com]
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It's a really humbling day when somebody from the fashion industry has to explain the tech and media world why copyright doesn't actually achieve what it was supposed to achieve.
Patents at least don't last forever. But they are very very silly at the moment as evidenced by the stupid little rent seeking lawsuits by Apple.
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What's your proposal for funding drug research?
You're probably right in that the current method is not perfect, but I could come up with a number of worse systems.
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:5, Insightful)
What's your proposal for funding drug research?
Funded via NIH and public universities... in other words, exactly the way we fund it now.
The difference would be, the public (who already pays for the research) would be the direct beneficiaries of the research, instead of pharmaceutical companies getting to claim a monopoly on what should, by all law and rights, be public domain.
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You're under the impression that the private pharmaceuticals do nothing by way of funding the drug discovery process?
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:4, Insightful)
PS: No, I don't need to provide a link, google it.
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not necessarily wasteful if it grows the budget by more than it costs.
For example, let's say I have a small company and my non-marketing costs are $10k a year (example numbers here.) Furthermore, let's say it'll cost me that $10k a year no matter whether I sell nothing or sell 100 units. (Actual pill-by-pill production is cheap. Setting up the factory is expensive. Getting a drug approved is expensive. Finding a drug to get approved is expensive.)
If I spend $2k in marketing maybe I can sell $8k in product, providing the drug to 80 people a year. Okay, sure, not terrible.
Maybe if I spend $4k in marketing I sell $10k in product, providing for 100 people.
Maybe if I spend $10k I sell $20k in product, proving for 200 people.
Is that $10k in marketing "a waste"? Well, if I spent half as much I'd make less profit. If I spent half as much I'd help fewer people. If I spent half as much I'd have less profit to put into creating new drug lines.
I understand where you're coming from, the idea that marketing is a drain on the economy since it produces nothing, but for an individual company it could be the difference between new drugs being developed or the company going bust.
I think what you're actually proposing is a pure collectivization of drug discovery. The problem I see with that is how do we then ensure we culture the right drugs? Drug discovery is hard. Immensely hard. Failures are often and expensive and government is poorly equipped to make entrepreneurial decisions. That's why we currently rely on private companies to make the decisions on who is a good research and who is a bad researcher when a company in total only makes two or three really profitable drugs every decade. We can allow those companies to fail if they can no longer produce. It's a lot harder to let a government program "fail" like that.
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not necessarily wasteful if it grows the budget by more than it costs.
For healthcare, yes it is.
Think about it.
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? I heard of cholesterol as a health problem long before Lipitor existed, and before direct to consumer drug advertising was even a thing.
If you are relying on advertising for your information about the world, I don't like your prospects for health and well being in any case.
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:5, Insightful)
I never see cures advertised. Only maintenance drugs. I hope I'm wrong, but it seems like drug companies don't want cures, they want dugs that mask symptoms that you need to take for the rest of your life.
Is it better to cure aids or to let someone live on a daily pill with aids?
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:5, Insightful)
If I never hear about Lipitor maybe I never bother getting a cholesterol screening and then die of heart disease at 37 instead of going to my doctor at 35 and saying, "Hey, I heard about this Lipitor thing and that men from age 35 should have cholesterol screenings."
One should go to the doctor yearly. This is a healthy habit, right up there with brushing your teeth and exercise and cooking food thoroughly.
The only point of marketing to the mass public is to make them think they want something. They want someone who's feeling a little down today see a commercial for an anti-depressant and say "hey, *I* am feeling down, maybe I'm clinically depressed, clearly I need this pill." They should only be marketing to doctors, and even then it shouldn't be by giving away swag and lunches to a doctor and their staff, it should be a just-the-facts operation. This medication treats xyz better than this other one, just look at these reduced side effects.
What I'm getting at is that you're doctor should already be running the blood work and should be bringing up your cholesterol levels up to you. That's why they're licensed: they are acting as your agents regarding health.
That's why sensible countries prohibit the drug industry from advertising.
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It's just an example, sheesh. Insert a less common sense ailment then. For example, without marketing I wouldn't know about the various smoking cessation products, including the nicotine vaccination.
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:5, Informative)
I see this objection a lot. As someone with quite a bit of knowledge about the pharmaceutical industry, medicine, and basic research in biology, let me try to explain the problem: creating a cure is insanely difficult. Why?
1. It usually requires permanently altering cellular anatomy or physiology/metabolism, and homeostasis won't let you.
2. Many diseases have genetic components, which would require altering DNA to cure.
3. We don't have the technology to carry out #1 and 2.
In a disease state, the body's homeostasis has diverged from a "normal" state. Homeostasis is a robust process, meaning that it can take a lot to change it; usually it occurs slowly over a long period of time. Taking a pill that temporarily alters that homeostasis doesn't reset it to normal. Think freshman chemistry: equilibrium and Le Chatelier's principle. You changed the equilibrium, and the disease state homeostasis fights to go back to what it was.
As for genetic components, cystic fibrosis should be the easiest disease in the world to cure: it's caused by having two copies of a bad allele for a potassium channel that result in misfolded proteins. Insert at least one good copy into the genome and voila! A cure! Yet nobody has ever demonstrated success with gene therapy in humans. Which leads us to the third point...
We just can't figure out how to get gene therapy to work well. We also can't figure out how to permanently move a diseased homeostatic process (e.g., insulin resistance) to a normal state.
It's not that the pharma companies don't want to. Patient compliance with medication is horrible. If you tell a patient to their face that they will only live 3 more years if they don't take this pill every day, versus 10 years if they do, the average patient will only take the pill about 180 days of the year. So, if a drug company could sell a cure at the same cost as a lifetime of one-a-day pills (which they could), then they would absolutely do so. It's guaranteed money, like a magazine subscription versus buying a copy off the rack whenever.
Besides, many scientists at academic and government research institutions would rather find cures for diseases, yet are unable to. Unless we pull out the tin foil hats and speculate that they, too, are on the payroll of the pharma companies, it should be clearer that there are other reasons cures don't happen.
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't understand.
There are a fixed number of people who need a drug for their health problems.
Giving a drug to someone who does not need it is malpractice.
Advertising drugs does not really increase your legally and ethically available customer base.
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While I agree with the spirit of your comment, it may not be strictly correct because between "need to stay alive" and "don't need at all" there are varying levels of need, as in "probably would benefit from," or "might possibly benefit from," or even "definitely would benefit from but to a marginal degree."
Suppose you have moderately elevated blood pressure. Do you need to take medication for that? Well it depends. How elevated? What is your family history of cardiovascular disease? Your age? Have you at
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:4)
To become a complete asshole in this discussion let me point something out. :)
The more people who buy and take drugs solely because they saw an ad on TV the higher the production of that drug.
The more they can make the lower they can price it. The stupid people get weird side effects and / or die.
The ones who need it can get it for a little less money.
The world is a better place.
P.S. I think that was some real good asshole stuff there.
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Well, I'd naively like to hope that if there were only 80 people for whom this drug were the best treatment, that 80 patients would have it prescribed. And if there were 200 patients for whom it were best, you'd have 200 customers. And so on. If I discovered that my doctor was prescribing my medications based on marketing rather than what's best for me, I'd switch doctors.
The only purpose of advertising is to increase demand, which in the case of health care should be purely driven by need. What seems worse
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Surely there are more targeted ways to advertise to doctors than on national TV during prime time. Those ads aren't for doctors, they're to increase demand among the general population, who can pressure their doctors into prescribing things whether it's in the patient's best medical interest or not.
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They also come to market sooner than reference material.
So you're saying the drug companies start advertising before their research has been published? Something seems a bit wrong with that. If you're just talking about brick-thick pharmaceutical catalogs being sent round, aren't we living in the 21st century? Even without computers, hasn't it been possible to send around updates even for paper catalogs for as long as we've had paper catalogs?
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The same pharma companies that spend over 50% of budget on marketing and advertising? Don't you think it is a little wasteful?
PS: No, I don't need to provide a link, google it.
Your response would have been better if you had provided a link yourself. Anyhow, here is one link (PDF), entitled 'Pharmaceutical Marketing – Time for Change':
http://ejbo.jyu.fi/pdf/ejbo_vol9_no2_pages_4-11.pdf [ejbo.jyu.fi]
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No, if spending on marketing generates more revenue than spending on R&D then of course they should be doing that. And in an industry with high fixed costs and low variable costs you should expect marketing to get more funding - that's simple math.
Of course a significant portion of that evil marketing and advertising budget is actually subsidizing medication costs for poor people (which shouldn't be necessary of course, but the US health system is broken):
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:4, Insightful)
Pretty much. The heavy lifting is done for them and the research they do is heavily subsidized by taxpayers.
And, their research is entirely in high-profit drugs that may or may not be important for human health.
Also, look at how often they get it wrong. Huge money spent researching a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory that is less effective than Ibuprofen (whose patent has expired) and happens to give you a heart attack.
I should disclose here that I am alive today pretty much only because I was involved in a drug trial in the 1990s due to a nasty type of lymphoma. I'm completely better, no recurrence in almost 16 years now. I really tried to find out the provenance behind the drug I was given: almost entirely funded publicly, and my care was given at a non-profit hospital.
I was born during a time when almost all medical care was done on a non-profit basis. People got paid, but you do get to be paid in a non-profit setting. Doctors lived really nice, upper-middle class lives. Best house on the block and that sort of thing. It all went haywire when the profit motive took over everything in medicine.
Oh, and the increase in life expectancy that has occurred during my lifetime happened mostly before the for-profits took over.
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So you're saying that if we dissolved every last pharma company today new drugs would come to market exactly as they are now with no other changes to the infrastructure?
That's what I'm getting at -- I know that NIH does basic biology research and I know that pharmaceuticals often get things wrong -- but they do provide a part in the system. Unless you have a plan to /replace/ them, you don't have a plan.
I think the government is great at basic research. I think it's absolute shite at creating a product ou
Why dissolve? Just de-monopolize (Score:3)
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:4, Informative)
And yet he patented Remune.
And of course his "refusal" to patent his polio vaccine had nothing to do with the lawyers at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis saying that prior art made it not patentable - they did the legal research into that just for fun with no intention of actually patenting it if it was likely to succeed.
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Yep. One of the reasons there's not much research into new antibiotics is that it's not very profitable. Big pharma wants to make pills that people need to take every day for the rest of their life, not pills that people take for eight days once a year or so.
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:5, Insightful)
pharma is TOO IMPORTANT to be left to money-grubbing capitalists. its like infrastructure, it should be maintained by the gov who will be a little less of a pain-in-the-ass than the pharma companies.
we have the gov do things that we rely on for common good. pharma should be one of them.
the idea of profiting from others' pain is so WRONG, I can't even get my head around why we allow such evil practices.
at some point, we should think about how we can convert this 'business' back into the charity and caring set of goals it was SUPPOSED to be in the first place.
a lot of things should have profit taken out of it.
profit is evil. more and more, I'm seeing how our 'money, at all cost!' civ is just entirely designed wrong.
"sorry, you have to suffer. our prices are more important than your pain relief"
unbelievable. I wish there was a hell; so that the pharma (and similar) ceo's could go to 'retire' when they die.
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Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:5, Interesting)
the idea of profiting from others' pain is so WRONG, I can't even get my head around why we allow such evil practices
Profit from other people's pain? The pharmaceutical companies that make the drugs I take every day, Merck and Pfizer, are profiting from RELIEVING my once-substantial, and now nearly non-existant pain. I am thankful every day that we have companies committed to such "evil" practices.
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:5, Insightful)
What if they could make a pill that cured the source of your pain, relieving you of both your pain AND your financial burden to pay them?
Do you think they would?
Or do you think they'd quietly keep supplying you your painkiller for 17 years, until the patent expired, and then try and sell you a new one developed solely because they can't make the same margin on the old one, now that any chemist worth a damn can legally make it for a few cents per pill?
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Please tell me what mythical disease this is that causes pain but can be cured with a pill?
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AC is absolutely right. Of course someone would make that pill, because it would completely wipe out all their competitors' market share, assuming that the price of that pill was less than the present value (including inconvenience) of taking the other pills over the length of the patent term.
And I'm not forced to buy their new pills; their old (no-longer-patented) ones work just fine for me. But they don't work well enough for some people, whereas the new ones may. So I'm quite happy to have given them the
I'll show you profit from other people's pain (Score:3)
You seem to misunderstand what people like me mean when we say "profiting from others pain" - while your pain is relieved, the profit premium can make drugs unaffordable to some others. If you could afford the drug without profit, but cannot afford it with profit, then Big Pharma is profiting from your pain.
Consider the case in India regarding a compulsory license for a kidney and liver cancer drug.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120312/02424818071/putting-lives-before-patents-india-says-pricey-patented [techdirt.com]
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Right, because more government control = less evil and well maintained. Just look at the US's current infrastructure and areas of oversight (e.g. the FCC).
Yea, but you should have seen 'em when they were new, before the lobbyists and their pet congresspeople got ahold of them!
FWIW, our infrastructure isn't all that fucked up, it's just that it hasn't been maintained and/or expanded as necessary, mostly due to the aforementioned lobbyist/congresscritter carnal relationship.
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When I imagine a world with out the FCC I see a world where the radio spectrum is a wild west of interference and people cranking up their transmitters to drown out my transmitter.
The government, especially the federal government, *should* be there to promote the Common Good. The FCC, FDA, EPA, NIH, and many other government agencies do just that. Ye
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever you may think, government is the only large organization that is even a little bit likely to do things for the common good.
Everything else is profit at all costs. The idea that the "Free Market" or some other voodoo can sort it out is a bullshit story told by the same people with a shitload of money who benefit more from less government to protect the people they are exploiting.
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The market takes care of food just fine
Riiiight. Seriously, do you live in a cave.
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Let us also note that Big Pharma spends vastly more on advertising (at least in this country) than on R&D. The massive cost to bring a drug to market? Please. The cost to bring a new drug to market is significant, but pales compared to the amount spent advertising it, while the cost to bring a new form of an existing drug to market is roughly jack shit, because of FDA regulations which reduce testing for derivatives of existing molecules. You only have to do a short study to prove that it doesn't kill s
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The problem/cost isn't making the drug, it's getting it to market/passing human tests.
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Fundamental Patent Reform. For any patent to be granted a list of expenses in developing the patent is submitted. Then they have patent protection for 10x that in revenue. They will submit an annual report, and any kind of lying will have the patent revoked. The people who want to use the patent will verify the reports to find any falsification. For devices that integrate multiple patents they are allowed to be summed accordingly.
This way, there is still incentive to do the R&D, because you'll get multi
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:5, Insightful)
You are ignoring the counter argument that it was patents which allowed the US companies to create medications in the first place. Medications that are cheap today now that patents have expired, only existed because the US made it profitable for companies to develop them in the first place.
(I'm not saying this is definitely true, just that you've acted as if the argument doesn't exist and "making drugs cheap" is an obvious solution)
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:4, Insightful)
This is exactly right.
The choice isn't between new expensive medicines and new cheap medicines.
It's between new expensive medicines and no new medicines at all.
If you slow technological development by eviscerating the profit motive (imagine the idiocy of applying it to computers, smart phones, and Internet tech 20 years ago), with medicine, people die who otherwise wouldn't.
20 or 50 years go by, and the tech lags further and further behind where it otherwise would be. This causes increased numbers of deaths who wouldn't otherwise die, like compounding interest.
Had the US been like Europe the past 70 years (and I'm not talking just medicine, but general business unfriendliness) then would the US's production (half of all new medicines) been like Europe's instead?
And you'd stand here in 2012. Happy with your 1980-level "free" medical tech?
If your ears burn over this, they should. You could already be killing people like a major war does. Had Europe spit out medicine like the US does during this time, maybe we'd have 2025 or 2035-level medical tech, and more lives would be saved by the millions each year.
You just can't shove these hypothetically saved lives in front of a camera, the way you can with lives lost due to an expensive medicine. But there's no comparison in the numbers, it's not even close.
Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score:4, Informative)
I don't agree that in general Europe is business unfriendly. The US has two other major advantages over Europe, namely a large common market and a head start after WWII.
EU-27 has a bigger economy and more Fortune 500 companies than the US.
Europe certainly has problems for business, but those are mostly the fact that there are many languages, currencies and different laws to deal with, not that the climate is inherently business unfriendly. Some countries might be somewhat more unfriendly towards US companies than their own, but that's mutual.
And we manage this wile providing universal health care, guaranteed pensions, social welfare, more holidays and shorter working hours.
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All drug production should come from large heard of antelope, or from a single chinchilla in a tutu.
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But US bullies the world and lets other citizens die because they're not American.
I disagree. First off, big pharma is fully willing to let plenty of Americans die (if they can't afford their medication). Big pharma is also fully willing to help plenty of non-Americans pay for the medication they need. It is much more money-related than citizenship related.
One with a clue, ten thousand to go (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does it need one veteran specialist to see that broken is broken? Everybody else still considers the courts to be, well, like tennis courts. A game is played according to arbitrary rules, and the best specialists win.
What do we need engineers for? The courtrooms are where it is decided who is innovating.
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Being a specialist isn't a bad thing, but asking a specialist in astrophysics to authoritatively decide the relative merits of various Baroque music compositions is.
He volunteered... (Score:5, Insightful)
On one hand, I agree with him. On the other, we have a judge who volunteered apparently just to make a stand in this case. How long before "receptive" judges start volunteering to argue for the other side...
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Not quite... if you RTA fully, you'll find out he only registered his interest in any cases involving patents with the lower courts, and the judge that was assigned the case requested to transfer it over to him, which he accepted.
So, no, he didn't get to rummage around in the bin for this one. It was 3 interlocking pieces:
1) The judge from Wisconsin the system assigned the case to knew (or was informed) of Posners interest in patent cases and asked to transfer it to him.
2) Various pieces of judicial adminis
Re:He volunteered... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a bit of a difference between "I'm taking taking this persons side" and "the fact that you're both in court over this at all is stupid."
No software patents! (Score:5, Insightful)
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software is still covered by copyright and licensing agreements.
It is one of the very few places where IP laws of different types overlap.
Re:No software patents! (Score:4, Informative)
Copyright laws still exist even if software patents go away.
Re:No software patents! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:No software patents! (Score:5, Insightful)
If he "rips it off" then he is violating copyright protections. If he copies the look and feel of the software with the intent to deceive or confuse the customer, then there is probably a trademark violation. If he just duplicates the functionality of the software, well, that's just competition. Deal with it.
Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, I don't see the current state of affairs changing anytime soon. There are too many people invested in the current system, and campaigning on a platform of IP reform isn't likely to gain much traction with the public at large, at least not without a LOT more *AA lawsuits. I'm sure the *AA realizes this and keeps its lawsuits fairly discreet and under the public's pain threshold, while they work on conditioning people that copying is theft.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen some software things done that were truly patent-worthy
Except that mathematics is not patentable, and we has fundamental results about software being a form of math:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry-Howard_Isomorphism [wikipedia.org]
So why make apologies for software patents? Either we stop trying to uphold the previous principles that made math unpatentable, or we stop giving out patents on math that is expressed as software. Otherwise we just have the mess that we see today.
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Except that mathematics is not patentable, and we has fundamental results about software being a form of math
Atoms aren't patentable. We know that machines are just a collection of atoms. Therefore, no machine should be patentable.
There are several good arguments for why software patents do not achieve the goals that the patent system is supposed to have. "Software is just math" is not one of them.
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Well, it is pretty much using a user interface to increase a value until an upper boundary is reached...
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Yes, software is math all the way
not a fan of... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:not a fan of... (Score:4, Interesting)
But I absolutely agree, if we're going to stick with them, a term limit of like 4 years on software patents would go a LONG way.
As much as I agree, that's not the task of a judge (Score:5, Insightful)
A judge should check whether someone acts within the limits set by the law. A judge shouldn't be publicly trying to change the laws, just like a politician should not try to get involved in a court case to get someone convicted.
Still, I agree that our patent system is over-used, and it seems that it often inhibits innovation instead of facilitate it.
Re:As much as I agree, that's not the task of a ju (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually he is doing what a Judge should do, he is examining whether software should fall under patent law. This examination and interpretation is under the purview of the judicial branch.
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If you put it like that, you have a good point (sorry, can't mod you up).
I read it as if the judge proposed to change the law so that software no longer falls under the patent law.
I read the article again, and it's still not clear to me which of the two is the case here.
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Maybe your just taking your nym to literally... LOL
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A judge shouldn't be publicly trying to change the laws, just like a politician should not try to get involved in a court case to get someone convicted.
Huh? A judge should totally try and change the laws, just like any other citizen should. No, he shouldn't do it in the context of his job, but this doesn't appear to be the case. He's not denying the validity of patents in the cases that come before him, but in his office, when he's not behind the bench, he's offering critical opinion of existing law based on his experience as a judge. More power to him! Wish there were more doing the same.
Recusal bait (Score:3)
when he's not behind the bench, he's offering critical opinion of existing law
Posner's critical opinions could be used by patent maximalists to show bias in an attempt to force Posner to recuse himself.
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A judge should check whether someone acts within the limits set by the law. A judge shouldn't be publicly trying to change the laws, just like a politician should not try to get involved in a court case to get someone convicted.
Were there laws written specific to allow software patents, or did some judge decide at some point that patent laws applied to software design? If it was decided in a prior case, what is the judge's obligation to follow precedent in this case?
A lot of US law is, in fact, set in precedent in courts. There is a protocol for when judges are supposed to follow precedents, but even so, they can find a way to challenge it if they need to. The real test is whether their challenge will stand up on appeal.
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You don't know the first thing about the law system, don't go telling judges what to do. Seriously.
IANAL, and neither are you. Come back when you get a law degree, and then tell me what judges can and can't do.
Then he should resign and run for congress (Score:2, Informative)
Judges should stick to judging, and leave legislating to legislatures. Software patents may be a bad idea, and the modern patent system may be detrimental to innovation, but that is not the concern of judges. Judges are supposed to decide based on legality, they are not supposed to decide the sensibility. The Constitution clearly gives the government the power to issue patents. So it is up to Congress to fix this, and that won't happen until enough voters care.
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Software = Math. And the original patent law states very clearly you cannot patent math.
Judges ARE supposed to consider how laws should be interpreted.
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Judges should stick to judging, and leave legislating to legislatures. Software patents may be a bad idea, and the modern patent system may be detrimental to innovation, but that is not the concern of judges. Judges are supposed to decide based on legality, they are not supposed to decide the sensibility. The Constitution clearly gives the government the power to issue patents. So it is up to Congress to fix this, and that won't happen until enough voters care.
You seem to forget the part whereby software patents used to be forbidden, and then were gradually introduced via several court cases, most famous of which are Diamond v. Diehr [wikipedia.org] and the State Street decision [wikipedia.org]. There is no law by the US Congress that either specifically allows or forbids software patents. All of the software patent decisions until now have been legislation from the bench.
And given that the US Constitution explicitly specifies that patents can only be be granted in order to "promote the progres
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That is true. However, it is exactly the Court's job to decide what the law actually says when there is a disagreement about same. Somebody has to be the ultimate authority on that, and this is their job.
Also, the Constitution does not give the Government the power to issue patents for just anything the government feel like issuing them for. In particular, it has to be an inventor's discovery. Can things like "business methods" or algorithms be considered "inventions"? You and I have an opinion. However, te
Appeal just waiting to happen (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Appeal just waiting to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
He still he had an extremely sound point when he indicated that Apple and Motorola couldn't actually prove significant damages. I doubt there will be too many other judges (outside of perhaps a fabulously corrupt district) who would reverse that. The patent suits that seem to do really well are the ones referring to cutting-edge and recently-released products, where the economic harm doesn't need to be proven because it's too new to tell. (I think.)
It's too bad (Score:2)
had a better claim to intellectual property protection because of the enormous investment it takes to create a successful drug.
Yeah, too bad Bayer doesn't make any money at all on acetyl salicylic acid because it hasn't been patent protected for many, many years. What the hell is this argument for drug companies? It becomes hardER to earn a profit once the patent expires, but it's certainly not impossible to do so. You would think that monopoly is the only way to make money, according to them. No, monopoly gets you the $50 pill and the $500 vaccine.
Re: (Score:2)
Some drugs for very rare conditions cost a fortune because they take just as much research as any other drug, but only apply to a few hundred people, if that. If it cost 1 billion to research, but 100 bucks to apply the treatment...you're never making the money back if your competitor just looks at what you did, sell it for $100 * 300 treatments, and call it a day.
Just an example among many.
Orphan drugs - a lot of good work out there (Score:3)
These are often very expensive drugs, since the market is small, they often cost a patient tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for the rest of their lives. These drugs often get extra patent protections and fast-tracking to the market.
These drugs are not created by accident.
Patents for different sectors (Score:2)
If you RTFA, you'll realise this is not just about software patents. He's going so far as to suggest that patents are suitable for certain industries (e.g. Pharmaceuticals) where the investment to create the products is immense. Software is one of those industries where patents hold back innovation. Software is more about execution.
Just stop being idiots about it. (Score:2)
The problem isn't patents per se. The problem is idiocy in the patent office in collusion with big corporations.
Somebody is going to invent good robots for the house someday. Somebody is going to invent real artificial intelligence. There's a lot of work jamming forward ever more-efficient high speed 3D algorithms and routing algorithms. People are working on robot cars.
These things can and should have protection.
Here's a good rule: If it's just a simulation of something that already exists, and the me
Re: (Score:3)
But if one person (or company) has a monopoly (which is what a patent is) on artificial intelligence and robots, then basically we're all out of work. And also those people whose shoulders were used to stand on by these new monopolists. IMHO, another sign that patents are inherently wrong.
Constitutional? We don't know. (Score:2)
Some of the sitting supreme court justices have implied they aren't sure Software patents are valid either [mashable.com].
Personally, I think it would be best for both sides if someone took this issue to the Supreme court and got it decided. I have my own opinion of what they should decide, but either way everyone would be better off without the uncertainty.
MATH = Not Patentable (Score:3)
Math is not patent-able. Math is intrinsic, part of the world and nature around us. We do not invent math, we merely discover it.
Programs can be converted into Lambda Calculus.
Lambda Calculus is math.
Programs are math.
Programs are un-patentable. QED.
Copyright is plenty enough.
"My personal opinion is that algorithms are like mathematics, i.e. inherently non-patentable. It worries me that most patents are about simple ideas that I would expect my students to develop them as part of their homework." - DONALD FUCKING KNUTH
If you think you know more about Computer Science than Donald Knuth, you're wrong.
Somebody with balls (Score:2)
Good for the judge. AFAIC all patents and copyrights must be abolished, the less government intervention in the economy the healthier the economy is. Today government is involved in every aspect of economy and we can see the outcomes.
The judge is commenting appropriately (Score:2)
Several have lambasted the judge for making the statement that he doesn't believe that software patents are necessary, saying that he should confine himself to making judgements on matters of law. However, it's important that a judge make such statements if he observes in the execution of his duties that the application of the law and precedent is not serving the purpose for which it was enacted, or is adversely affecting the court's ability to perform its duty (e.g., something precipitates a flood of lengt
Fundamental Patent Reform Idea (Score:3)
For any patent to be granted a list of expenses in developing the patent is also submitted. Then they have patent protection for 10x the expenses in revenue. They will submit an annual report, and any kind of falsification will have the patent terminated. The people who want to use the patent for free will verify the reports to find any falsification. For devices that integrate multiple patents they are allowed to be summed accordingly on a prorated basis.
This way, there is still incentive to do the R&D, because you'll be able to get multiples of your investment back. But the world gets your patents potentially sooner. If you want to delay the world from getting your patents, then set your prices very low, so ti take a long time to recover them, . Or set your prices high and move onto the next thing. This way everyone wins. They either get really cheap inventions or the patent protection runs out fast. It's a great balance.
This not only fixes drug patents but software patents too, as most software patents would only costs thousands to develop and would get paid 10x back in a very short time.
The fall of software patents (fraud) is getting .. (Score:3)
.... closer!!!
There are some things you cannot patent: Physical Phenomenon, Natural Law, Abstract ideas. And of these also mathematical algorithms. ..... is himself made up of the ship and crew. Interesting how the Oracle and Morpheus were the only survivors from the original considering what the represent in the world of abstraction. Simply put, it is we who create our world of abstractions that constrain what the users of that world can do..... out of all that is possible. see concept #3 http://threeseas.net/vicprint/vic-concepts.html [threeseas.net]
All these are what software is of and then there is the identified physics of abstraction: http://abstractionphysics.net/pmwiki/index.php [abstractionphysics.net]
It even inspired a known movie trilogy "The Matrix" http://threeseas.net/vicprint/VIC-basic.html [threeseas.net] only you can't kill off the crew or ship in real life and of course Smith loses because he has no choice but to realize he being the second of three agents of Input, Processing and Output,
The point is: Software Patents are acts of fraud. And maybe that is a hard thing for the courts to accept, considering it was one of their's who started this mess of software patents in the U.S. In some back alley courtroom decision.
Re:As a software programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
You would be protected sufficiently by copyright, a patent means something else.
Look at it from this perspective, using patents the way you want limits the software industry by saying only this company can make any kind of a software that does this. This has a very negative effect on the industry because they last 16 years. Additionally, patents are supposed to be qualified to protect inventions and that those are unique and not easily thought of by others. By comparison, thousands of programmers have already created applications that partially duplicate everything that is in existence in someway now. So the real question is... are you really creating something new, or are you just trying to write software and use a legal methods to force your relevance instead of just being better at it than the programmer next to you?
Re:As a software programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
Programmers in Europe are now refusing to sell their software in the US. Why? It would cost them LITERALLY NOTHING to distribute. Its digital. They just have to make the sales, and collect the money.
So why don't they do it? Because they're TERRIFIED of US patents. Its a goddamned nightmare. You're walking blind through a minefield! You spend years of your life on some app, and then find out that because of a tiny patent from 10 years ago that has almost nothing to do with anything, you're about to be sued into oblivion.
Patents are STATE SPONSORED MONOPOLIES. In this day and age, technological advancement is its own reward. Being first to market is enough. You don't need government sponsored monopolies to convince companies to invest in R&D, they're not stupid.
Re: (Score:2)
I disagree. As long as the code isn't copied then if it accomplishes the same goal then who cares.
That's the way the market is *supposed* to work.
Re: (Score:2)
Is it small indie developers coming up with genius ideas and getting patents to protect themselves from the big guys?
NO. NOT AT ALL.
What we have here is a world where grad students sell their patent ideas for dirt to companies like IBM and Micorosoft because they have no money and nobody's heard of them.
Then those companies turn around and sue each other to oblivion. Its nothing to do with fairness, its just a legal war.
And that's the BEST SCENARIO. Usu
Re: (Score:2)
if I write an amazing piece of software that nobody has seen before and some big company comes and makes a totally ripped off clone, I'd be pissed and that'd be unfair.
And even with a patent you probably wouldn't see a dime. They have money and you don't. They can win court cases that take a decade to resolve. You can't. The best you can hope for is to sell your patent for a pittance to a company in the business of suing people.
And let's say you do make something really novel and innovative and useful, like generic object recognition, then that's great. But once competitors make their own object recognition software, how do you know they're using your code, your algori
Re: (Score:3)
"speachless"? Like, there's a fruit called a speach, and you have none?
Clearly it was a typo.
He meant he's peachless.