I would argue that patent in software either need to be eliminated or you need to provide full source code of your thing. And it is needs to be narrow.
Right now you can provide vague bloc diagrams of a vague process and it is enough. But if we take the intent of patents it was to protect the inventor IN EXCHANGE for sharing the knowledge. The second part seems to have been forgotten...
This sounds like a machine for creating patents that are known in advance to be invalid because of the prior art from which the machine mechanically derives its allegedly sellable proposals. In other words, patent fraud.
Can anyone name ONE software innovation that wouldn't exist if we didn't have software patents? 99% of enforcement is rent seeking and trolling.
> ONE software innovation that wouldn't exist if we didn't have software patents
maybe not in the spirit, but at least one person had to have found a better way of doing something while trying to circumnavigate a patent
Patents need to expire quicker. Things change too rapidly in some sectors and these patents hinder innovation IMO.
I can see the need for areas where I takes years and a lot of capital risk but in some sectors this is just not the case anymore.
I generally agree, but the length of a patent should probably be proportional to the R&D costs (and possibly other factors). Pharmaceutical development is insanely expensive and risky, if we want new, revolutionary drugs to be brought to market the pharma companies need to be able to make a profit (this may be an unpopular opinion because of the price gouging pharma companies are infamous for, but this is part of the reason pharma companies aren’t developing new antibiotics yet, which will be a disaster when we need them). The fact that novel drugs can have the same patent lifetime as the bit operations required to average two integers correctly is insane. Evaluating the appropriate patent length in practice is probably difficult in that it would be gamed by applicants.
They need to be enforced far more narrowly and claims of patent violations subject to wider definitions of prior art. It's crazy how broadly some patents are on things that have long existed.
That is a hard problem to enforce. Limiting patents to months or only a year or two is much easier (and cheaper) to enforce.
Time is a great way to change the regulatory environment.
If you need to build a factory to produce a product, the investment and time scale make long term patents reasonable.
With software, it’s not the same time/$ investment and therefore the term of protection should be much shorter.