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A comment on The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been terminated. Parent comment

Re:The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been te... by hackinthebochs on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @01:29AM (#14244146)
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.
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Re:The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been te... by bogositosius on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @02:59AM (#14244476)
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."
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Re:The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been te... by hackinthebochs on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @08:51AM (#14245916)
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.
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Re:The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been te... by chc on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @10:36AM (#14246663)
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.
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Re:The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been te... by hackinthebochs on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @08:55PM (#14252180)
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.

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Re:The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been te... by bogositosius on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @11:37PM (#14252843)
Patents don't purport to offer protection for ideas.
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Re:The licensing program for MP3-related patents has been te... by hackinthebochs on Wednesday May 03, 2017 @02:09AM (#14253432)
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.

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