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Difference between revisions of "Software patent quality worse than all other fields"

(Possible reasons: augmented the point about a low bar for inventiveness)
(Possible reasons: incentives are misplaced, encouraging watering-down)
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# 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). This might not be a major problem if you have to have 100 million dollars to build a business off your invention, but it is a problem for cheap software cloned and distributed essentially for no cost since anyone can play.
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# 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). This might not be a major problem for society and for other inventors if you have to have 100 million dollars to build a business off your invention, but it is a problem for cheap software cloned and distributed essentially for no cost since anyone can play.
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# The low bar to inventiveness and significant power grant that is a patent encourages inventor-lawyers to dumb down and broaden the patent claims as much as possible to increase scope of infringement. The effect is that even a genius idea will get watered down to just barely meeting the minimum criteria of non-obvious to a PHOSITA so as to maximize the ROI.
  
 
==The ideas are too abstract==
 
==The ideas are too abstract==

Revision as of 01:32, 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.

Possible reasons

  1. Abstract algorithms can be described in so many ways
  2. Jargon and lack of tangible components can make a mundane software idea sound technical
  3. 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
  4. 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). This might not be a major problem for society and for other inventors if you have to have 100 million dollars to build a business off your invention, but it is a problem for cheap software cloned and distributed essentially for no cost since anyone can play.
  5. The low bar to inventiveness and significant power grant that is a patent encourages inventor-lawyers to dumb down and broaden the patent claims as much as possible to increase scope of infringement. The effect is that even a genius idea will get watered down to just barely meeting the minimum criteria of non-obvious to a PHOSITA so as to maximize the ROI.

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

Related pages on ESP Wiki

External links

References