The law suit against software patents grinds along. Well, it has nothing to do with software except in an inverted manner.
Engineering News-Record's Melissa Traynor and Tom Sawyer report that a case involving business patents will be heard in December by the US Supreme Court. The US Patent Office rejected Bernard Bilski’s patent for a risk hedging method.
The US Court of Appeals last October said that business-method patent applications must be tied to machines, or else transform one article into another. The former test required that patents produce "useful, concrete and tangible results."
Traynor and Sawyer do a good job interviewing those for and against changes to what can be patented. A worthwhile read.
Killing software patents in the CAD industry would spur innovation, since competitors currently are wary of implementing features patented by others.
(HT: Darren Young)
How is killing patents going to spur innovation? Implementing something that someone else has done doesn't sound too innovative to me. Everyone would just sit around waiting for someone else to do the hard work, and then step in to skim the cream. Wait a minute, can you say "Microsoft"?
In a similar vein, it is often suggested that patents should not be allowed on medicines. This would supposedly result in cheaper medications because there would now be multiple competitive manufactuters of new products. Right' And how long would it be before there were no research labs producing new products? Why spend a pile of money researching and inventing something only to have everyone else make the profit?
I'm not saying the present system is perfect, or even any good, but the cure might be worse than the disease.
Posted by: Bill Fane | Jul 27, 2009 at 04:52 PM