I dispute "very much". It came out in 2004 and almost all the patents are gone.
Yes, if you care about the DVD-era still. If not, this expiry doesn't have a big impact on anything.
edit: I am talking about divx web player
You don't have to file your patent in every jurisdiction. There have been treaties for recognising each others intellectual property rights since the late 19th century and Brazil has been part of these from the start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internation...
For example, the Wright brothers biggest contribution to aviation was suing everyone using wing warping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war) which greatly advanced the adoption of the much more advanced ailerons.
Software patents have a similar effect, for example Cisco's patent on Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol led to the development of the more secure and more capable Common Address Redundancy Protocol (https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/SA/v14/i05/a6.htm).
We tend to invest heavily in whatever we can get working first, but it's rarely close to an ideal way of doing something. By pushing every developer to find a newer, better way of doing something, patents prevent stagnation and lead to more advanced technologies.
When we get something working first, there are probably some optimal partial solutions there. Working around the patent means having to do some things inefficiently while being able to provide better efficiency or cost of the overall system.
In my work, I all too often see that the obvious optimal solution we come up with turns out to be patented and we are spending time on finding least bad worse solution. (unless our patent lawywers manage to pussh through a patent for the same thing with different wording, like measuring period instead of measuring frequency)
In some cases it is not possible. For example, 3D printing was held back for 20 years just because of sleeping patents.
https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Sh...
"We wish it to be understood, however, that our invention is not limited to this particular construction, since any construction whereby the angular relations of the lateral margins of the aeroplanes may be varied in opposite directions with respect to the normal planes of said aeroplanes comes within the scope of our invention."
Some people (Curtis) felt this claim was far too encompassing and should not be enforced. But I don't know, These guys just spent a decade working out an entirely new discipline, aeronautical control. And you don't think they deserve exclusive exploitation rights to that discipline for the next 20 years?
And a million people had the idea of "controlling a vehicle in the air". Patents aren't for vague ideas, they're for specific mechanisms.
The socially practical effect of working patent law is that it incentivizes inventors to publicly document their inventions by offering limited exclusive rights to the invention. To that end, an overly broad claim to hypothetical inventions which are not actually documented in the patent is detrimental and instead stifles innovation.
20 years is the midpoint between the Wright Brother’s flight and operational jet fighters. They won the race but it was very much a competition. If Orville and Wilbur didn’t cross the line first then Maxim or Langley would have. They all built on George Cayley’s work.
So no, I don’t think the first one to file a plausible patent should get exclusive rights. It should at least extend to contemporaries. And we should consider the cost to innovation when breakthroughs are artificially constrained for what amounts to multiple technological generations.
Unfortunately in my own ruminating on the topic the only practical alternatives seem to be one or more variations on the scary boogey man of socialism.
The Wrights definitely were in it for the money.
The government project was the Langley Prototype, which cost 20 times more than what the Wrights spent, and fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement.
> the scary boogey man of socialism
For good reason. Socialism's track record is pretty bad. They're always running out of other peoples' money.
However the track record for developed countries communally sharing "intellectual property" is much much better. Universities, open source, and public domain all have some crossover with the ideals of socialism.
Yes, communism has repeatedly failed spectacularly.
The softer socialism of public welfare has worked (so far) for many countries including the US. Although I'm skeptical about the future given modern demographics and our governments' choices to appease a majority. The governments of most developed countries smell socialist to me. I'm from New Zealand and most private income/property is taxed up the wahoo to pay for our social welfare programs: it doesn't take much squinting to see my own society as broadly socialist.
Somehow I see people in the US complaining that the Chinese are beating the US at capitalism (regular complaints of price undercutting and monopolistic behaviours) - what's weird since the Chinese are supposed to be pinkos.
I'm not joking - the D language is as open source as possible. We give it away for free.
When you force people to pitch, share, cooperate, etc, things start to don't work out so well and you start getting people that takes advantage of a system that mandates others to work for a cause no matter what, as well as people that will do whatever they can to not do their work.
Define socialism. Isn't the collectively owned road outside your property essentially socialism? Would that work better if it were privately owned?
I say boogeyman not to imply it is without problems but rather to say that in the problem spaces that it is often deplored the incumbent alternative is often categorically worse for all those who do not directly benefit from it, which is usually a supermajority at a minimum. Thus, to make the incumbent more tolerable a caricature of an idea is brought forth to scare those who would otherwise support an aspirational idealist into backing the known “lesser” evils.
There aren't many pure socialist countries like there aren't many (any?) pure capitalist countries. Most of Europe operates in mixed mode, half socialist. Some countries are very bad (and against) at implementing any measures that directly benefit the lower classes (as opposed to the typical capitalist "trickle-down economics") so they vilify anything that has even the faintest smell of socialism.
> They're always running out of other peoples' money.
I wish people would stop parroting this as some sort of deep insight. Capitalists don't run out of other people's money but they do collect all of it. Ask the capitalists who sink other people's investments with no recourse. Ask the capitalists who get funded from people's pension funds, with "interesting" IPO strategies. Don't turn a blind eye for the sake of a remark which was witty a few decades ago and sounds just ignorant today.
This seems like a success story in spite of software patents, not because of them. Just because they were forced to develop a new protocol in order to avoid getting sued for using Cisco's doesn't mean that they wouldn't still have improved on what Cisco had if they'd been allowed to use and modify it freely. The lack of lawsuits hanging over everyone's head certainly hasn't prevented innovation from happening in FOSS.
I don't agree that that's the biggest problem. I think the biggest problem is that patents are abused to stifle competition by refusing licenses or putting untenable fees on them. No one would have cared about Nintendo's D-pad patent if they'd just put a reasonable license fee on it. On the other hand, a patent like MP3 I would argue is quite legitimate, but putting a patent on a coded just makes interoperability more difficult. If MPEG had charged licenses for decoding chips and explicitly allowed software implementations, that would have things so much more smoother.
Whether it's single passenger cars or AI, nobody really understands how inefficient they and their lives are.
Governments mucking around with things like patents only distorts markets in ways that make them inefficient, and ultimately worse. Anyone who thinks the government's intervention improves things hasn't been at the business end of the government.
Patents (and copyright) aren't bad. It when it becomes too broad. Not reflective of the effort involved, or too long lasting when it becomes an issue.
Fwiw, early steam engines were also patented, and that slowed down development until the patents expired.
* from 100 years ago, one that would happen anyway because tech progresses, patents or not
* one that that wasn't correct one as they didn't patent VRRP (which was another open source competition to it), they tried to patent troll it
and both of them were "proper use", not "we will try to make our patent as wide as possible so we can stifle any competition"...
I think the claim of being entirely useless, at least in most spaces is very valid. There are some techs that take years and millions (medical drugs come into mind), but vast majority of patents are just stifling technical progress, and especially on software side
Maybe they try to develop it themselves, maybe they sell the idea to a big corporation that has the resources to implement it. Either way, genius begets profit, and the world gets genius ideas... in theory anyway.
But a genuine idea back then needed a long time frame to actually do something with it. 20 years seemed reasonable at the time.
The world is less logistically constrained these days. Make it 5 years, no renewals.
The modern purposes of patents seem to have shifted a long way from that.
I wonder how much of ADSL's advantage is due to trade secrets (spread across many vendors) versus how much has been published as patents.
I'm not sure if that's true, or if it's more that 1) we hear more about the more egregious stuff and/or 2) something was lost in translation with that stated purpose when the world went digital.
People are far more empowered today, many more can work near the bleeding edge, and funding can be arranged in different ways than holding on to a patent.
Good luck publishing in Costa Rica. When you're not privileged you're likely to be on the losing end. So what use is it? Better keep your invention a secret, like most do, and let the next generation display themselves as the inventors. That's the alternate reality the system actually supports.
The whole system should be scrapped. Publishing is easy nowadays, just do it. Then you'd have the rights of you can prove you're the first. Anyone that wants to use can/must give you a known amount of royalties, depending on whether the invention is a unique enabler of a class of products, or just an optimization. Which it will become over time. If you don't want that, keep it a secret and build company around it.
But The basic idea is sound. If you invent a novel mechanism and publish it the government will grant you exclusive economic exploitation rights to that mechanism for the next 25 years. After that it is now fair game.
It is an attempt to solve the real problem that it is much harder to be first than second, the guy in first place has to spend all that time and effort to develop the thing, and the guy in second just has to copy the guy in first. To rectify this social injustice the patent system was developed, where the government would grant and enforce economic exploitation rights of the mechanism to the inventor.
The problem is that patenting something doesn't require one to put a lot of time and effort - just to produce few pages of text and diagrams. So it might be sufficient for somebody to have a general idea.
Then 25 years is too much.
A good example(old enough to not matter any more) is the how the Wright brothers invented something fundamentally new, their patent was on how to control an airplane, The problem is, once you see it, it is obvious how to control an airplane. Birds do it, Why should such an simple thing be protected? But conversely. This is a discipline that took the Wrights many years of hard and meticulous work to figure out. Is it morally correct to say "No, we are not going to grant you exploitation rights to this thing you invested so much time and effort developing"?
"Buying something over the web", Amazon, 1997: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5960411A/en
"Rounded corners in a GUI", Apple, 2014: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9396565B2/en
Sometimes it is significantly harder. Often it's just a matter of luck
No. it is no way shape and form, good. 25 years is eternity in tech. The impact of the tech is not all that much related to investment either. You are just stifling any competition in the market
> It is an attempt to solve the real problem that it is much harder to be first than second, the guy in first place has to spend all that time and effort to develop the thing, and the guy in second just has to copy the guy in first. To rectify this social injustice the patent system was developed, where the government would grant and enforce economic exploitation rights of the mechanism to the inventor.
It has completely wrong structure for that. First, the duration. Second, the way you can patent vague idea, not actual concrete implementation. It is not used to stop competition from just copying your product, it is stopping anyone in market to compete.
1. publish it e.g. as a paper or open source, letting all big AI labs to use it for free
2. keep it secret
Are you saying that it's evil to have a secret third option of making the algorithm public but forcing AI labs to share profit if they use it?
Let say you come up with a patent. You let open source use the patent, GPL3 ..., for free why charging close source solutions.
That could go to funding the open source development or other gains. FANNG has the money, take it from the them by all means.
But in modern tech? No.
So I see it as unavoidable evil. The patent system makes it lawful evil as opposed to chaotic evil, which is strictly speaking an improvement.
Patents protect the idea of a particular program. And in the post-AI world, it's the idea that holds the value, not the implementation. Implementations are cheap now.
Another alternative to preventing the entire software market from collapsing is to revive the Whelan v. Jaslow copyright standard, under which the abstract "structure, sequence, and organization" of a program is eligible for copyright. But programmers would bristle at that almost as much as robust patent protection for software. Until, that is, the money comes in with mouths to feed and mortgages to pay...
You won't get this, otherwise we had tons of LLM written photoshop alternatives already. And if it would work, that would be a good thing.
This is the major reason why most large open-source projects are banning big code contributions made with A.I
As for the copyright infringement angle, it’s well and truly too late for that to be a meaningful problem, socially and politically. It’s easily in “too big to fail” territory now—any striking down of the “fair use” exemption claim would kill the entire industry dead, because every one of them would have to throw away all their models and synthetic data and start again, and that’s geopolitically untenable. They moved too fast for judiciary to regulate them, and I think the window of opportunity for legislature to regulate them closed no later than 2024.
I'm sure the patent/copyright trolls care a lot about the "industry." It is still the early days but eventually they will come on knocking.
I'm also thinking about the click wheel; I got one of my kids a knockoff iPod for Christmas last year.
Can other e-commerce sites legally "one-click" to purchase like Amazon now?!?