No, you get a patent for your secret anti-clog dishwasher, so that the courts grant you a monopoly on it. In exchange, you have to give something back - specifically, you have to reveal your secret design to society - so that it is useful to someone in the future. That's the contract that you agree to, when you patent something.

If you don't want to reveal your design, you could always keep it a trade secret.

If you're a genius working on software, you shouldn't have trouble filing a patent that would be useful to another engineer, once it expires. For some reason, though, people instead patent stupid shit like 'a software system that does _______.' They don't actually explain how to build a software system that does _____, they don't give anything back to society, and are instead leeching of the largess of our legal system.

If you want protection for your invention, tell us how it works. It's a pretty simple concept.

But does mp3 fall in the category you describe? I agree with you that many software patents should not be granted, but the distinction should not be between software/notsoftware.

Software patents aren't particularly useful for making money with software. Hackers produce code, which is protected by copyright, and that's how the law protects them from having their work stolen. Patents are a bad match for software, and are mainly used for two things:

1. Trolls use them to seek rent from independent creations.

2. Companies that are not purely trolls but need a vector to attack another company sometimes use them in the same way trolls do.

3. Entities that actually make software use them as a deterrent against patent claims.

Nobody actually depends on them for the profitability of software they've made, and nobody actually benefits from the disclosures in expired patents. Software patents are purely weapons. The hypothetical genius you're talking about would not be harmed at all if they went away, and would be better off because they'd be spared the vicissitudes of patent trolls' attention.

There are alternatives to patents - for example hosting research intensive parts of your system in the cloud.

This is pretty much what is happening with speech recognition these days among other things.

No need to worry about opensource, or the fragility of patents, when you keep your technology a secret.

Another approach is to use trade secrets - you encrypt parts of your application - reducing performance - enabling you to sue anyone who decompiles it in order to replicate, or indeed interface with it.

Patents would actually seem the least of these evils, if they were only less broken.

What about 4: research institute that invents an audio compression method? The work that goes into mp3 isn't just coding the method.

Debating software patents with silicon valley types is a losing battle. They're the types who would stand to profit from someones non-obvious software invention not being patentable, and so most such people are unsurprisingly against software patents. There's little nuance involved beyond that.

What is a "Silicon Valley type"?

People who see themselves as entrepreneurs/hustlers/hackers, in contrast to scientists/inventors/researchers.

Can you name any examples of "non-obvious" software "inventions" that require patent protection?

RSA is the usual example. Do you disagree with it?

Yes, I disagree. Why does/did RSA require a patent?

Require is the wrong word. The question is were we better off with or without them having a patent. Not keeping RSA a trade secret seems like a win for society.

That presupposes a lot. Who says it would have been kept a "trade secret"? And, supposing it would have been, who's to say someone else wouldn't have come along with an alternative open solution?

The difference is that person now has to sell their idea packaged in a finished product to see any return on their idea. If you could patent it and license it, you could make money on the idea while leaving the work of developing a polished product to the experts at delivering products to end users.

Ideas in the software world are essentially worthless. Execution (your ability to implement the idea) is what actually matters. So, forgive me if I'm not losing sleep over the person who has to actually do work to see "return on their idea."

The same can be said about inventions in any sphere. But that's exactly what patents correct for; to give value to ideas independent of them being productized. And so your point is not at all an argument against software patents.

Patents are not meant to be a way to stake a claim on an idea (https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/can-you-patent-an-idea) — they're a system where you get a temporary monopoly in exchange for sharing a novel, non-obvious and non-abstract invention.

To be clear, I didn't say that's what patents are for (i.e. their purpose), but what they correct for, i.e. what they do in practice.

But I don't see that the two descriptions are different in practice. Patents incentivize publicly releasing an invention instead of keeping it a trade secret (or letting it languish). The problem this is solving is that ideas aren't valued by the market, only products. But society benefits from ideas independent of products. And so the solution is a system to put value on ideas, ergo patents. This meshes with my alternate description.

Patents don't purport to offer protection for ideas.

Was something unclear about this sentence?

>To be clear, I didn't say that's what patents are for (i.e. their purpose), but what they correct for, i.e. what they do in practice.

The problem is software isn't tangible. Something like an algorithm is different. It's mathematically provable. The vast majority of software patents are based on preexisting concepts such as the patent IBM was awarded for "Resolution of Abbreviated Text in an Electronic Communications System", which is a database that looks up abbreviations like netspeak and fills in the full word. Or Google's patent for "Variable User Interface Based on Document Access Privileges" which shows something different on a webpage based on your geographical location. Something websites had been doing for years. These frivolous software patents by major tech companies are predatory and stifle innovation. They know the patents won't hold up in court, but they can afford protracted legal battles startups cant and use that leverage to strong-arm smaller companies.

Right, it was only after the patent office was invented that people started inventing things. Before that, nothing of consequence was created by humanity.

Isn't it odd that they were able to invent the patent office without an already existing patent office? Quite a miracle.