You say: “instead the question is whether any law should be allowed that restrains development by others or that creates in one a monopoly.”

First, patents are not monopolies.

Second, that decision has long since been made. You should read the U.S. Constitution.

-Gene

The answer is seen clearly in the open Internet. It developed as a free thing and it advanced a technology based on a standard, not on a law, that encouraged everyone to participate. Out of it has come a world wide media, but now the patents are about to centralize the media and impose commercial gates and bring it to a halt.

Sorry that you are forced to engage in appropriate business practices. You are right. I would be much easier if you could ignore the rights of others and do whatever you want without consequences.

Yes, big companies file thousands of patents, but smart small businesses file patents as well. Ever wonder why big tech wants to make it harder to get patents? They are sick of independent inventors and small businesses patenting things that they copy themselves.

Do what you want, but don’t be surprised when you are on the wrong end of a lawsuit simply because you were too lazy to research.

-Gene

So what does this come down to? Big companies file thousands of patents and statistically it will be extremely likely that your product will violate at least one of them. This is just a modern form of piracy.

You are 100% right, and you have made the case for software being patentable without even knowing it. Because the CPU interprets the instructions and executes that means software is a method. Methods have been patentable since 1790 and they are simply a set of instructions to accomplish a task.

The number “1″ is not math. It is a number.

-Gene

So IMO, you can patent a machine that interprets “1″ as an instruction, but not “1″ itself as this is Math.

>you can claim are likewise being infringed

A.k.a. Mutually Assured Destruction.

I agree it’s a good idea to get some nukes of your own for the sake of protecting yourself, as long as the environment is one of MADmen, but you’re also implying that everyone having nukes this powerful is a good thing. (and saying it’s a good thing in other posts and comments.)

I beg to differ.
Seeing how few people want the cold war back, I suspect (but have indeed not proven) most will consider this a bad thing.

Imagine this purely hypothetical deal:
A company could get automatic free license to all patents, provided they
- Gave the ‘patent-qualifying” description (the “can reproduce from” text) of all products
- All “patents” taken by them (or from related activity) had to be free for all to use.
- Did not just copy what others have patented. (Let’s assume the lawyers found a wording that fullfills the intent.)

If the above hypotethical was real, which would recommend? For a company to get its own patents for MAD protection, or use the above deal? Why?
(The why part is important here, since this would affect demand for the profession of *ahem* certain people on ipwatchdog.)

Part of the problem seems to be that it doesn’t matter all that much if you are infringing or not, in many cases the legal costs would exceed what the supposed infringer would be able to cover anyway.

>You can claim all you want that patents on the steam engine held back the industrial revolution, but that is simply incorrect.

I would like you to tell me where my source for the following data is incorrect:

The “he” below refers to James Watt, who invented a crucial improvement to the steam engine. In some cases “they” may be more accurate, referring to Watt and his partner Boulton.

In short it seems to say (this was all about the UK)
-He diverted significant resources to wielding the patent against others.
-He couldn’t work around a definiciency in his product because the solution was patented. He rather developed and used a solution which was suboptimal instead. (At least until said patent expired.)
-His business went better after his patent expired. (“Boulton and Watt for many years afterwards kept up their price and had increased orders”)
-Many inventions made until then were shelved until they could actually use it.
-The steam engine got its central place in the industrial revolution only after the patent expired.

Before Watt (1776) 510 engines about 5,000 horsepower.
Patent expiration (1800) 2,250 engines (only 449 Watt engines) total horsepower 35,000 at best.
1815 estimated nearly 100,000 horsepower
1830 horsepower reached 160,000

“After the expiration of the patents in 1800, not only was there an explosion in the production of engines, but steam power finally came into its own as the driving force of the industrial revolution. In the next 30 years steam engines were modified and improved, and such crucial innovations as the steam train, the steamboat and the steam jenny all came into wide usage.”

Source: Against intellectual monopoly (freely available at http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm )

A personal, untested, theory of mine is that (pure) software may be a field which needs to mature a lot more before it (the field) can actually benefit from patents. Then again, mature fields may tend to suffer from gridlock economy. I’m probably missing something there.