ESP Wiki is looking for moderators and active contributors!
Difference between revisions of "Software patent quality worse than all other fields"
m (Reverted edits by 72.175.231.189 (talk) to last revision by Ciaran) |
(→Possible reasons: by law the bar for novelty is too low) |
||
Line 6: | Line 6: | ||
# Jargon and lack of tangible components can make a mundane software idea sound technical | # Jargon and lack of tangible components can make a mundane software idea sound technical | ||
# Professionals working in the patents industry only see the ideas submitted for patenting, and therefore fail to realise that they are not qualitatively different from the ideas that good software engineers come up with every day of the week, most of which are considered too obvious to write up and publish | # Professionals working in the patents industry only see the ideas submitted for patenting, and therefore fail to realise that they are not qualitatively different from the ideas that good software engineers come up with every day of the week, most of which are considered too obvious to write up and publish | ||
+ | # US Patent law merely asks a patent invention be non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art. This is a very low standard almost implying that almost anyone practicing in the art would come upon that invention given a few years time if not minutes or hours. We need only look at the bell curve to see how many things that would be obvious for many on the top third (or top half) of the curve would be eligible for a patent by not being obvious to those in the central region (or exactly in the middle). | ||
==The ideas are too abstract== | ==The ideas are too abstract== |
Revision as of 01:18, 15 October 2010
Quality problems can happen in any category of patents, but the quality of software patents is particularly bad. This is probably a fundamental problem that can't be avoided in a domain as abstract as software.
Contents
Possible reasons
- Abstract algorithms can be described in so many ways
- Jargon and lack of tangible components can make a mundane software idea sound technical
- Professionals working in the patents industry only see the ideas submitted for patenting, and therefore fail to realise that they are not qualitatively different from the ideas that good software engineers come up with every day of the week, most of which are considered too obvious to write up and publish
- US Patent law merely asks a patent invention be non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art. This is a very low standard almost implying that almost anyone practicing in the art would come upon that invention given a few years time if not minutes or hours. We need only look at the bell curve to see how many things that would be obvious for many on the top third (or top half) of the curve would be eligible for a patent by not being obvious to those in the central region (or exactly in the middle).
The ideas are too abstract
In chemistry, ideas are described concretely, such as Trans-6-[2-(3- or 4-carboxamido- substituted pyrrol-1-yl)alkyl]-4-hydroxypyran-2-ones.[1]
In software, ideas are described as "point of sale location", "material object", or "information manufacturing machine".
Examples
- Unbelievable software patents
- FFII's webshop which uses 20 ideas patented in the EU
- Microsoft developer's internal comments about his own patents indecipherable by anyone but a patent attorney
- Some Kodak patents
Related pages on ESP Wiki
- Raising standards is not our goal
- The disclosure is useless
- Silly patents
- Software patents are unreadable
- How to read patents
- Why software is different