Free?

[Kagamin]

Steven Schveighoffer Wrote:

> You can profit from the fruits of your invention *without* patents.

If a bigger corporation doesn't steal your invention.

> >> Add that to the fact that software
> >> patents are *rarely* beneficial to the community.
> >
> > Does the community want benefits at the expense of the inventor?
> 
> The *point* of patents is to benefit the community.  The price society  
> pays to the inventor is granting a monopoly.  I'd argue that a 17-year  
> monopoly on software technology and algorithms is too high a price to pay  
> for knowing a "secret" you can't use until it's very obsolete.

Patented technology can be used under terms of GPL right now as example of x264 shows. With GPL patent holder can be sure he still can make money on commercial patent users.

> >> They are mostly used as
> >> weapons to stifle innovation from others.  In essence, software patents
> >> have had an *opposite* effect on the industry compared to something like
> >> building cars.
> >
> > Let's look at the H264 technology. Would it exist in the first place if  
> > its creators had no chance to patent it?
> 
> What if is not a fair game.  It's impossible for me to say because I did  
> not invent it.  But I believe most people who come up with ideas for  
> software are not in it for the patents.  Even in the company I worked for  
> which got several software patents, they were an afterthought -- Software  
> is invented to *solve a problem* which needs to be solved whether it can  
> be patented or not.  Did the inventors of H.264 do it for the patents?   
> Maybe.

If it's impossible to say, then your opinion has the risk to be unfounded. If we eliminate patents, it will be impossible to say, whether things became better or not - who knows what inventions were not invented because their authors had no resources for it.

I'm not sure h264 solved a problem. Video encoding worked just fine before it. It's just a better algorithm. The experts may be not for patents, but they are paid by big companies which are for profit.

> But I firmly believe if software wasn't patentable, we would have  
> equivalent video streams today (maybe even better than what we have),  
> because it *solves a problem*.

Equivalent - yes, but not today. The story of h264 became at 1998, it took years to complete it. It also took quite a while to get Theora right. Innovation in XviD were incremental and backward compatible with stock MPEG4 ASP decoder.

> This is a strawman -- GPL is not required by patent law to be licensed at  
> no cost for software patents.  The inventors of H.264 have chosen this  
> route, so good for them.  But it is not a benefit of GPL or a strike  
> against boost, it's just what they chose.

Can you make money with boost license?

> You cannot copyright a design.  You can copyright implementation.  And if  
> you don't make the design public, people have to spend vast amounts of  
> time and effort to just *figure out* your design, then they have to write  
> their own implementation (which is not cheap).  Meanwhile, you have  
> improved your design to something better and already sold thousands or  
> millions of copies, sucking up all the market share.

So open source is out of game?

> > The same is for software world. A program may require quite a large  
> > investment before it could be made usable. Let's consider D: who would  
> > get quality implementation first - Digital Mars or Microsoft? If DM  
> > doesn't patent D, it will sell *nothing*.
> 
> I think if Microsoft decided to implement D, Walter would be the first one  
> jumping for joy :)

That's only because he doesn't sell D.

> > Even if DM manages to get some market share, it won't survive  
> > competition and eventually lose. IE lost its market share because there  
> > was more effort put into Firefox than IE.
> 
> DMC is still being sold AFAIK.  There is always a market for cheaper  
> software, or a more agile software company.
> 
> One might pay for DMD if one gets specific support.  For example, if I  
> wanted to buy a D compiler for ARM, would Microsoft be willing to  
> implement it for a fee?  Would they even respond to my request?

Windows 8 supports ARM for some reason.

> > I suppose trivial patents are also a problem for physical industry as  
> > the wheel patent shows.
> 
> The wheel patent is a test of a poorly designed patent system (as the  
> article indicates).  It is not representative of most patent systems.
> 
> See this quote from your linked article:
> 
> ===========
> Keogh, who is a freelance patent lawyer himself, says that he applied for  
> the patent in order to test this new class of new patents. He says that  
> innovation patents are not examined in detail by the Australian patent  
> office.
> 
> "The patent office would be required to issue a patent for everything," he  
> told The Age newspaper. "All they're doing is putting a rubber stamp on  
> it."
> ===========
> 
> Note that this is not a trivial granted patent because of a flawed review  
> process -- THERE IS NO REVIEW PROCESS, ALL PATENTS ARE GRANTED!  This is  
> not a fair comparison of well-established patent systems.

Do you call patent systems granting trivial (software) patents well-established?

> >> When was the last time you did anything with a patented software
> >> technology except *avoid it like the plague*?
> >
> > I would like to avoid H264 but unfortunately I can't.
> 
> Right, and if software patents did not exist, the web would have  
> standardized on some other video codec, which would be freely available by  
> now.

I actually avoid h264 in the web :)
Well, in fact I use firefox and avoid flash, which results in avoiding h264.
Webm is enough for me in the web.
I can't avoid H264 for "real" video.