Software Patents

[Maven]

Just out of fun, what is you're stance on them?
Do you ever have patent searchs done?

I'm presonally afraid to release code due to the existance of them. Even the *bs* patents can run up a nice 500k bill.

[sluggy]

It depends what country you are in, a patent filed in one country doesn't apply in another country unless the two have signed a treaty to that effect.
I am going to pick on the US patent office, because that is the one that receives the most (negative) press. The issue is that they are patenting end products with too broad a scope, or they are patenting processes that can be considered standard or generic, like the company that is trying to exercise its patent on online ecommerce: they patented online transactions in general, and now they are in revenue gathering mode by sending threatening letters to smaller ecommerce companies demanding compensation and "license" fees. Needless to say, their patent got revoked both in this country and in Australia, for being too broad and covering a generic process, and there was also evidence of usage prior to their patent application.
The fault in this case lies with the US patent office, for not properly invetigating the application, not determining if it was indeed new "technology", failing to determine the full scope and impact of the patent, and for failing to determine if the application conflicted with any prior applications.

I will see if i can dig out some links regarding the company mentioned above.

[Porkster]

In some ways they are a good thing.   You can still patent a computing method in the US by using the WIPO.int treaty if you are not a US citizen.

For an example,  I have been stopping and start projects due to the facts of protection.   I know if I complete commercial code that incorporated new methods, it will be copied without emphases of my effort/work.  How can someone complete with Microsoft or other giants.

On the other hand, I also feel it is peoples rights to copy good ideas.  It's up to the maker to have the better and suitable product to gain sales.  The sheer word 'Viable' comes into play.   An example is mp3's being copied.   It is 'viable' to sell them at a correct price to stop peoples' need to copy without payment.

Patents are also limited to a duration so there is rewards to the community in time.

.

[Maven]

In some ways they are a good thing.   You can still patent a computing method in the US by using the WIPO.int treaty if you are not a US citizen.

For an example,  I have been stopping and start projects due to the facts of protection.   I know if I complete commercial code that incorporated new methods, it will be copied without emphases of my effort/work.  How can someone complete with Microsoft or other giants.

On the other hand, I also feel it is peoples rights to copy good ideas.  It's up to the maker to have the better and suitable product to gain sales.  The sheer word 'Viable' comes into play.   An example is mp3's being copied.   It is 'viable' to sell them at a correct price to stop peoples' need to copy without payment.

Patents are also limited to a duration so there is rewards to the community in time.

.

I wonder how things like the GNU projec stay's alive. I mean if you write a decent sized application, you're bound to be running over some patents no matter how orignal it is. Seems to me that people like that take risks.

[Porkster]

wonder how things like the GNU projec stay's alive. I mean if you write a decent sized application, you're bound to be running over some patents no matter how orignal it is. Seems to me that people like that take risks.

No one would sue unless you had money to be taken, otherwise it's like trying to sue the bird that shits on your car windscreen.

Also alot of the patents Microsoft own are encompassed within the use of their OS. What I mean by this is that a user has some rights to make software that uses the base OS and its patents, declared in the agreement of the OS purchase and for developers within the OS.

Some companies in the past have charged developer a fee if they commercialise their produce when created on a particular OS or hardware.  Apple/Mac was one of them.

In life the best legal postion to be in is either super poor or super wealthy, otherwise you get screwed every angle.

.

[Robert Collins]

I always thought that software patents were very difficult to obtain and very expensive if you do get one. And that you cannot patent general gerneric like code because there is no way to prove one way or another who it belongs to but you can patent a 'solution' or 'algorythm' if it has not already been patent. This is what I was told when I was working for a company trying to sell a software product and I was the programmer to put it together. They went to a patent attorney to get the product register and their attorney told them that they could patent such items as logos, trademarks, the name of the product and the names of components of the product, certain pieces of 'code' that were considered a 'trade secret'
but not the code as a whole.

This, if it is the case, brings up code snippits that one can download from certain sites. I usually see some kind of copyright stuff at the top of the source code listing but I have to think that it is probably not really copyrighted because the sample snippit only shows very common methods that are used to resolve the problem. This is not something one can copyright and second, isn't it so that as long as he was willing to give it away on the net that he waived any copyrights that might have applied?