That's not a very well done petition. Here are some of the problems.
(1) The America Invents act was not toothless. It contains provisions that put major hurt on patent trolls.
(2) It fails to actually state any realistic action items.
(3) It shows a misunderstanding of the role of the President in the patent system. What they are trying to accomplish requires Congressional action, not Presidential action.
(1) America Invents improves the patent office's efficiency at awarding patents and switches the U.S. from first-to-invent to first-to-file. IMO, both will be a boon to trolls.
(2) The action item is the title of the petition.
(3) Government branches don't operate in silos. When the President demands something from congress and pushes it hard enough, he usually gets something on his desk.
It's a petition, not a bill. I want my President to act, not pretend that he can't do anything about it. He's the one who lit a fire under Congress and called out obstructing members by name to pass healthcare reform. I've relentlessly contacted all my representatives and senators, but congress does nothing without pressure.
You're right and they should use that to improve the petition, but I still think it's important to show that lots of politically active folks care about this.
Sure, Obama can't just end software patents on his own. But at least it puts the opposition on the map, politically. Still, that's all the more reason to want to make a good case.
(1) It's not just trolls that are dragging us all down with patents.
(2) Eliminate patents, starting with the software ones.
(3) The President doesn't vote on the federal budget either, but it's not correct to say he doesn't have a role in it. In this case the USPTO is under the Executive Branch, so actually, I would think the President would have a lot of authority in the matter.
(1) Trolls are definitely a problem, but so is apple, MS, and Oracle. Hell we saw what happens when Samsung got pissed off, they decided to start suing for patents the world needs to implement cell phones. Samsung may have failed, but MS may not.
(2) Patents are good, as long as they are NON-OBVIOUS. In the realm of software, a lot of things are obvious. In fact most of what is patented is obvious. The problem is that its non-obvious until an engineer needs to solve it, then it will become obvious as it is on the path to the solution. Software patent problem: SOFTWARE IS ALGORITHMS; MATH! You cannot patent equations. We have lots of proof that software is just an equation, though more complex and in a different form. Hell implement it in Lisp and you have lambda calculus. That's the point.
Software is mathematics. End of story. Cannot be patented.
(3) President is not in full power, but not powerless either. He can put pressure via the citizens.
Agreed. A petition was worthwhile to elevate the attention given to the matter. It could be the response was a brush-off, but it might also be an invitation to the party.
It's pretty hard to overestimate the impact that executive branch policy has on the PTO. If there truly were a "quality-first" directive, with mandates to reject hard-to-understand and overbroad applications on teachability and novelty doctrines, that would have a huge impact on the patent landscape. But there's a ton of work to do in crafting a suggested directive that would accomplish that, and petitions aren't really the proper vehicle for such suggestions.
It might be more productive to interpret the press release as an invitation to work on that document, and the pointer to the AIA page as a forwarding address to take the initiative to the next level.
So: what ought be the content of "Executive Order N to the Patent and Trademark Office?"
We don't have "software patents," since software (as code) isn't patentable subject matter. Instead, we have "business method patents," which cover the systems and methods used by the software in conjunction with an operating environment that are putatively novel, non-obvious, unique, and enabled.
I'd imagine most people fall into two camps: (1) business methods shouldn't be patentable subject matter solely because they satisfy the machine-or-transformation test (as articulated in a trilogy of cases from the 1970s and most recent in Bilski); and (2) even if they should be, many of the business methods today fail on non-obviousness grounds.
Proscribing the issuance of 'software patents' isn't the problem. The problem is that in this digital age, we're relying on the machine-or-transformation test for business practices that exist in the virtual world. Because of the prevalence and impact of the internet in the global marketplace, there's now a fundamental difference between a ROM chip in a device containing instructions interpreted by a microprocessor and a software program compiled into machine readable code stored in RAM and processed by your computer's CPU.
How about we start spending more than 5 minutes writing these petitions? Several points are missing and what's there doesn't even convey the key points clearly.
Dude, this is the internet. We don't think things through here, and I think the President should be weeping for gratitude that the petitioner deigned to use more than 140 characters to unburden himself. Weeping.
I frankly do not understand such black and white take on software patents. I don't think that all of them are evil. If one invests his time and money in developing a software algorithm - something non-trivial, say, an IFS compressor for binary data - why should such invention not be entitled to the same level of exclusive use protection that a mechanical design receives?
The previous story on this provided the perfect response: "If millions of people carried machine shops around in their backpacks, mechanical engineering would be incompatible with the patent system too." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182882)
I fail to see why you think it's a perfect response. Patents exists to stimulate inventors by protecting fruits of their labour from trivial copying. What the ease of copying has got anything to do with the patent system being broken?
What patents supposedly exist for does not match the net effect they have. (And remember, we only care about "stimulating inventors" because it gives the general public a net benefit, just like copyright theoretically exists to encourage the writing of more creative works.) People have this theoretical vision of patents protecting small inventors/businesses from some other company building the same product better/cheaper and putting "the little guy"/"the underdog" out of business. That romantic notion needs revision, because it doesn't work anymore, if it ever did. Patents today (and software patents in particular) tend to fall in three major cases:
- Small company gets a patent, thinks it will protect them, and either never uses it or quickly learns that their one patent will not protect them from the thousands held by whoever they want protection from. They also don't have the time or money to waste on litigation rather than just building a product.
- Large company gets a patent, adds it to the war chest, uses it as a giant stick to force anyone working in the same general area to pay up. Small companies have to pay up, and Free and Open Source Software gets excluded entirely (or just publishes their code anyway and says "screw patents", which works nicely for people not worth suing but makes anyone else using their code a target).
- Patent trolls, who write or more commonly acquire patents, wave them around like a stick, and extort money from people actually being productive.
One of these cases derives no benefit from software patents, and the other two turn software patents into net losses for the public. So, tell me again how software patents represent a useful tradeoff for the general public, and why we should grant an artificial monopoly that would not otherwise exist?
But physical manufacturing outside of freestanding factories has never been a significant part of an industrial economy. It more or less amounts to "arts and crafts".
This changed with computers. You could never start a car factory in a garage, but there was a golden age where you could start a high-tech electronics company like HP or Apple.
Today you can start a web-based or software company on a laptop in a coffee shop or library. This is a big deal, let's not kill it.
Software patents have to go away or we're going to be stuck in the industrial age, which would be bad because we've already sold off most of our factories.
> But physical manufacturing outside of freestanding factories has never been a significant part of an industrial economy.
Actually, it has. Large scale production may have usually been in a factory, but often that factory was small production multiplied. Ford and the like were anomalies, even in the car biz.
> You could never start a car factory in a garage
I don't know about you, but literally thousands of folks did exactly that.
OK, that's probably 700+ manufacturers after duplicates are counted for. Which is great!
But I can't figure out how to tell how many of them meet my original criteria of manufacturing outside of "freestanding factories". Spot-checking the links from Wikipedia turns up several references to converted bicycle and motorcycle factories. No references to "two guys in a garage" which kinda makes sense considering garages probably came after the early automobiles. :-)
No doubt some of them started in barns, but again, I don't think that was a huge part of the economy.
The all in one list doesn't include the countries that had lots of car companies, such as the US. US only list (which was the biggest) has over 1800, from 1896 to 1930.
The US wikipedia entry claims that very few car companies were started after 1930. I know a couple from the 60s that didn't make the list which were literally a couple of guys in a garage. No, they weren't casting their own engine blocks but neither does Lotus for some of their models.
> But I can't figure out how to tell how many of them meet my original criteria of manufacturing outside of "freestanding factories".
Most made very few cars so it's unlikely that they had significant factories.
> I don't think that was a huge part of the economy.
There were two separate claims. The first was that small scale manufacturing was a significant part of manufacturing. I haven't addressed that.
The second was that lots of car companies had almost nothing in the way of "factory". That's the claim that I've supported.
s/machine shops/nanoassemblers/ then, if you like; software still has a much smaller barrier to entry. And for the record, I don't necessarily believe in mechanical engineering patents either, but as a software professional I primarily care about abolishing software patents, because they hurt me personally.
Why should it not be treated the way a mathematical result is? People invest time and effort into proving theorems too. It seems to me that software is ideas, like math is.
Interesting. Can you point to any official response from Netflix referencing that petition, or did they just take the desired action without referencing the petition?
So Facebook knows when you go to a government site.
I imagine Facebook also knows which petitions you sign, or at least which ones you click on. I say imagine, because although I'm signed in, it still asks me to sign in before I can sign the petition, and signing in while I'm signed in leads to a 404.
I never understand the gambit about trying to hide your email address and I understand it even less here. Who cares if the White House has my email address?
(1) The America Invents act was not toothless. It contains provisions that put major hurt on patent trolls.
(2) It fails to actually state any realistic action items.
(3) It shows a misunderstanding of the role of the President in the patent system. What they are trying to accomplish requires Congressional action, not Presidential action.