The existence of patents also was meant to create an industry for selling ideas rather than physical goods.

How often are people really inventing novel things, patenting them, and then licensing them out to other parties or selling the rights? By far the most applied use case of patents is to fabricate or buy bullshit IP to sue anyone even remotely close to your product or service into bankruptcy.

In some ways, yes, patents have created jobs. Except the job is not to be innovative or discover new things, but to manipulate and optimize your language in a patent filing to cover as much existing IP as possible that you can then harass with your patents.

It is only most obvious with software patents because of how insane it is to restrict math like that.

The question always has to be do the benefits outweigh the costs. Are the few and far between actively able to use the patent system as a means to come up with legitimately novel inventions worth all the innovation lost to corporations using patents as weapons to shut down competition and prevent innovation.

> The problem is, over the past few years software has been moving way too fast for the standard patent timeframe.

Two thoughts:

- Why does this mean that they should be eliminated entirely? Why not revise the timeframe?

- Isn't this argument applicable to almost all modern patents, whether software, technological, or otherwise?

Not the parent poster, but personally I just don't see the value (to the public) with this model.

Most A/V codec development these days is done at least somewhat out in the open, and there are collaborators between different organizations. The nature of the beast is that you can't release codecs to the public without inherently giving away how it works. Even if you lock things down with NDAs and such, people will reverse-engineer it before too long.

That alone isn't an indictment of patents here (note that drug development suffers from similar issues, at least wrt disclosure), but:

This sort of work will happen regardless of whether or not there are patents covering them (the fact that we have/had things like Vorbis, FLAC, VP8/9, Tarkin, Theora, AV1, etc. is proof of that), so in the end patenting these sorts of things doesn't actually "promote the progress of science and useful arts"; it just encourages rent-seeking behavior. Patent-encumbered codecs out there are not meaningfully better performance-wise than the patent-unencumbered ones (certainly not enough to justify the licensing fees); the patent-encumbered ones are merely better at marketing, so everyone who wants to do anything with video ends up paying a tax for no real benefit.

I favor the elimination of software patents but if we must have them then things like MPEG are one of the few examples of software that probably should qualify for patent protection. The idea that no one would research new video codecs without patent protection is laughable - OS vendors, network operators, et al are highly motivated to do so regardless of patents.

Unfortunately making software non-patentable isn't likely to happen anytime soon. Perhaps we should fight for some key changes like reducing the length of software patents to something reasonable like 5 years.

I'd also like to see an "industry standards" exception to patents: Any implementation of an industry standard created by an international standards organization, working group, or similar authority is exempt from patent suits. Royalties are fixed at some rate determined by the board (but no more than x% of sales price or flat $y per item indexed to inflation) and go into a pool. All patents in the pool are paid out of it. If you think your patent covers something in the standard your only option is to submit your patent to the pool, then you get a cut of the royalties corresponding to your contribution (again as determined by an impartial board). Any fights over standards-related patents would be confined to the board of experts, the royalty rate they determine, and the allocation to each patent. The law would specify that changes to royalties (even court-ordered) can only go into effect once per year and only apply to products manufactured after that date.

Such a scheme would encourage everyone to contribute to open standards because it would be the only way to ensure you can avoid patent lawsuits.

The one wrinkle is open-source software. I was trying to come up with a workable system. All I landed on was no royalties required for open-source software or end-users of such software, but if a manufacturer uses such software in a product they sell then they would still be subject to royalties.

This all just sounds too complicated. Why not just require that any technology developed for an industry standard, ratified by an international standards body, be given away, with patent rights disclaimed? I honestly don't see why we should allow people to make money off of foundational things like this. It creates perverse incentives.

As you point out, the lack of patent revenue here isn't going to hurt innovation; I agree that it's laughable that the lack of patent protection would stop or even slow down research here.

But one could argue it‘s always better to re-invent something superior and the timeframe might as well be nonexistent