No patent if invention lies only in computer program, says Indian Patent Office

Re:No patent if invention lies only in computer program, say... by icebraining on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @08:49AM (#11166651)

You say that people like Doug Engelbart should benefit more from their inventions, and to achieve that we should grant patents only to individuals or non-profits.

But a patent for Doug Engelbart most famous invention - the mouse - was filled, and it was assigned to a non-profit (SRI, a nonprofit research institute), and yet it seems neither he nor the institute got much from it.

As for Alan Kay, from what I can tell, he doesn't have a single patent with him as the inventor (which is always a person, an employer would be the assignee). So how could he benefit from your law?

I don't disagree that it would be fair for inventors to benefit from their inventions, but I don't frankly see how would your proposal actually achieve it.

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Re:No patent if invention lies only in computer program, say... by nnq on Thursday February 25, 2016 @02:00AM (#11172820)

- first example: that's because a patent shouldn't simply expire if no royalty is paid for it. (As an aside: the clock should start ticking for the first time someone starts selling a product implementing it. And patent royalties should also be paid with mandatory delay of at least 3 years or something: so, for example, an entrepreneur can start a company that uses a patented technology, even if now he can't afford to license it, and only have to start paying for it after he had some time to start making profit.)

- about AK: all his ideas were software related and quite broad. Also, I would guess the he recognizes that allowing "broad software patents" indiscriminately with the current laws would be a total disaster, so he's mostly against software patents, obviously. But in a different legal context he's probably think completely different.

I don't know that much about patent laws, but the parts that I do know of seem totally backwards to me. Like nothing makes sense the way it is, you'd have to rewrite everything from scratch and retrain all the lawyers and judges. Probably because the laws were invented for easily-buildable physical inventions like the steam engine a 100 years ago. And they have no concepts that make sense for "informational products".

You can't look at the behavior of people in the past and say "considering their behavior, such laws would not have benefited them". The simple fact that a law exists and is written in certain way can completely alter the behaviors of people because they know they now can take advantage of it, so they behave differently.

I am personally against software patents NOW, btw. In the current legal context they would be nonsensical an harmful. But change lots of the context around them and they could be a very good idea for the reasons I mentioned in the previous comment.

Probably the solution would be to invent a new concept of "soft idea patent" that has no relationship whatsoever with the concept of "classic patent" and for which none of the current patent laws apply. Then write from scratch the laws for these new "entities". And "digital computer software patents" would be just one of the subclasses of "soft idea patents", each with their separate laws and regulations.

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