Comment by lylecheatham
5 years ago
I really think #EndPatents is a very software oriented view of tech. In the physical engineering space patents are the only thing that allows a small company to actually design, manufacture and sell a product before a larger company can just squash them.
I know that getting investment as a small company in the hardware space would be near impossible without patents, because any investor without a brain would see that the giant in your industry could decide to take your idea, design it faster, manufacture it cheaper and sell it to a wider audience in a fraction of the time.
Very true, but #EndSoftwarePatents can and should be a thing.
I actually take a position that some software maybe should be patentable, but that it's such a tiny percentage of what actually GETS patented that it's likely better to simply prohibit/invalidate all software patents than to allow only certain software patents. The backlog of hundreds of thousands of obviously-bad software patents wouldn't really be able to be individually reviewed by the experts that should be able to invalidate them, and software has copyright and trade secret protections available. That should be good enough for 99.9% of circumstances.
The patent office has clearly proven that they can't be trusted to discern "novelty" in software development, and I don't see that changing any time soon, so time to prohibit the system from applying to software at all. At present it's 100% prohibiting the small inventors from innovating (or allowing a few patent trolls to extorts those who succeed) and 0% allowing small innovators from profiting from their products.