Voice Tech's patents, according to their abstract, involve "receiving audio data from [a] mobile device at the computer. The audio data is decoded into a command. A software program that the command was provided for is determined. At least one process is executed at the computer in response to the command. Output data is generated at the computer in response to executing at least one process at the computer. The output data is transmitted to the mobile device."
https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/12/mycroft_patent_troll/
All software patents are hardware patents since the program runs on the computer.
That's the loophole that the EPO has been using to allow software patents to be granted anyway, despite their exclusion in the law.
After the failed attempt to codify their practice in law in 2005, the large companies and the patent industry decided to install their own court, the Unified Patent Court, which might go live next 1st March.
They broke the rule of law as they needed the signature of the UK, with the blessing of the European Commission Thierry Breton, the guy who was ex-CEO of Technicolor, who made a fortune with MP3 patents.
Seems like a very very real reason to be horrified by software patents.
In my opinion, this is like patenting putting a blue Lego brick on a red brick because nobody bothered to write down or patent that particular combination before. There's no core novelty here, and obviously Mycroft was not stealing profits from Voice Tech Corp.
We can find other ways to finance "innovation".
For small companies patents are basically worthless, a big company can just play legal ropeadope until they run out of money.
For a startup, however, patents can still have value in at least the following ways:
1. Patents on improvements can discourage established competitors who are using the same or similar improvements from suing the startup for infringing the competitors' patents.
2. A potential acquirer may want to acquire the company for its patents. The acquirer may be an established competitor who does have the resources to assert the patents against other competitors.
3. Patents encourage investors who see patents as residual assets that would be liquidated if the company fails.
There are very few places in law where you can legally stake a claim within someone else's territory and exploit it for profit.
Without patents pharmaceutical industry would be nearly impossible, i.e. it's very hard to come up with a compound but very easy to synthesize it as soon as it's known.
Long story short, there are enough sick people to provide medicine to and have a profitable business through a high volume of care, and governments are much better at providing long term financial stability than private corporations to burden the necessarily regulatory costs.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforceme...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/pharmaceutical-companies-pay-...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/three-generic-pharmaceu...
Take FDM 3D printers for example. Stratasys figured out and patented the first one almost 35 years ago and then proceeded to do fuck all with it, selling mediocre garbage for sky high prices. After it expired in 2009 3D printing rapidly became a whole industry with dirt cheap hardware, enabling millions to make things never before thought possible. We could've reached that point in the early 90s if it weren't for patents.
Sure one might say, it also forces the patentee to disclose the inns and outs of the invention, but frankly those patent descriptions are often as bare bones as possible and you'd get there reverse engineering any product far sooner than 20 years.
Anyway it's likely I misunderstood something there since again I know nothing. But after hearing that, I considered that while software patents are obviously bad, maybe they make some sense in other industries.
https://cepr.net/we-can-develop-new-drugs-without-patent-mon...
> While drug companies do operate to make a profit, the part of the story that Nisen misses is that the profit does not have to be gained through patent monopolies. Suppose that the U.S. and other governments put up research funding, which private corporations like Gilead could bid on based on their expertise and track record. In this case, a condition of the research is that all patents would be in the public domain (the companies were already paid for their work) and all results would be fully public as soon as practical.
The above comes from Dean Baker, who seems to be confident and credentialed.
They don't know a world without such patents and they don't know the people and companies who would do research in such a world.
That's a claim like nobody would be a fire fighter if it wasn't a paid job. Guess how reality is really like.
What about all the underpaid people in healthcare? By that mindset those people wouldn't exits.
Why do people comment about the way society works when clearly agency is monopolized to focus on fiat wealth targets, not real work of value.
Of course patents also create monopolies and because no one wants to go backwards, monopolies never get challenged or challenged with little consequence so you can hold many country's and their population hostage quite legally.
Excellent point, and it's the same with some proposed AI Laws.
There is next to zero proper due diligence done for a patent to be awarded and there is no consequence to the office for issuing invalid patents. Just significantly raising examination fees, getting the patent office on the hook for issuance of invalid patents and fining companies filling for frivolous patents would solve most if not all of the current issues.
I leave investigating why it's not done as an exercise to the reader.