The original idea of a patent was full and open disclosure in exchange for a fixed period of control. The assumption was as Edison said, 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. The fixed period was to motivate the perspiration. As with any system it had glaring successes and failures but it was always as an option to trade secrets which, last I heard, are more numerous than patents. No one is required to use the patent system. Reverse engineering a trade secret cannot be patented as it is by definition prior art.
Inventors are not like Buddhist monks in that no one gives them gold coins just for sitting around inventing all day. They are on their own getting reimbursement for their effort. And as the author notes, they have to do it within their own culture.
That said the patent system has gotten out of hand and particularly in the foolish application to software. Everyone has their favorite rant on a software patent. Most of them are not about the software but on what is done regardless of the software making it happen. That is not an invention. That is not an novelty. They are things you have to be a dullard not to see as obvious.
Patents are no longer to encourage beneficial novelties which are better known to the public than kept secret. They have become commodities. Patent claims are company tradegoods with attorneys as the traders. The use of these patents is no longer to introduce better products but as part of overall profit strategies.
Let us remember all of the issues of the software community can be eliminated by simply nullifying all software patents.
Copyright has always been the reasonable way to deal with software. The meaning of infringement is reasonably well established as is the concept of public domain. The latter has served the open source community well.
Lets keep patents and copyright as separate issues and deal with them separately.
I got my last provers back in 1967 so I certainly do not remember everything. But I do not remember ever, repeat ever, having to go through an entire textbook. It was always selected sections of a text which constituted the course material. Maybe it was different in liberal arts courses.
So why are there textbooks? Only bits and pieces of them are needed for course work. Why are there not just those sections instead? Why commission a complete text and evaluate the total content when only pieces of it are ever used?
And why do students have to pay for an entire book when at little as a quarter of it will be used? Why not just publish each section separately and sell them separately?
And while we are on the subject when has enough progress been made to warrant revising the entire text? Why not instead keep all the old sections in print and only create only a section or two on what has progressed?
Once having the sacred sheepskin do we ever learn from a textbook again? We read papers instead. If we need to learn a new subject we find material which relates that subject to our specialization not the generalities of a textbook. So why are students deprived of specialized booklets and required to buy entire texts to get the parts needed?
And if done this way how far is each section from public domain material? There are only so many different ways to say a thing. Consider programming languages. Ever tried counting up how many "Getting started in _______" there are for each language? Ever notice they all appear to agree with essentially the same examples for that language? Is there really a need for more than one or two of these for each language? Is there really a need for three or four a year each and every year for each language?
They all say about the same thing. They might as well be public domain. The way they are they give the appearance of being rewritten to avoid copyright infringement not to produce intrinsically better material.
So lets get passed the archaic idea of textbooks and start producing materials which reflect the selected parts of the books which are in fact the only parts taught. That will reduce the costs for students. For some subjects texts that went out of copyright a century ago are still the last word on the subject. Geometry really has not changed much. A 2010 text is going to cover the same material as one from 1910.
Authored Comments
The original idea of a patent was full and open disclosure in exchange for a fixed period of control. The assumption was as Edison said, 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. The fixed period was to motivate the perspiration. As with any system it had glaring successes and failures but it was always as an option to trade secrets which, last I heard, are more numerous than patents. No one is required to use the patent system. Reverse engineering a trade secret cannot be patented as it is by definition prior art.
Inventors are not like Buddhist monks in that no one gives them gold coins just for sitting around inventing all day. They are on their own getting reimbursement for their effort. And as the author notes, they have to do it within their own culture.
That said the patent system has gotten out of hand and particularly in the foolish application to software. Everyone has their favorite rant on a software patent. Most of them are not about the software but on what is done regardless of the software making it happen. That is not an invention. That is not an novelty. They are things you have to be a dullard not to see as obvious.
Patents are no longer to encourage beneficial novelties which are better known to the public than kept secret. They have become commodities. Patent claims are company tradegoods with attorneys as the traders. The use of these patents is no longer to introduce better products but as part of overall profit strategies.
Let us remember all of the issues of the software community can be eliminated by simply nullifying all software patents.
Copyright has always been the reasonable way to deal with software. The meaning of infringement is reasonably well established as is the concept of public domain. The latter has served the open source community well.
Lets keep patents and copyright as separate issues and deal with them separately.
I got my last provers back in 1967 so I certainly do not remember everything. But I do not remember ever, repeat ever, having to go through an entire textbook. It was always selected sections of a text which constituted the course material. Maybe it was different in liberal arts courses.
So why are there textbooks? Only bits and pieces of them are needed for course work. Why are there not just those sections instead? Why commission a complete text and evaluate the total content when only pieces of it are ever used?
And why do students have to pay for an entire book when at little as a quarter of it will be used? Why not just publish each section separately and sell them separately?
And while we are on the subject when has enough progress been made to warrant revising the entire text? Why not instead keep all the old sections in print and only create only a section or two on what has progressed?
Once having the sacred sheepskin do we ever learn from a textbook again? We read papers instead. If we need to learn a new subject we find material which relates that subject to our specialization not the generalities of a textbook. So why are students deprived of specialized booklets and required to buy entire texts to get the parts needed?
And if done this way how far is each section from public domain material? There are only so many different ways to say a thing. Consider programming languages. Ever tried counting up how many "Getting started in _______" there are for each language? Ever notice they all appear to agree with essentially the same examples for that language? Is there really a need for more than one or two of these for each language? Is there really a need for three or four a year each and every year for each language?
They all say about the same thing. They might as well be public domain. The way they are they give the appearance of being rewritten to avoid copyright infringement not to produce intrinsically better material.
So lets get passed the archaic idea of textbooks and start producing materials which reflect the selected parts of the books which are in fact the only parts taught. That will reduce the costs for students. For some subjects texts that went out of copyright a century ago are still the last word on the subject. Geometry really has not changed much. A 2010 text is going to cover the same material as one from 1910.