[ProgSoc] Red Hat asks US Supreme Court to bar software patents

John Elliot jj5 at jj5.net
Mon Oct 5 22:00:48 EST 2009


Bryn Davies wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Roland Turner <raz at raz.cx> wrote:
>> The power of congress to grant monopolies in order to promote the
>> development of ideas can't reasonably be said to include the power to
>> grant incentives to dead people (who, by virtue of being dead, can't
>> produce any ideas at all, much less produce more ideas in response to
>> incentives).
> 
>  Now now, is it so hard to believe that people might want to benefit
> their survivors? It also increases the value of the assignable right,
> which enables them to sell it for more money here and now. Assignation
> has always been a big part of the property concept, IP no exception.

Tricky, isn't it?

The thing that irks me about patents is that it's a misnomer to believe
that ideas are

 a) discovered independently by an individual, and
 b) discovered by only one individual

I've spent my career locked-up in my bedroom coding, and I'm sure that
I've independently discovered ideas some of which are likely already
patented (by some stretch of interpretation). Patents say I can't use my
own ideas developed (painstakingly) in isolation from other parties who
may lay claim to ownership of my (!) ideas because they were the first
to file with some bureau.

As an example, I developed an API for generating hierarchical documents
with a particular method of object chaining. It was a novel approach to
document composition that I arrived at completely independently before
I'd even heard the term 'object chaining', and allowed me to generate
content in a high-performance manner with syntax like this:

 content.
   Paragraph().
     Text( "This is the first " ).
     Strong( "paragraph" ).End.
     Text( " in the content." ).
   End.
   Paragraph().
     Text( "This is the second " ).
     Strong( "paragraph" ).End.
     Text( " in the content." );

It's my idea, it's a good idea, I came up with it all by myself, but I
expect some big company has already laid claim to a patent that covers
something that could be argued to be similar. I came up with this idea
years ago, and as an independent software developer should I have to go
through all the rigmarole and expense of applying for patent protection
for this idea (which is but one of many many ideas that I use on a daily
basis in going about my software development business) just so that I
can sleep soundly knowing that I'm not going to be sued for the use of
my own idea?










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