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Miloslav Ciz 2024-03-08 16:56:58 +01:00
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patent.md
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@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ There is an article on software patents at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/softwa
Patents are kind of similar to but also very different from copyright ([Richard Stallman](rms.md) stressed the differences and says it is dangerous to think of copyright and patents as similar): while copyright applies to [art](art.md) and is granted automatically, patents apply to ideas (which should ideally be new inventions but in practice can be just any trivially stupid ideas), have to be registered and are kept recorded somewhere. Patents also last a shorter time than copyright (generally 20 years as opposed to copyright's lifetime plus 70 years) and are territorial, i.e. not world-wide. These facts make patents a bit less disastrous than copyright, however they still cause a great deal of damage -- not only do they prevent technological progress (a new ideas such as a new efficient [algorithm](algorithm.md) is simply prohibited to be used by anyone but it's "owner" and those who the owner sells a license), they also allow so called **patent trolling** (patent scams) -- patent trolling takes advantage of the fact that it is practically impossible to safely check if some idea is not patented, i.e. safe to use. There exist troll companies whose sole business is to register trivial patents and then sue random people who unknowingly implement this idea in their projects (there is e.g. a famous video about how this happened to the developer of X-plane, trolled by Uniloc company that had patented the idea of using a "play store" to distribute programs) -- the companies often bully developers to off court settlement for paying a lower free but this includes a contract that **prevents the affected developers from talking about this**.
Granting and checking patents is also becoming progressively more difficult, expensive and sometimes basically impossible, as any new filed patent has to be checked for how "innovative" it is. This means someone has to literally go through all ideas ever invented in computer science (impossible even for the biggest brain on the planet) and check if the new submited idea is really new -- given that computer science progresses by lightning speed, every day it is becoming more and more difficult to check patents. As time for checking a patent is limited, the result is many false positives, errors and grants of patents on trivial or non-innovative ideas, which has disastrous consequences. And of course, we're not even talking about corruption -- patents are highly lucrative and it would be naive to believe there are no cases of someone just buying a patent grant.
Granting and checking patents is also becoming progressively more difficult, expensive and sometimes basically impossible, as any new filed patent has to be checked for how "innovative" it is. This means someone has to literally go through all ideas ever invented in computer science (impossible even for the biggest brain on the planet) and check if the new submitted idea is really new -- given that computer science progresses by lightning speed, every day it is becoming more and more difficult to check patents. As time for checking a patent is limited, the result is many false positives, errors and grants of patents on trivial or non-innovative ideas, which has disastrous consequences. And of course, we're not even talking about corruption -- patents are highly lucrative and it would be naive to believe there are no cases of someone just buying a patent grant.
Many (probably most) [free software](free_software.md) proponents, and just many programmers in general, including for example [Richard Stallman](rms.md), [John Carmack](john_carmack.md) or [Donald Knuth](knuth.md), have highly criticized the existence of software patents. [Richard Stallman](rms.md) himself has been warning of the dangers and has likened the world of patents to a **mine field** because when you're programming, you have no idea whether an idea you get and implement in your program isn't in fact "owned" by anyone, programming itself poses risk of stepping on mines (patents).
@ -20,4 +20,4 @@ Some patents are [fun](fun.md) and bullshit, e.g. there exist bizarre patents th
- [intellectual property](intellectual_property.md)
- [copyright](copyright.md)
- [trademark](trademark.md)
- [trademark](trademark.md)