Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sat 15th May 2004 08:23 UTC
It is when I read articles like this that I have "my blood all going up to my head" (that's a Greek saying for people that get angry). So apparently, Apple is trying to patent "transparent windows that do a certain action after fading away". While I don't personally find this "innovation/invention" patentable, it's fine with me: Apple is doing the best it can to secure its business (maybe I would do the same if I had shareholders on my back).
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> Copyright laws forbid our competitors from ripping off the software and employing it for themselves.
Did you know that your competitors are allowed to reverse engineer or to take ideas/concepts from your software - copyright doesn't protect this. Further more, perhaps your software simply doesn't have any substantially new and novel technical features worth protecting.
> The only ones benefitting are the lawyers and the patent offices.
Not when you're protecting the investment and revenue of millions of dollars in funding R&D and other activities, providing offices, paying for health insurance and everything else. Sure lawyers and patent offices make money, but I bet you sell your software via. distributers or even with online payments and other people who all take a cut of the pie as well.
> With things being as they are, I don't have to double-check every single algorithm for whether it's patented or not, and we deliver quality software that beats the competition because of our know-how, our skill, and our head start in developing this stuff
Umm, sorry to tell you this: but computer implemented inventions are already patentable and many are granted, so just because you don't do it doesn't mean you can't get in trouble. People have to do this when producing cars, tractors, radio and high fi equipment, domestic products, and all many of other items: it's standard engineering practice, software isn't some magical exclusion.
> Patents are good only for hindering your competition on the *legal* battlefield, instead of the *technological* one where this kind of competition belongs.
Garbage. There are many battlefields: it's not all technological. If it were, you'd be able to spend nothing on sales and marketing and write software because "if you build it, they will come". This just doesn't happen (other than for some very successful products): you wage a war on multiple fronts. That's how economics has, and always will work. Software makes it no different. Protecting your investment in inventions is one of them.
> No patents on algorithms, data structures, procedures, or ideas.
There are none on discoveries, ideas, mathematical methods and so on; other than where they are implemented to have an industrial application.
For example: there's no patent on public key cryptography, but there is on specific embodiments (RSA, ElGamal, etc) that have technical effects. Fair enough too, these people put a lot of effort into inventing new and efficient approaches.