http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTduy7Qkvk8&feature=player_embedded

“Do you have a flag?”

I’m constantly confused by how poorly software patents turned out. Like I understand the philosophical objections and agree with them, but even if the current system were implemented sanely, it wouldn’t be that bad — in fact I don’t think anyone would particularly be complaining about it.

All the cases you see with the “land grab”-esque methods, it seems like the majority of them are:

1. insane claims to have invented simple, basic, obvious functionality that everyone uses — easily countered by you or me saying “look, this company was using that years ago, isn’t this prior art?”

2. claims to some patent that the company isn’t using — how hard can it be to just reduce the “idle time” on software patents, before the judge says “I don’t think you’re really trying to use this technology, but this company over here is spending millions of dollars on it.”

3. issues over the fact that software patents seem to be granted for functionality instead of design — in software you can make something that does exactly the same thing as something else, with the same inputs and outputs, but is written in a different language, using different algorithms and different hardware, which is very different than the inventions normal patents are designed to cover.

4. finally, one of the key tenets of software dev is theft: you are supposed to steal other people’s ideas if they are good.

If the people administering out software patent system had just proceeded about it in a sane manner, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation. It might still be wrong in principle, but I don’t think it would be causing such negative effects.

I realize that this might make me fall into cog’s definition of someone who believes: “or can be made so with some modest reforms” but I’ll admit that at this point, it may not be possible. Perhaps if a dose of sanity had been injected back in the beginning, but there’s so much crazy built into the system at this point, I agree that reforms would be very hard.