{"id":4771,"date":"2010-10-05T07:15:30","date_gmt":"2010-10-05T14:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=4771"},"modified":"2010-10-04T22:29:12","modified_gmt":"2010-10-05T05:29:12","slug":"does-patenting-software-make-sense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/?p=4771","title":{"rendered":"Does patenting software make sense?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Daniel Tunkelang wrote an <a title=\"An Open Letter to the USPTO | The Noisy Channel\" href=\"http:\/\/thenoisychannel.com\/2010\/09\/25\/an-open-letter-to-the-uspto\/\" target=\"_blank\">interesting post<\/a> about the merits (and lack thereof) of software patents. The basic argument is that software patents are overly broad, hard to defend against, are not central to most software companies&#8217; businesses, and only truly benefit attorneys and patent trolls.<\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t pass judgment on the industry as a whole, as I am sure there are many legitimate cases, but I will point to some evidence to suggest that the patent mechanism, in its essence, is the wrong mechanism for protecting these ideas.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->The evidence in question is the manner in which claims are written:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A method and system for&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Apparatus for&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>A computer readable storage medium embodying a set of instructions&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And of course there are the ubiquitous descriptions of circuits to implement high-level abstractions such as video segmentation or document clustering algorithms.<\/p>\n<p>The point is that all this language is tied to the hardware rather than the software being patented, because the raw algorithms themselves are too abstract to be patented. That this language is necessary seems like organic evidence for the inappropriateness of software patents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Daniel Tunkelang wrote an interesting post about the merits (and lack thereof) of software patents. The basic argument is that software patents are overly broad, hard to defend against, are not central to most software companies&#8217; businesses, and only truly benefit attorneys and patent trolls. I won&#8217;t pass judgment on the industry as a whole, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4771"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4771"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4773,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4771\/revisions\/4773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}