from Hacker News

Direct the Patent Office to Cease Issuing Software Patents

by acrum on 9/23/11, 9:03 PM with 44 comments

• by dbingham on 9/24/11, 2:00 AM

  Yes, this is a dupe from earlier today. I posted the damned thing by accident while learning the system in a half awake stupor. And, because I was in an half awake stupor, decided it was a good idea to share it with the world after accidentally posting it. I've been trying to get them to take it down to no avail. Failing that I've suggested better language and asked other people to suggest better language. On Monday I plan to call the White House switch board and see if I can beg/bully my way to someone with the power to update the text. The previous thread had my suggestion for better language, but I'll just go ahead and repost it here:

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  The US Patent system is badly broken with respect to software patents. Patents are being issued to companies for “inventions” that are, in fact, common knowledge included in any introductory software textbook. The result is that the large software corporations are buying up reams of patents and using them to bully small, innovative companies out of business or into paying ridiculous licensing fees.

  Quite apart from encouraging innovation, patents are now stifling it. The software industry is one of the few industries still strong in America. Even in a time of recession, there are not enough computer programmers to fill all the available positions. Startup companies are forming and growing readily. But if every line of code written brings with it a potential violation of someone else's intellectual property, this will cease to be the case.

  To solve this problem, we petition the Obama Administration to direct the Patent office to cease issuing software patents and to instruct the judicial system to take a long hard look at existing patents for validity. With these two steps, those of us in the software industry can stop worrying about mutually assured patent destruction and get back to doing what we do best.

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  If anyone else comes up with language the community prefers, I'm game to use it when I call the switchboard on Monday.

• by hugh3 on 9/23/11, 10:11 PM

  Is this "petitions" feature on whitehouse.gov brand new? I've heard of a couple of petitions today, and never before.

  I see right now that there are only 32 petitions there, and every one of them is either a neutral or leftish cause. The only completely nutty one is the UFO one, and there are no troll ones either (I thought "Stop Animal Homelessness At Its Roots" was a clever troll, but apparently it's talking about abandoned pets rather than wild animals).

  Have conservative activists not yet got wind of this? Has 4chan not yet got wind of this? Or is the White House carefully curating what petitions it allows to appear on its site?

• by alttag on 9/23/11, 9:52 PM

  Dupe from earlier today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3028999

  Same complaints on that thread. We as a community seem embarrassed to sign something which has such awful grammar.

• by elehack on 9/23/11, 9:41 PM

  IANAL, but I don't think the executive branch has the authority to do what the petition is asking. The patent office merely interprets what Congress and the courts tell it - while there is some interpretational discretion, I don't think it extends to the point of rejecting all software patents and certainly not to the point of retroactively invalidating all of them.

• by s3graham on 9/23/11, 9:48 PM

  Good lord, can we petition them to write the petition in English first?

• by randymorris on 9/23/11, 10:02 PM

  Grammar aside, I think this should be signed at the very least to show interest in IP law change. You have to admit that any developer with any sense of the litigation battlefield currently represented in the law should jump at the chance to bring more focus to the subject. I would rather fight big business on a competitiveness basis than over the tremendous threat of litigation with the large legal team overlords cutting up every concept and locking it down.

• by dsosby on 9/24/11, 2:59 AM

  Now how to identify what is a "software" patent and what isn't? Legally software already can't be patented -- it has to be a physical something. Read any "software" patent and it doesn't refer to the software, it refers to some sort of programmable machine that does something special with its software.

  Is it a machine patent or is it a software patent?

• by NormM on 9/23/11, 11:01 PM

  Since there are trillions of dollars worth of software patents out there, most owned by US companies, this doesn't seem like a good way to proceed even if it were legal. You might be able to stop future applications for software patents. But really there's no bright line between software and hardware anymore -- you really need to reform the entire patent system.

• by marojejian on 9/23/11, 9:46 PM

  This is a nice idea, but I can't sign a petition where the grammar is that bad.

• by gavanwoolery on 9/24/11, 1:52 AM

  As of this writing, 5029 of the required 5000 signatures have been collected! Now hopefully this actually goes somewhere...

• by jarin on 9/24/11, 1:36 AM

  Just a small thing, but this site completely fails at the back button.

• by dsl on 9/23/11, 11:27 PM

  Software patents are not bad. Obvious patents are bad.

• by kman on 9/24/11, 4:15 AM

  good luck with that.

• by irrumator on 9/23/11, 9:33 PM

  Why?