It's not immoral to obtain a patent. Sure, your company's patent portfolio might end up in the hands of a patent troll. On the other hand, your company might be sued into oblivion in a year because you didn't obtain your patent. In that tradeoff, I'd file the patent. The fact that something can be used for immoral purposes does not make that thing immoral.
Your slavery comparison is also ridiculous. It is only valid to someone who already believes patents are terribly immoral. To anyone else, it comes off as Godwin-lite. I think a more apt analogy would be if you know that a university was a paper mill, but the accreditation board refused to revoke its accreditation. What would you do in that situation? You might obtain your own degree from the institution so that you can say with certainty and with credibility that the university is a sham. It would indeed be immoral to obtain a fake degree for the purpose of defrauding an employer. It would not be immoral to obtain a fake degree to strengthen your argument.
> It is only valid to someone who already believes patents are terribly immoral.
It doesn't assume you believe patents are as immoral as slavery; I already made that specific disclaimer. It assumes that, yes, you do take strong moral exception to software patents.
I work for a small company that is vehemently anti-patent even though we do enough novel work that we could file hundreds of patents each year that would fall in the top percentile of innovation among patents. The company has been around for a long time and some of our products are in very patent-encumbered areas like video and audio codecs. We do license patents from others where necessary; for example, every Miles license we sell includes licenses for Thompson's MP3-related patents.
I didn't say that you had to believe that patents are as immoral as slavery. But you already have to believe that patents are intrinsically terribly immoral before your metaphor makes sense.
And as I said, just because something is sometimes or even often used for immoral purposes does not mean it is intrinsically immoral.
If you're asking me personally, it's because in the first case you're adding to the ever-burgeoning sea of patents and thereby increasing drag on innovation and curtailing programmer freedom. I don't think the kind of sublicensing we do with Thompson is totally without negative consequences in terms of complicity, but it's of much lesser concern to me.
Are you a patent lawyer? A programmer? Both? I'd love to hear your own perspective on this.
For background, my previous job was in a small group of researchers and programmers at NVIDIA. The company had a history of hardware patents but had been pushing more and more for supposedly defensive software patents when I joined. Partly in response to the infamous Creative patent on a robust technique for stencil shadows which had "coincidentally" been filed right after NVIDIA's Cass Everitt had given an invited talk at Creative on that very technique which he had discovered (and John Carmack later independently rediscovered). Anyway, for most of us in DevTech, at least half our time was spent on pure research and prototyping. A colleague in that group, Ignacio Castano, wrote a blog post on programmer responsibility and software patents that you might find interesting: http://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/2010/11/software-patents...
Patent lawyer, yes. Programmer, not really, just sort of a tinkerer.
That blog post is of course right that a patent attorney can't really write a patent without the help of the inventor. So if you're against software patents, I think it makes sense to put some responsibility on the inventors who help attorneys write them. But I think this line hits the nail on the head: "It’s the benefit of being a good corporate employee, not being considered a trouble maker, not loosing opportunities for promotion, not bringing negative attention to yourself, not going against the tide."
Most people are not willing to put their careers on the line over principles, and that's not going to change. Maybe a handful of the most vehement will, and maybe they're good enough at their jobs to get away with it... but mostly, no. People just go along with what their bosses tell them to do.
The idea about the anti-patents is interesting, but (with that implementation) probably not particularly useful at preventing bad patents from issuing. Patent examiners don't search wikis for prior art--they mostly search the patent literature, and to some extent scholarly articles, textbooks, and things like that. So while a wiki article might be helpful at invalidating a patent in litigation years down the road (assuming the defendant found it and could prove when it was written), it's tough to imagine the circumstances where it gets on an examiner's desk and helps him do his job.
You misunderstand. Ignacio's anti-patents wiki was internal-only and meant to discourage other NVIDIA employees from filing patents for ideas he had already discovered. He was the main (and for a long time the only) software guy working on the tessellation architecture and associated algorithms for DirectX 11 and NVIDIA's Fermi chip. Thus he was something of a vanguard; other internal researchers working on the same front would be likely to make very similar discoveries even if working independently. After all, that's the nature of the overwhelming majority of patents and perhaps the single biggest reason they're a bad idea in practice even if you have no issue with them in principle.
> that's the nature of the overwhelming majority of patents and perhaps the single biggest reason they're a bad idea in practice even if you have no issue with them in principle
I disagree with this (and I have no idea if it's true in the majority of cases, but let's stipulate to that for the sake of argument). If it's a common occurrence that independent researchers tend to invent similar things around the same time, then it strikes me as a positive thing for the law to bestow some advantage on whoever was first. That would tend to spur innovation and patent disclosures, which is the whole point of the patent system.
> If it's a common occurrence that independent researchers tend to invent similar things around the same time, then it strikes me as a positive thing for the law to bestow some advantage on whoever was first. That would tend to spur innovation and patent disclosures, which is the whole point of the patent system.
No. The coincidence of timing is a second-order consequence of the fact that smart people when faced with problems with similar requirements will produce similar solutions. In some cases the requirements are so constrained that not only will the abstract ideas be identical but so will the concrete implementations of those ideas (e.g. write me an optimal 8x8 IDCT for machine architecture X). It is absurd that any reasonably smart fellow who happens to tackle a problem first should be granted a government monopoly on his ideas.
If the goal is public disclosure of knowledge then assuming the problem has any wider relevance it will soon enough be revisited by other similarly smart fellows, so there is little incentive for the discoverer who happened to be first to closely guard his secrets. The gain to society for granting the monopoly in this case is that the knowledge might be disclosed a little sooner than otherwise. The cost is that other and sometimes even smarter fellows cannot develop those ideas further without a license, not even in the context of pure research, never mind business.
That hardly spurs innovation. And as for that, it was never the original purpose of the patent system but is rather a latter-day tacked-on justification for it, but let us suppose that is its principal purpose. Do you see that happening? It's certainly not working in the software world. Elsewhere in the thread there was a reference to a paper debunking some of the classic supposed success stories of patents related to Watt's steam engine and Ford's windshield wipers.
Ah, but now we're just arguing about what constitutes a non-obvious invention. And I would agree that we need better patent examiners making that decision.
Sure, that is a huge and endemic part of the problem. But if that were all, I might believe something of the system could be salvaged. Anyway, this thread has grown too deep already, so let's end it here. Thank you for the discussion.
Your slavery comparison is also ridiculous. It is only valid to someone who already believes patents are terribly immoral. To anyone else, it comes off as Godwin-lite. I think a more apt analogy would be if you know that a university was a paper mill, but the accreditation board refused to revoke its accreditation. What would you do in that situation? You might obtain your own degree from the institution so that you can say with certainty and with credibility that the university is a sham. It would indeed be immoral to obtain a fake degree for the purpose of defrauding an employer. It would not be immoral to obtain a fake degree to strengthen your argument.