You mean you can't get a government-backed monopoly on your product, so you actually have to compete?! With competitors who charge lower prices?! Cry me a river.

Besides that, such a big fuss over being able to 'bill a constant amount' month-to-month, it really is nothing but a business method, no matter how intricate the computations behind the scenes.

It's a convenience at best, and one that I would assume would be re-creatable by any number of mathematicians given the assignment.

But just about any patentable idea is recreatable by experts in that field if they are given that assignment. I do not claim to know whether or not this particular patent should have been granted, but I do not see why the fact that it can reverse engineered should be relevant.

Clean room development is usually (but not always) not enough to get around a patent though.

I know that clean room implementation has been used to avoid trade secret and copyright claims, but that seems to have little relevance in this case. If anything, it seems to somewhat show the need to have a patent protect developments like this.

That means you can treat it as a black box without any knowledge of what is going on inside and produce an identical black box with a possibly completely different implementation on the inside.

These guys are essentially trying to patent something that can be expressed as a mathematical formula, and in my opinion that should not be possible.

Reduce it to an absurdity, imagine the patent on 'Pi' or a patent on calculus. Does it seem 'right' to you that such a thing should be patentable ?

If any group of mathematicians skilled in the art could come up with it that alone should have been grounds for dismissal, just being the first should not give you an automatic entitlement.

Things like this make me almost think I should be going into law. This will truly matter to a large number of companies, and probably more so to start ups than to larger more established companies that already have market share.

You've actually got it somewhat backwards--patents were in large part originally motivated by inventions where reverse engineering was not possible--metalworking techniques, for instance. By granting a temporary monopoly, patents would encourage inventors to publish their ideas. Otherwise, to protect their advantage, inventors would keep their methods secret, preventing others from improving on them and eventually taking the secret to the grave with them.

In that situation, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that patents were a bad idea.

And unlike physical patents it costs nothing to produce the software once the innovation has been made, so there is no need for a small guy to have something to sell to a big company to ensure the innovator is getting something for his efforts.

PG has said in other essays that it often makes sense for a startup to not worry about whether what they are trying to do until they are sued. If they are still tiny it is unlikely they will be sued even if they are infinging, and if they are large then they will have the resources to either defend against the suit or make a reasonable settlement.

But that is a practical matter. None of that changes the fact that it borders on logically inconsistent to argue for patents of machines while against the patenting of algorithms (and a program is nothing but an algorithm that has been properly formatted).

If you (quite sensibly) throw out the obfuscating language about morality and property rights, however, it's certainly possible to assert "temporary, government-enforced monopolies on ideas of this type will encourage innovation, but government-granted monopolies on ideas of that other type will hinder progress and encourage misuse". This is a statement of factual nature, that may be correct or incorrect, but is not logically inconsistent. It also makes it more obvious that patents, despite being called "IP", are not actually about property at all--they're a regulatory hack, the government deliberately distorting the market with the goal of subsidizing particular behaviors, namely innovation and invention.

If you make patents too powerful, you get people 'patent trolling' and producing a lot of vague patents with no intentions of implementing/putting to use/selling the IP involved; instead hoping to be able to sue someone for violating it.

If you make patents too weak, people invest heavily in reverse engineering instead of innovation/invention and take other people's ideas and make money off of them.

I find this to be a very frustrating and disheartening position to be in.

I almost think that there is something wrong with the idea of patents (not the idea of intellectual property) because it seems that they fail at both ends of the spectrum with regards to protecting people who actually produce useful things for our society and continue to push us forward.

It seems like all of that simply means that we need to make sure the balance is struck in the right place. And no matter what balance is struck, it will create some problems and make some people unhappy, but getting it at least close to right is likely to be good for society as a whole.

The patent system is predicated on the idea of disclosure (indeed, the very word "patent" derives from a Latin word meaning "open"). The idea is that inventors will add their innovative knowledge to the public domain, for which they will receive a temporary monopoly on its commercial exploitation.

Most proprietary software is protected by trade secret laws, which are vulnerable to reverse engineering. Patented software is not, since it has already been disclosed in the public record and is nonetheless protected during the term of the patent by virtue of its monopoly status.

I guess my point is: Think of the patent debate as a continuum where at one end you have 'strong patents' and at the other end you have 'weak patents'.

At the strong patents end you have a prevalence of IP trolling. At the weak/no patents end you have a prevalence of reverse engineering and heavily reduced incentive to innovate (might as well just copy and produce/market cheaper/better). IP trolling and reverse engineering are kind of edge-case exploits.

It isn't clear to me that anything in the middle of the continuum (defends against both edge cases) is really consistent with what we think of as a patent, or that there is anything in the middle that is actually possible enforce in a fair and consistent matter.