That article sounds like it supports a corrollary of rayiner's theory, that men are sick of having to "earn it". The article certainly seems to support that it is indeed women who control sex, and anytime they "settle for less" they feel like they're "giving it up".
Little do they know that even in marriage the dynamics don't change much, only the number of people involved (married people stereotype joke :-))
"Detecting Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Activity in Second Life and World of Warcraft", Angela S M Irwin, Jill Slay - University of South Australia
Heh, I'm surprised there have been no New Yorkers yet chiming in to say "good riddance". Most New Yorkers -- in my experience -- seem to share the sentiment that there are too many tourists already.
Oh boy, that paper is a huge exercise in setting up a strawman and knocking it down. Lemley has done some good work, but this is not it.
1. He goes on and on about "patent theory", and it's worlds apart from how patent systems work in practice. His feeble connection is that practice is based on theory.
2. He cites a paper that directly contradict what he's saying.
2. a) He cites a paper to ostensibly support his theory that patent offices are pro-individual, but the reference actually says, without paraphrasing, "The patent laws do very little to prompt this view." It actually concludes that the lone-inventor rhetoric "has done little to stave off the increasingly anti-individual-inventor changes in substantive patent law."
2. b) He perpetuates the same "Watt stopped Steam" myth that Boldrin and Levine make. And to support this, he cites the Turner/Selgin paper that asserts precisely the opposite!
3. Further, regarding steam, he insinuates patent law didn't work as expected because Watt's patents promoted steam research by forcing workarounds. In fact, innovation through forced workaround has long been a known (though possibly post-facto) rationalization of the patent system.
4. All the examples he gives of "multiple independent invention" are actually examples of multiple individuals independently inventing different inventions. And he further proves it by saying that many of those inventors secured patents for their own inventions as well!
5. All the other parties working on the "genius" inventions did contribute to overall knowledge, but a) their work was not wasted since they did things differently, exploring the problem space further, and frequently got their own patents, and b) those inventions that ended up being remembered as genius were actually the commercially more successful ones, typically because they were either technically superior or their inventors were sharper businessmen.
6. He implies accidental inventions are less deserving of protection, completely omitting that those inventions all happened in labs or research environments by people who were actively experimenting.
Throughout this paper, Lemley consistently makes two mistakes:
* He conflates the broad “idea” of something with the specific implementation that makes that something work;
* He conflates popular narrative about patents with the patent system;
And based on these two, he enumerates flaws in popular narrative where most major inventions were not invented only by those that got all the credit.
And then he completely fails to show how this flawed narrative has anything to do with the patent system, which, by his very own examples, does reward individual and incremental contributions.
My problem with that book is that the authors start it with a lie [1], and changed to different lies when being called out on it [2]. They also made some misrepresentations of how software and open source works.
Just from that, it was difficult for me to take anything else they say at face value. To top it off, I just came across a reference [3] suggesting Boldrin and Levine's analysis of the dye market was inaccurate, and that patents actually played a big role in German dominance in the market.
The one thing I've realized from reading a lot of studies, anyone that makes a broad claim that IP if "all good" or "all bad" is wrong.
Did someone say "research" and "patents" in the same sentence? :-)
I was going to rifle through my vast collection of references to studies about patents, but I just came across a pretty good review of the research of economics of patents:
"Recent Research on the Economics of Patents" - Bronwyn H. Hall, Dietmar Harhoff (Google for PDF)
I'm still going through it, but it will give you an idea of what the current research looks like.
Here's the deal: Whether patents promote innovation, and whether their benefits outweigh the harms, are extremely difficult questions to answer. I mean, how do you even measure "innovation"? You could say by "counting patents", but that's simply a circular argument! Not to mention the complaints that many patents are low quality, or that companies like Twitter are regularly called "innovative".
So in absence of any direct indicators, what the vast majority of studies do is roughly this:
1. Pick a few metrics that act as proxies for whatever they measure (innovation, patent quality, economic benefit, economic harm, productivity, R&D efforts, etc.);
2. Gather data from which these metrics can be gleaned, typically constrained along many dimensions such as time, industry sectors, sources, etc. to make gathering it feasible. (Sometimes this step is actually optional and author outright just run simulations on what they think are "reasonable" approximations of data. Sometimes they don't even do that. In the paper above, they're referred to as "Theoretical Evidence");
3. Present a hypothesis;
4. Construct a model;
5. And test the model to see if their hypotheses stand up to the data or not.
And at each step they provide varying degrees of explanations of their methodologies, assumptions, controls, potential confounding factors, flaws in their data, and so on.
As you can imagine, it is rather difficult to make solid, generalizable conclusions. For one, the metrics may be pretty poor approximations. Or the model may be poor. Or the hypothesis may be flawed - an unfortunate problem with many studies is that they do not take into account changes in the legal environment (such as the changes wrought by the AIA and decisions like Medimmune v. Genentech) so their very premises are flawed.
Fortunately, many studies are all about finding flaws in other previous studies, so there's some semblance of balance.
Really, go through the paper above and the papers it cites, and you'll see why it's downright impossible to make broad assertions like "patents promote innovation" or "patents harm innovation".
> ... and said "I represent a concerned group of local small business people and programmers, and software patents are destroying our ability to make a living and causing us to lose jobs", that software patents would have been a solved problems years ago.
That is very true, but my very strong hunch is that this hasn't happened because software patents are not really a problem -- at least not anymore. As I've said elsewhere, the vast majority of programmers barely even know what a patent is, and tons more consider them a good thing. Those are also overwhelmingly the people that don't spend time posting on places like this.
Another indirect piece of evidence is the current uproar in Congress about patent trolls: A handful of trolls (that I'm aware of) -- like the WiFi guys, the scan-to-email guys, the vehicle-tracking guys -- send out demand letters to mom & pop businesses, and suddenly Congress is up in arms. It's possible, but I find it unlikely that, if there are so many companies involved in software patent litigation, there are not even a few that would reach out to their representatives.
However TFA is being silly in claiming it threatens any significnt portion of MSFT's licensing revenue. Companies that size don't typically license individual patents, they license portfolios of patents.
Now the following is all speculation, since these licensing deals are very closely guarded, but from the few I've heard of: I'm guessing Microsoft's "smartphone" (or maybe the "linux") portfolio has dozens of patents, each of varying value, of which this was just one. So the portfolio's value will decrease a bit, but I'm guessing not by much.
I'll let alone the fact that your definition of "software patents" is flawed. Let me address your other points.
> There are so many conclusive arguments against software patents that the result is overdetermined.
Or, also known as "being in an echo chamber".
> Black boxes are never patentable.
The concepts of a Person of Ordinary Skill and Doctrine of Equivalents is not "black boxes". Are you saying all the so-called "bad" patents you've seen were things you couldn't implement by reading them?
>1. Computer programmers are overwhelmingly against software patents.
Echo chamber. The vast majority of developers barely know what a patent is. Many others think they're a point of pride, and that's where all these software patents are coming from. The rest are just really vocal.
> For the first time in my life I see educated people advocating the abolition of the entire patent system, even at the cost of life saving drugs, just to get patents out of computer software
"Educated" does not mean "well-informed", and it does not mean they know anything about patents. Economists are still having trouble quantifying the benefits and harms of patents, let alone software patents, so I'm guessing your "educated people" are basing their opinions on personal biases rather than evidence.
> Programmers hate patents in their industry by something like ten or twenty to one.
Wow, this echo chamber seems to have reached resonance. Here's a statistic closer to the truth: 99% of people complaining about patents don't know jack about how patents work and simply regurgitate what they tech media tells them, and tech media is not only clueless, it's deliberately misleading.
> 2. Software patents are harmful to innovation. They created almost all the modern patent trolling crisis. They shutdown startups and innovative projects and block open source.
Studies [1, 2], albeit with only publicly available data, have found no empirical evidence of a "modern patent trolling crisis", and I have heard of more small companies being ripped off by big guys (see i4i) than being shut down by patent trolls. On the other hand, I can list some studies that find "software" patents are no worse than other types of patents [3, 4, 5], and can actually be pretty useful for startups. [6, 7].
> 3. Software is math and both math and mental processes are SCOTUS identified ineligible subject matter.
"Machines are made of metals which occur in nature, which are SCOTUS identified ineligible subject matter."
> 4. The quality of software patents we see is uniformly bad...
I'm genuinely curious: how do you judge the quality of a patent?
> 5. When we bought our computers, ever since the first general purpose computers in the 1940s, we have done so expecting to run programs on them. Using a machine for its expected and customary use is not subject to any patents beyond the patents on the machine itself.
"When we first mined metals, we have done so expecting to make things out of them. Using a metal for its expected and customary use is not subject to patents beyond the patents on the metal itself."
There are plenty of those, including, say, IP Watchdog. Yes, some of us have been known to hang out in very pro-patent echo chambers as well.
> The concepts of a Person of Ordinary Skill and Doctrine of Equivalents is not "black boxes".
Complete non sequitur. A black box is a device where the function is known, but not its workings. If something is a black box, it's hard to see how it would satisfy the 'enablement' standard. Well, unless it's black box software, then it's just fine! Judges apparently think that you just tell the computer what to do and it requires no undue experimentation. So you just need someone to come up with the brilliant idea to patent software that simulates the human brain and achieves sentience (or at least passes the Turing test) and everything thereafter is just a matter of typing it in once this disclosed. Yes really, see [1].
> Studies [1, 2], albeit with only publicly available data, have found no empirical evidence of a "modern patent trolling crisis"
They apparently haven't read the newspaper, either, wherein we find that every major tech company is apparently a thief, in spite of the fact that nobody actually reads patents (we're all warned not to, treble damages and all that). Interestingly, widespread reinvention of a patent is not considered empirical proof of obviousness, rather it proves that the idea was really valuable and the patent holder deserves lots of money for discovering that, say, cell phone computers can do email just as well as other computers. Also, we'd best not look at the steadily increasing number of patent cases, nor all of the goings on in Marshall, TX.
> "Machines are made of metals which occur in nature, which are SCOTUS identified ineligible subject matter."
You're confusing "contains" with "is" here. I've also seen patent lawyers try to do a reductio ad absurdam saying that software is hardware (read some of the Patently O comments...). Apparently they don't realize that software is information and that numbers are no different than any other form of information. And, as with your broken logic, we can say that hardware contains information [software], but it's quite ridiculous to say that hardware is information.
> I'm genuinely curious: how do you judge the quality of a patent?
By how much of it is actually new. If someone comes up with a new computing device, some idiot will try to patent having it do email, web surfing and everything else we already know that computers can do.
> When we first mined metals, we have done so expecting to make things out of them. Using a metal for its expected and customary use is not subject to patents beyond the patents on the metal itself."
We can actually enumerate all of the programs that can go on a particular computer. It's the set of integers from zero to the largest number that would fit in memory (most of these are not useful, however). I don't believe you can do that with all things that could be made of metal, moreover the metal's properties are altered in certain combinations (e.g. amalgams) whereas the computer's properties are not altered by the information on it--the computer is still performing an instruction loop over the data it contains.
[1] This is a real howler for programmers, found quoted on Patently O: Fonar Corp. v. General Electric Co., 107 F.3d 1543, 1549, 41 USPQ2d 1801, 1805 (Fed. Cir. 1997) (“As a general rule, where software constitutes part of a best mode of carrying out an invention, description of such a best mode is satisfied by a disclosure of the functions of the software. This is because, normally, writing code for such software is within the skill of the art, not requiring undue experimentation, once its functions have been disclosed. * * * Thus, flow charts or source code listings are not a requirement for adequately disclosing the functions of software.”).
Glad to finally see someone who looks at the other side of things as well! I generally avoid IPWatchDog for the same reason reasons as Groklaw: too shrill, snarky and narrow-minded.
> Judges apparently think that you just tell the computer what to do and it requires no undue experimentation.
Yes, Fonar v GE is a ridiculous one when generalized, and I do wholeheartedly agree that the "enablement" requirement is very weak currently and a ton of patents don't meet it in my eyes. Take the PageRank patent, for one, often cited as an example of a good patent. It is very lacking in implementation details, so much so that a blogger set out to implement it and ended up with a bunch of posts complaining about all the undue experimentation he had to do.
But take the average case: how much undue experimentation is required for your average patent? How much undue fiddling would be required to implement, say, Twitter's pull-to-refresh, or the iPhone rubber banding patent, or the Google doodle patent, or the MS FAT patent? I think my point still stands: how many patents couldn't you implement just by reading them? (Also, keep in mind triviality of implementation is very different from non-obviousness.)
> They apparently haven't read the newspaper...
Like I said, tech media is not only clueless, it's deliberately misleading. Newspapers are merely anecdata, and worse, potentially biased anecdata [1]. Why rely on that when we have studies that tell you the data they looked at so you can find the flaws in them rather than accepting unsubstantiated, rageview-bait at face value?
> Also, we'd best not look at the steadily increasing number of patent cases, nor all of the goings on in Marshall, TX.
Actually, studies [2, 3, 4] did look at it and found no real increase. [2, 3] found that the AIA joinder rules, where previously a single case could have multiple defendants now must be individual cases, caused an inflation in lawsuits with no statistically significant increase in the number of litigants involved. [4] actually finds EDT is better than others with respect to plaintiff win-rates.
> Interestingly, widespread reinvention of a patent is not considered empirical proof of obviousness
A few points here, since this turns up often:
1. Reinvention many years later is not proof of obviousness. It simply means an idea has permeated widely enough to become obvious to others. A big reason the way US (and other) patent offices do examination, where they must support a rejection with enough prior art references, is to avoid hindsight bias.
2. There is very little "widespread" re-invention going on; what is happening is one product/project/company re-invents something(s) and that gets widely used. (Think Android, or the iOS SDK.)
3. Simultaneous independent invention could be considered proof of obviousness... Or it could be proof that two or more really smart people were working on the same problem at the same time, which has happened in "patent races". But at least at the PTO it happened so rarely that they changed to first-to-file.
> You're confusing "contains" with "is" here.
No, you're confusing both, the nature of software and the inventions being claimed. The software is what makes a machine do useful things, and those useful things are the inventions that are patentable.
> I've also seen patent lawyers try to do a reductio ad absurdam saying that software is hardware (read some of the Patently O comments…).
What they mean is, it's "equivalent", which is perfectly accurate. Also, please explain how software can exist without hardware. What's in your mind is steps to implement or recreate software, but it cannot exist without hardware outside your mind. Just like any other invention.
> Apparently they don't realize that software is information ...
How is "Software is information" different from "machines are metal"? Doesn't seem to be my logic that's broken.
> By how much of it is actually new.
Sure, but how do you determine that a patent covers something actually new?
> We can actually enumerate all of the programs that can go on a particular computer. It's the set of integers from zero to the largest number that would fit in memory (most of these are not useful, however).
I don't see the point, but I can trivially debunk this:
1) The order in which you "interpret" or execute those bytes gives you a completely different program. So if you can fit in 1GB in a high-end smartphone, the number of all possible programs approaches factorial(1e9). That's a number about 8 billion digits long, if Google serves correctly.
2) Now consider that you fill that memory up with programs that generate other programs, or variations of themselves. Something like, say, Conway's game of life. I cannot begin to calculate how many different programs that could generate.
These are absolutely humongous numbers, no different from the number of ways physical objects can be arranged. Now consider that only an infinitesimally small part of them are actually useful. I find that an argument to the patentability of software than against it.
> ... whereas the computer's properties are not altered by the information on it--the computer is still performing an instruction loop over the data it contains.
The computer's properties are not altered?!? It goes from being a heap of semiconductors to actually doing something! How is that different from a machine going from a heap of components to an useful implement?
And each program makes it do something different so each program changes the purposes of the computer, and so becomes a different tool! A simple thought exercise: you're on Youtube. Someone asks you what you're doing. Is your answer:
a) "I'm using the computer"
b) "I'm watching videos"
Interesting isn't it? Now repeat the exercise with games, programming, document editing. And then explain to me how running different software on the same machine does not change its function.
> Yes, Fonar v GE is a ridiculous one when generalized, and I do wholeheartedly agree that the "enablement" requirement is very weak currently and a ton of patents don't meet it in my eyes. Take the PageRank patent, for one, often cited as an example of a good patent. It is very lacking in implementation details, so much so that a blogger set out to implement it and ended up with a bunch of posts complaining about all the undue experimentation he had to do.
Glad to hear it.
> [4] actually finds EDT is better than others with respect to plaintiff win-rates.
I might be missing something, but I don't see it taking the really high settlement rate into account. If you include those as mostly losses, well yes, Northern California still sucks as well and the overall win rate sucks.
> There is very little "widespread" re-invention going on
Using SSL with RC4, scan to email, pick any "we own the internet" patent, really.
> The order in which you "interpret" or execute those bytes gives you a completely different program.
No, the hardware performs an instruction loop no matter what is in memory or the registers (unless you break it).
> Now consider that you fill that memory up with programs that generate other programs, or variations of themselves. Something like, say, Conway's game of life. I cannot begin to calculate how many different programs that could generate.
None of which fit into the device (you've already used up all memory, remember?). It's also a finite number. You're thinking of a Turing Machine with infinite memory (wish we had one, but we don't). There are functions with finite values that are not computable incidentally (the Busy Beaver function, which incidentally is related to your idea, is one such function). Yes, there are more programs than fit into memory for any finite amount. Sadly, we do not have infinite memory. Yes, you can increase the number of possible programs by adding memory (this should be no surprise to anyone who has ever used a computer and needed more space to install X). Every program (equivalently, every mathematical statement) can be identified with a number. Even this text is nothing more than a very long number. I believe I already mentioned Godel's work.
> no different from the number of ways physical objects can be arranged.
That's infinite, though (as far as physics knows). Anything you can fit into memory will be finite (though it can be extremely large, as you've noticed). One is exhaustible and enumerable, the other is not. The computer is designed to let you put any value whatsoever into its memory. We do not have a general atom-arranger that can make any construct out of matter. Though how I wish we did have one of those from Star Trek! ... I'm sure you'd then have people patent making X with the synthesizer... for every X that already exists. Which is about where we are with the computer, no? That's why we think that new synthesizers (computers) should get patents but not every trivial, already existing X that you can imagine putting on there. At least when it's a new X we can respect it a bit, but when you're doing old X + computer, it gets silly fast, because many, many people can figure out how to do old X + computer ... but the lawyers think it patentable for some reason.
> The computer's properties are not altered?!? It goes from being a heap of semiconductors to actually doing something! How is that different from a machine going from a heap of components to an useful implement?
It goes from executing an instruction loop on no data... executing an instruction loop on data. Yes, the instruction loop was a very fundamental, useful idea, precisely because it can compute any algorithm given appropriate input. The computer is unlike any other invention precisely because we found such a general mathematical construct to put behind it. But the data is just a large number. Yes, printing a few GB of data as a decimal number would run you out of paper, but there's absolutely no reason we couldn't do it.
> The current state of the patent system is such that having been granted a patent legally supersedes in power the act of enabling technological advancement. That is to say that the power of the patent system has surpassed its social justification...
I'm not sure what your first sentence actually means, but there is not enough evidence to support the following sentence. I know it's a popular opinion around here, but really, it's because this place is an echo chamber when it comes to certain topics.
There are studies that show how NPEs have beneficial effects (see work by Michael Risch, Jay Kesan, Anne Layne-Farrar etc.), and others showing their harmful effects are not as bad as media makes it look. The GAO report on NPEs, for instance, found that they are no big problem, really.
Unfortunately, the data available is limited in a big way: there is no data at all on demand letters that trolls like Lodsys send. There's an act that would help track these things too (http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/11/patent-reform-2013-d...), and that's the one I'm really looking forward to. That data would give a much clearer picture of the NPE situation.
Little do they know that even in marriage the dynamics don't change much, only the number of people involved (married people stereotype joke :-))