blah blah, whatever I wrote earlier. scroll down.
You make an important distinction but I still believe software patents are not useful. Differentiation in implementation purely to skirt a patent’s claims is useless.
I spent some time tracking down the account of expert witness Philip Greenspun when Amazon sued Barnes & Noble to enforce the one-click patent. In particular:
I was asked “Why didn’t you patent this yourself, if you developed it first?” My reply was “It only took me an hour to build; if I went down to the patent office after every hour of programming, I wouldn’t get very much done.”
Real programmers don’t bother with software patents, they’d rather spend their time building new things rather than deciding who owns old things (to paraphrase Greenspun). Ban software patents.
Now that I’ve had my first beer of the night, and you stimulated my mind, things I don’t like about software patents have come back to me. When a software patented algorithm becomes a standard, that is rough. The whole gif vs. png wars were a sad time. I’m glad I chose the side of png, but I still find a lot of people have no idea what they are. (Also, I’m surprised at the number of people who won’t believe me that png is a lossless format, but that has nothing to do with patents.) There are similar issues with ffmpeg and the video formats. In all these cases, ideas for how to compress data were patented, then used in a standard format. Not a fan of that. But this isn’t completely unique to software. In chemical engineering, when making a P&ID, you are required to be a member of ISA to use their standard symbols. So, you have to pay $85 a year (apparently $100 in 2009) to legally talk the language of chemical plant design.
Anyways, one beer tells me, one-click purchase patent was lame. File formats based on patented algorithms are lame. (I’m digging Firefox 3.1/3.5 and actually am preparing some screencasts in Ogg Theora to natively play.) Maybe software patents are lame. In an academic setting, the people in my lab have generally found that the things we have considered patenting are too complicated for most companies to write on their own, so copyright of our own code has protected us from stealing. Maybe my judgement has been too clouded by the fact that anything we consider patenting takes much longer than an hour to implement, and generally mathematical knowledge that stretches the limits of most math/scientific C libraries to their capacity.
You’re like the small town bank who’s been doing things Right for the last 10 years only to have its reputation tarnished by big bank asshats. Your mention of copyright as enough protection plus the higher standard internally for what is patentable tells me your lab is thinking about protecting itself and not about making a quick buck. Lawsuits are not desirable for people who do the Right thing. And that’s just it: for any program sufficiently complicated to need a patent, copyright works just fine.
