I used to think they were entirely useless, but since then I've learned of many instances where a much better technology is developed because the first iteration is patented.

For example, the Wright brothers biggest contribution to aviation was suing everyone using wing warping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war) which greatly advanced the adoption of the much more advanced ailerons.

Software patents have a similar effect, for example Cisco's patent on Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol led to the development of the more secure and more capable Common Address Redundancy Protocol (https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/SA/v14/i05/a6.htm).

We tend to invest heavily in whatever we can get working first, but it's rarely close to an ideal way of doing something. By pushing every developer to find a newer, better way of doing something, patents prevent stagnation and lead to more advanced technologies.

I think this was the final patent on it that was valid anywhere, so now the status changes from "someone has a patent globally and we need to consider this" to "no one has a patent." If you're distributing something globally, even one market that still has the patent might stop you from default shipping a driver touching on it, or you might have to worry about court orders at least. It's hard to avoid jurisdictions on the open web.

Our demand for perfectionism prevent any progress. I would consider shortening patent length that can help everyone. With all the improvements in the world we could afford shorter window.

A patent was meant to give a solo genius a way to treat their idea as something tangible, at a time when logistics was much slower and the world revolved around the physical.

Maybe they try to develop it themselves, maybe they sell the idea to a big corporation that has the resources to implement it. Either way, genius begets profit, and the world gets genius ideas... in theory anyway.

But a genuine idea back then needed a long time frame to actually do something with it. 20 years seemed reasonable at the time.

The world is less logistically constrained these days. Make it 5 years, no renewals.

Software patents, no. They're just evil.

I don't think patents are inherently evil, however they certainly can be used for evil.

But The basic idea is sound. If you invent a novel mechanism and publish it the government will grant you exclusive economic exploitation rights to that mechanism for the next 25 years. After that it is now fair game.

It is an attempt to solve the real problem that it is much harder to be first than second, the guy in first place has to spend all that time and effort to develop the thing, and the guy in second just has to copy the guy in first. To rectify this social injustice the patent system was developed, where the government would grant and enforce economic exploitation rights of the mechanism to the inventor.

Software patents may be what saves the field. Currently copyright as an IP protection for software has been rendered near meaningless by AI. If I can get one AI to reverse engineer Photoshop, and another to implement the produced spec, I have a copyright-clean version of Photoshop.

Patents protect the idea of a particular program. And in the post-AI world, it's the idea that holds the value, not the implementation. Implementations are cheap now.

Another alternative to preventing the entire software market from collapsing is to revive the Whelan v. Jaslow copyright standard, under which the abstract "structure, sequence, and organization" of a program is eligible for copyright. But programmers would bristle at that almost as much as robust patent protection for software. Until, that is, the money comes in with mouths to feed and mortgages to pay...

> Cisco's patent on Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol led to the development of the more secure and more capable Common Address Redundancy Protocol

This seems like a success story in spite of software patents, not because of them. Just because they were forced to develop a new protocol in order to avoid getting sued for using Cisco's doesn't mean that they wouldn't still have improved on what Cisco had if they'd been allowed to use and modify it freely. The lack of lawsuits hanging over everyone's head certainly hasn't prevented innovation from happening in FOSS.

For every case like this, there's a patent on an optimal method which forces everyone to use suboptimal workarounds.

The wright brothers patent was not on wing warping, it was on controlling a vehicle in the air. In short the Wright brothers did not invent the aeroplane they invented how to control a aeroplane.

https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Sh...

"We wish it to be understood, however, that our invention is not limited to this particular construction, since any construction whereby the angular relations of the lateral margins of the aeroplanes may be varied in opposite directions with respect to the normal planes of said aeroplanes comes within the scope of our invention."

Some people (Curtis) felt this claim was far too encompassing and should not be enforced. But I don't know, These guys just spent a decade working out an entirely new discipline, aeronautical control. And you don't think they deserve exclusive exploitation rights to that discipline for the next 20 years?

This sort of benefit in software can be realized with much shorter terms. A 5 or 10 year term would accomplish pretty much all the same benefits. 25 years is just way too long for software.

Having people create new technology to avoid arbitrary legal hurdles instead of adopting existing and perfectly functional technology doesn't seem particularly efficient.

The Wright brothers sued Curtiss specifically for ailerons, and won. Ailerons were ruled to be a form of wing warping.

That, and we're also past the need for geniuses to keep grinding in a cave, in hopes of landing a patent.

People are far more empowered today, many more can work near the bleeding edge, and funding can be arranged in different ways than holding on to a patent.

A patent is meant to encourage people and companies to share the details of their inventions, instead of keeping them secret. In return the inventors get protection for a certain number of years.

Solo geniuses don't have the money to operate the patent system, it doesn't work for them. All they can do is sell for cheap or else get bogged down. When they invent as an employee they outright don't own it. That's a moral outrage. And that's what the patent system is to individuals.

Good luck publishing in Costa Rica. When you're not privileged you're likely to be on the losing end. So what use is it? Better keep your invention a secret, like most do, and let the next generation display themselves as the inventors. That's the alternate reality the system actually supports.

The whole system should be scrapped. Publishing is easy nowadays, just do it. Then you'd have the rights of you can prove you're the first. Anyone that wants to use can/must give you a known amount of royalties, depending on whether the invention is a unique enabler of a class of products, or just an optimization. Which it will become over time. If you don't want that, keep it a secret and build company around it.

I’m not sure how you can read that Wright Brothers wiki article and come away thinking patents worked in America’s favor…

Now imagine what would happened if Euclid's books (and Newton's Principia) were Copyrighted until today.

Right, but I thought it matters only if you sell something globally. Linux is distributed for free, so the burden of patent compliance is on the user, isn't it?

The problem often stems from the Patent Offices getting caught flat-footed with new tech. When the patent officers don't know enough about the field they are reviewing it is easy for things which are "obvious to experts in the field" or "overly broad" to slip thru and cause major headaches for everyone.

Depends on how they are used.

Let say you come up with a patent. You let open source use the patent, GPL3 ..., for free why charging close source solutions.

That could go to funding the open source development or other gains. FANNG has the money, take it from the them by all means.

> And you don't think they deserve exclusive exploitation rights to that discipline for the next 20 years?

20 years is the midpoint between the Wright Brother’s flight and operational jet fighters. They won the race but it was very much a competition. If Orville and Wilbur didn’t cross the line first then Maxim or Langley would have. They all built on George Cayley’s work.

So no, I don’t think the first one to file a plausible patent should get exclusive rights. It should at least extend to contemporaries. And we should consider the cost to innovation when breakthroughs are artificially constrained for what amounts to multiple technological generations.

The benefit comes from no one ever using the earlier inferior versions.

The intent of the patent system is to encourage publishing innovation in exchange for rights to it for a period of time, and then everyone gets to use it. IMO the biggest problem has been granting patents for inventions that at least in retrospect seem non-novel or obvious. I get that there's a grey area there at some point, but "one click ordering" is one that comes to mind. Just because someone hasn't done it exactly like that before, should not make such a simple idea patentable. And I think patents should be on specific implementations, not general ideas. If I can implement the end-user experience of one-click ordering without substantially copying Amazon's underlying technology, that should be fair to do.

You don't know what code the A.I has been trained on. It may very well be reproducing actual Copyrighted material it has been trained on.

This is the major reason why most large open-source projects are banning big code contributions made with A.I

Trying to harp on anyone here about "efficiency" is going to fall on deaf ears.

Whether it's single passenger cars or AI, nobody really understands how inefficient they and their lives are.

It does not help that things fundamental to the new tech, even though they took real effort to develop, are now exactly those items that are now "obvious to experts in the field" and "overly broad" And then have fun trying to distinguish real fundamentals from items in the form of (existing invention "with a computer") Or whatever the hot new tech of the day is.

A good example(old enough to not matter any more) is the how the Wright brothers invented something fundamentally new, their patent was on how to control an airplane, The problem is, once you see it, it is obvious how to control an airplane. Birds do it, Why should such an simple thing be protected? But conversely. This is a discipline that took the Wrights many years of hard and meticulous work to figure out. Is it morally correct to say "No, we are not going to grant you exploitation rights to this thing you invested so much time and effort developing"?

Not a lawyer, but patent law refers to distribution too. It shouldn't matter if it's free or has a price if they can say you're distributing it to Brazilian users.

That's confusing copyright with patents. The right to publish Newton's books is separate from being able to apply the knowledge which a patent protects. Note that math equations cannot be patented.

Maybe dlcarrier is AI?

So basically never

Plenty of open source software avoids using patents even though it’s free. Selling doesn’t factor into it.

At least in the chemistry/pharma industries, yes, due to the (necessary) regulatory structures there.

But in modern tech? No.

The Wrights were about 5 years ahead of their time. The Wrights went about it as an R+D project and calculated what the design must be, while the other developers were doing seat-of-the-pants designs which worked about as expected.

Presumably it's an "international patent" filed in Brazil.

You don't have to file your patent in every jurisdiction. There have been treaties for recognising each others intellectual property rights since the late 19th century and Brazil has been part of these from the start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internation...

Correct. 5 years is long enough to kill off inferior standards and let superior ones blossom.

Very much this. The incentive to create and invent is often largely financial, however that incentive need not be constructed as “winner takes all” rather we should lift each other up in our mutual accomplishments.

Unfortunately in my own ruminating on the topic the only practical alternatives seem to be one or more variations on the scary boogey man of socialism.

That's one problem. 25 years is also a really long time in fast moving fields like software, microchips, etc. And the format the invention is "published" as is essentially a legal document, often largely written by lawyers for a target audience of patent clerks and other lawyers, not a technical specification written for engineers and scientists. And the is an incentive to omit or obscure details important to actually replicating the invention.

>the biggest problem has been granting patents for inventions that at least in retrospect seem non-novel or obvious.

I don't agree that that's the biggest problem. I think the biggest problem is that patents are abused to stifle competition by refusing licenses or putting untenable fees on them. No one would have cared about Nintendo's D-pad patent if they'd just put a reasonable license fee on it. On the other hand, a patent like MP3 I would argue is quite legitimate, but putting a patent on a coded just makes interoperability more difficult. If MPEG had charged licenses for decoding chips and explicitly allowed software implementations, that would have things so much more smoother.

Why do you think it always only takes 5 years to develop some superior technology? 5 years seems like a short enough time frame that a company would rather just wait out the patent than invest heavily in R&D in the off chance they come up with a viable alternative (that now of course THEY can only protect for 5 years)

Most large open-source projects banning AI contributions have been doing it for social and technical reasons, not legal.

As for the copyright infringement angle, it’s well and truly too late for that to be a meaningful problem, socially and politically. It’s easily in “too big to fail” territory now—any striking down of the “fair use” exemption claim would kill the entire industry dead, because every one of them would have to throw away all their models and synthetic data and start again, and that’s geopolitically untenable. They moved too fast for judiciary to regulate them, and I think the window of opportunity for legislature to regulate them closed no later than 2024.

if it's inferior, why does it matter if it's 5 years or 25 years ?

Why can't the market work it out on its own? People will buy superior products.

Governments mucking around with things like patents only distorts markets in ways that make them inefficient, and ultimately worse. Anyone who thinks the government's intervention improves things hasn't been at the business end of the government.

I somehow never see this happening. Like, ever. I just don't think it's something to seriously entertain.

> The incentive to create and invent is often largely financial, however that incentive need not be constructed as “winner takes all” rather we should lift each other up in our mutual accomplishments.

The Wrights definitely were in it for the money.

The government project was the Langley Prototype, which cost 20 times more than what the Wrights spent, and fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement.

> the scary boogey man of socialism

For good reason. Socialism's track record is pretty bad. They're always running out of other peoples' money.

You are wrong about why open-source projects are banning AI contributions. While vibe-coded slop is obviously a pain, many are banning even their own well-known contributors from using A.I to write large parts of code due to legal concerns.

I'm sure the patent/copyright trolls care a lot about the "industry." It is still the early days but eventually they will come on knocking.

Certainly socialism is a heavy and dangerous solution to most problems, the critiques of it are many, and of the many most are fair.

I say boogeyman not to imply it is without problems but rather to say that in the problem spaces that it is often deplored the incumbent alternative is often categorically worse for all those who do not directly benefit from it, which is usually a supermajority at a minimum. Thus, to make the incumbent more tolerable a caricature of an idea is brought forth to scare those who would otherwise support an aspirational idealist into backing the known “lesser” evils.