Patents are intended to incentivize people to reveal their secrets in exchange for a temporary monopoly on the secrets. They are not meant as vehicles purely for making profit, but that is how they are being abused - by people who buy up patents and then sue anyone who infringes, or by people who patent as broadly as possible and then sue anyone who infringes. Useful for making money, not useful for the intended purpose of contributing work for the greater good of all people.
The patent system is too broken. Anyone who writes software should hate patents. Anything you write will infringe on some patent out there. If all you want is money then writing software isn't the best way to go about getting it.
A better system would be one where patents do not give protection to ideas, but do give minor tax incentives to the people who own and use a related patent in their business. Then their ideas are shared, but not using the patents gives them nothing, and they cannot block others from using the all too often obvious ideas.
It should be noted that patents are particularly broken for software, since in that field it appears to be quite easy to convince someone at the patent office that a trivial discovery is non-trivial. Also most of it is math and shouldn't be patented anyway.
> The patent system is too broken. Anyone who writes software should hate patents. Anything you write will infringe on some patent out there. If all you want is money then writing software isn't the best way to go about getting it.
I write software (open source on GitHub) and don't hate patents. I hate bad patents, the kind you can infringe upon just by writing software, but lots of patents aren't bad patents. E.g. IBM has a number of patents on compiler optimizations. Am I going to stumble upon Steensgard's pointer analysis by accident? No, the only reason I know about it is that IBM let him publish a paper based on the research they paid him to do at Watson.
>Am I going to stumble upon Steensgard's pointer analysis by accident?
Yes! Yes, you could stumble on Steensgard's algorithm. Like convergent evolution in nature, it's easy for requirements to shape implementation, and for multiple implementations to naturally overlap. There are so many software patents out there- it is a minefield.
Additionally, engineers at large companies are discouraged from doing their own patent research, because of the risk of losing a "sorry, we created this organically in good faith" defense in litigation.
Publication of patents does not offset the chilling effect and legal overhead on our industry.
Part of the rationale for the patent system is that it is supposed to encourage people to disclose trade secrets that they would not otherwise disclose. However, if you can tell how a thing works just by looking at it, then according to that rationale there is no point in allowing such an invention to be patented (at least not on that basis). Unfortunately, that does not seem to prevent many completely obvious things from being patented (e.g. one click shopping).
The patent system is too broken. Anyone who writes software should hate patents. Anything you write will infringe on some patent out there. If all you want is money then writing software isn't the best way to go about getting it.
A better system would be one where patents do not give protection to ideas, but do give minor tax incentives to the people who own and use a related patent in their business. Then their ideas are shared, but not using the patents gives them nothing, and they cannot block others from using the all too often obvious ideas.