The last patent on AC-3 (Dolby Digital) expires at midnight

Re:The last patent on AC-3 (Dolby Digital) expires at midnight by dave_sullivan on Monday March 20, 2017 @04:24AM (#13912552)

Thanks, those are good examples. I do want to point out however: these aren't exactly earth shattering inventions of the kind that justify the sentiment that patents are helping advance art and science.

Because the super soaker guy wants his patent, small software companies have to eat shit from patent trolls and millions (billions?) has to be spent by companies in litigation?

The positives don't outweigh the negatives.

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Re:The last patent on AC-3 (Dolby Digital) expires at midnight by jdietrich on Monday March 20, 2017 @04:45AM (#13912625)

Software patents are obviously bogus, as shown by the Curry-Howard correspondence. Software is not patentable in many jurisdictions.

Abandoning the patent system because of software patents would be an egregious example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The USPTO and the American civil legal system is broken in a lot of quite fundamental ways, but that doesn't invalidate the basic idea of patent law.

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Re:The last patent on AC-3 (Dolby Digital) expires at midnight by TeMPOraL on Monday March 20, 2017 @04:41AM (#13912611)

To be fair, our civilization is built on accumulating such "small" inventions. Even such (literally) Earth-shattering invention as the atomic bomb required thousands of smaller inventions across many different areas of science and engineering.

I agree that software patents situation is shit, though it would be great if we could handle patent systems of different industries in isolation.

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