Laws are national in scope. That's not the point; in any case, it's too reductionist - organizations like WIPO exist to normalize IP laws so that IP owners can make profits from licensing their IP in other countries.
Rather, the points are as follows:
the global nature of invention in the software industry tests the abilities of any national patent process severely, as software components, subsystems, etc invented in India are very likely to end up incorporated in software used in the USA;
the convergence of the software industry (a lot of people in a lot of places working on similar problems), in my opinion at least, makes it quite likely there are examples of simultaneous invention;
the imprecise nature of date tracking in software development, except in the most formal practice, makes it hard to get a good handle on the precise moment of invention, especially if that handle doesn't seem important until five years after the moment of invention because of a patent dispute.
You edited my "crumble" comment a bit overmuch for my taste. What I can claim with a straight face, or a smile if you'd prefer, is
"that the whole patent mechanism starts to crumble in such a set of circumstances"
those circumstances being: global development of software, convergence on a similar problem set, and intrinsic difficulty establishing moment of "software invention".
"A programmer owns the original code he or she writes" - not true, I think; at least in my country, the employer of the programmer owns the code, unless specific contracts state otherwise.
"the first to invent x is entitled to a patent on x" - also, not true, I think; the first who asserts ownership to the invented thing x is entitled to a patent on x. Else why would IBM, etc own patents? IBM didn't invent the things; employees of IBM did. Or, being ignorant of how this really works, perhaps the IBM employee gets the patent and then assigns or shares the right somehow with IBM. Or, perhaps I'm completely wrong and IBM, Microsoft, etc don't really own any patents, their employees do.
(Not to pick on IBM overmuch, they've seen value in supporting open source models too).
"those with the most money can seek - and be granted - patents on inventions they did not create" - true. also those with the means and inclination to chase patents rather than just create.
You avoid discussing my main topic, doubtless because I put it forward so poorly - that there are so many people inventing software things, in so many corners of the world, that there are bound to be some things invented simultaneously, and that the whole patent mechanism starts to crumble in such a set of circumstances.
If you accept that premise, and you may not, it then becomes tough to come up with any more satisfactory definition of your word "original" than "the person or organization who first files the patent".
That is, the person or organization who has lots of time, money, and lawyers to patent a compression algorithm or an image format or one-click purchasing or whatever, and to defend that patent vigorously once awarded.
Which is probably the same person or organization making use of public domain algorithms and code in other parts of its operations (like, for example, the wonderful corpus of public sorting algorithms, or hashing algorithms, or tree and list structures, or TCP/IP, or Linux, all of which could have been patented but weren't, none of which were obvious, and all of which benefit each and every one of us on a daily basis).
To quote the original post, "patents were meant to reward innovation - so the question is, 'how did we lose our way'".
A nice discussion. Not sure we answered the question.
Authored Comments
Laws are national in scope. That's not the point; in any case, it's too reductionist - organizations like WIPO exist to normalize IP laws so that IP owners can make profits from licensing their IP in other countries.
Rather, the points are as follows:
the global nature of invention in the software industry tests the abilities of any national patent process severely, as software components, subsystems, etc invented in India are very likely to end up incorporated in software used in the USA;
the convergence of the software industry (a lot of people in a lot of places working on similar problems), in my opinion at least, makes it quite likely there are examples of simultaneous invention;
the imprecise nature of date tracking in software development, except in the most formal practice, makes it hard to get a good handle on the precise moment of invention, especially if that handle doesn't seem important until five years after the moment of invention because of a patent dispute.
You edited my "crumble" comment a bit overmuch for my taste. What I can claim with a straight face, or a smile if you'd prefer, is
"that the whole patent mechanism starts to crumble in such a set of circumstances"
those circumstances being: global development of software, convergence on a similar problem set, and intrinsic difficulty establishing moment of "software invention".
"A programmer owns the original code he or she writes" - not true, I think; at least in my country, the employer of the programmer owns the code, unless specific contracts state otherwise.
"the first to invent x is entitled to a patent on x" - also, not true, I think; the first who asserts ownership to the invented thing x is entitled to a patent on x. Else why would IBM, etc own patents? IBM didn't invent the things; employees of IBM did. Or, being ignorant of how this really works, perhaps the IBM employee gets the patent and then assigns or shares the right somehow with IBM. Or, perhaps I'm completely wrong and IBM, Microsoft, etc don't really own any patents, their employees do.
(Not to pick on IBM overmuch, they've seen value in supporting open source models too).
"those with the most money can seek - and be granted - patents on inventions they did not create" - true. also those with the means and inclination to chase patents rather than just create.
You avoid discussing my main topic, doubtless because I put it forward so poorly - that there are so many people inventing software things, in so many corners of the world, that there are bound to be some things invented simultaneously, and that the whole patent mechanism starts to crumble in such a set of circumstances.
If you accept that premise, and you may not, it then becomes tough to come up with any more satisfactory definition of your word "original" than "the person or organization who first files the patent".
That is, the person or organization who has lots of time, money, and lawyers to patent a compression algorithm or an image format or one-click purchasing or whatever, and to defend that patent vigorously once awarded.
Which is probably the same person or organization making use of public domain algorithms and code in other parts of its operations (like, for example, the wonderful corpus of public sorting algorithms, or hashing algorithms, or tree and list structures, or TCP/IP, or Linux, all of which could have been patented but weren't, none of which were obvious, and all of which benefit each and every one of us on a daily basis).
To quote the original post, "patents were meant to reward innovation - so the question is, 'how did we lose our way'".
A nice discussion. Not sure we answered the question.