Should Software be Patentable?

What actual does patent mean?  A patent (/ ˈ pæt ə nt/ or / ˈ pe ɪ t ə nt/) is a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for detailed public disclosure of an invention. An invention is a solution to a specific technological problem and is a product or a process.  Patent law is designed to stop or throttle competition that mostly included few well-capitalized entities  protect intellectual property and encourage innovation, granting innovative companies a temporary competitive advantage over their rivals  patent troll is a person or company that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art

Remember copyright is not the same as Patent  Copyright- The exclusive legal right, given to an originator or an assignee to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material, and to authorize others to do the same.  Copyright law was designed to cope with many simultaneous equal individual creators in mind

Arguments against  Software is math! Math is not patentable so software shouldn’t  It is easy to make, If software was patentable, less people would do it and less software would be created  Software becomes outdated quickly with all the technological advances  Only a few people benefit like lawyers and big companies like google  Patents expand their monopoly  Consumers pay the price  Leaves the little guy out

More Arguments against  obtaining a patent on computer software can be an expensive process, costing eight to twelve thousand dollars, or more

Arguments For  The computer, which can perform any computation specified by a table of numbers ("instructions") is already patented. Any particular computation thus performed is a subset of behavior already patented in the patenting of the computer itself  It protects the software developer  Hardware and software are interchangeable so both desire patents  Patents mean that innovation is happening and it’s good to see so much activity in this industry

Martin Goetz  First person to get software patent  Autoflow from Applied Data Research (ADR) was the software  He is thought making software it own product  He argues that patent’s for software and hardware have no differences between them

End Software Patents (ESP)  Group that posts what is currently going on in software patents in the world  They have a wiki page  They are really just trying to get people aware of what's going on

Defensive Patent Pools  The general idea is that a group of patent holders who are friendly towards free software can "pool" their patents together and agree that these patents won't be used against free software developers, and that these patents may be used for counter-suing any patent holder that threatens free software developers.  They also want to stop non-practicing entity (NPE)  NPE’s have huge patent portfolios  The pools are funded through admission fees

Smartphones  In October2012 there was over 250,000 patents  Samsung filed 2,179 smartphone patent applications in 2013  Are patents bad? Because of all the innovation in the industry in the last 20 years?  But are most of the patents owned by a few companies?

Smartphone patents  U.S. Patent No , titled Method and Apparatus for Using Sensors on a Portable Electronic Device to Verify TransactionsU.S. Patent No  U.S. Patent No , titled Smartphone Biosensor (Sensor Technologies) U.S. Patent No  U.S. Patent No , titled Secure Smartphone-Operated Gun Lock with Means for Overriding Release of the Lock (locks guns when near schools) U.S. Patent No

Example  The now obvious "auto-filling" feature of spreadsheets is patented and not available in builds of free software office software for certain distributions  As of 2009, firms involved in developing HTML as an open standard with embedded video support could not recommend a video format because of the risk of patent encumbrancesHTMLstandardvideo  Amazon.com sued Barnes & Noble for violating its "One click buy" but the case was ultimately settled Amazon.comBarnes & Noble  Eolas successfully sued Microsoft for $521 million for the "browser plugin patent" EolasMicrosoft

New Zealand bands Software Patents  After 5 years of debate New Zealand decided that software Patents will be no more  Innovation and creation of new software requires breaching old patent laws  They are very happy with their decision  Patent trolls will not be tolerated in New Zealand, no sir

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