Whether as a non-US citizen I can do anything is another matter; but that doesn't stop me having an opinion

the debate about software patents has come up in the EU over the years.

Unluckily, we may still see that coming thanks to the free-trade agreement that most of the laserbrains who run this union want so bad and that really isn't beneficial to anyone (well, except to the USA). With ideas like "if an US company settles in an EU country and isn't happy with the local laws, they can sue that country for compensation" surely they'll include something like "US patents are valid and enforceable in the EU" as well.

Patents, not just on software, are a tough matter, and there's probably no single best answer. You will surely want to give someone a kind of competitive advantage if he develops something genuinely new. Take pharmaceutics as an example: Imagine you develop a new drug and go through clinical testing and all, investing 3-4 years and a million of currency, and then a company like Ratiopharm just says "oh nice, well thank you" and sells the drug for half the price (effectively pushing you out of business). But then again, the other extreme is that the companies holding patents sell a package of pills that would reasonably cost like 2€ for 150€ simply because they can, as they have the monopoly.

With software, it's even more complicated. On the one hand side, most software patents are bloody obvious once you know them, but admittedly not all of them are really that obvious if you don't know them. Applying a cosine transform or similar to an image or sound may be a trivial idea to most people. Doing something like psychoacoustic modelling, too, is pretty obvious once you think about it. But you gotta have the idea first, and it's quite non-trivial work figuring out the right parameters and to put it all into a specification, complete with working implementation and all. That's why you and me and everybody else pays to Fraunhofer. Would I prefer if I didn't have to pay? Well sure.

Then again, the software patent world is so full with "Really, dude? You got to be kidding me? A patent on multiplying two numbers?!" type of patents that you'd want to shout and kill someone.

It's a bit like the problem with software (movie / music) piracy. If everybody was honest and was buying their software / movies / music, you could sell pretty much every major software which now costs 300-500€ for 5€ and still be comfortably in the profit zone. CDs or movies could easily go for 2€. No need for copy protection, and no need for DRM, it wouldn't even be worth the trouble pirating the stuff.

But of course almost nobody pays for the stuff they use, and the major players selling the content have greed beyond reason, so a CD that is reasonably recent costs 15-20€. Now the relatively few who do pay get upset because they, as paying customers, are the only ones who are having DRM in their way all the time. Can't play that BluRay on your PC, can't play that CD in your car, have to watch stupid non-skippable anti-pirating commercials before getting to watch the movie that you paid for legitimately, etc etc.

I was talking to my brother earlier about this very thing. Came up with a good idea. I think if people want to protect patents, it should be more investment required to do so.

One way to do it is to shorten the length the patent can be held. Or make it so that a patent, in order to be held for a longer period of time, must be shown to be in active use (so that patent hoarders will have to use the patents they own).

I think the latter idea is the best idea. No one should have a right to have a patent that they are not actively using, with some impression that they are "going" to use it.

The problem is no set of rules fit every scenario perfectly. Maybe it takes 5 years to bring your product to market. Since you patented it in year 1, but it hasn't been in "active use" for 4 years, that means someone else can steal it, defeating the point of the patent system. Or by 'active use' (what a delightfully ambiguous legal term! Lawyers would love that. ), do you include research and development? No problem! Patent trolls research and develop stuff all the time - partially to claim that they are actively using their patents, and partially to discover new patents to sue people over.

And what if people invent something cool, but the computational power isn't available yet? It's not in active use because it can't be in active use.

And no, definitely there should not be a higher investment cost (whether financially or paper-work wise) for patents. That just means big companies get them and small companies (who patents are also intended to benefit) don't get to use them.

The length of patents currently are not excessive (20 years). Certainly not compared to the ridiculous length of copyrights (life of the universe, plus 70 years).

Trademarks don't even expire (until they are no longer in use), and that infinite length of time is actually beneficial to the public.

And honestly, if there were general labs that research and patent real inventions and then licensed them, that wouldn't bother me so much. Intellectual researching thinktanks. Bell Labs (AT&T), Google X Labs, RAND corp, and so on, are good things.

It's the buying of patents and then hoarding them that I have some problem with, but more specifically, it's the patent issuers who issue dumb patents. That is the real problem. The patent system is mostly a good system. It's the gatekeepers who are doing an amazingly crummy job.

In contrast, copyright is mostly not a good system (just out of date with technology, too abused, and too patched and modified over hundreds of years), and is in need of overhauling. Trademarks are fine as-is (they prevent the legality of counterfeiting goods and public deception).

There are also occasional immoral uses of patents to exploit the public - my dad's gout medication was purchased by another pharmaceutical company, and shot up from $10 for a month's supply (might've even been 90 days) to $400 for a month's supply. I'm not exaggerating either, those were the prices! So he stopped taking his gout medication. There are other medications, but that was the only gout-attack prevention medication that actually worked very well and didn't have side-effects - so it was bought out and the price raised 40 (or more) times higher.

I can't think of a good legal solution to that though - technically, they are within their legal rights to do that, just as Apple can charge luxury prices for Apple products. It's just when it comes to actual physical health necessities and then raising them drastically after it's shown to work, that it rubs me the wrong way.

You acknowledge the current situation is bad, you offer no solution that involves software patents without the problems, but you want are arguing against the people here who don't like software patents - I don't get it.

Just because I don't have a solution doesn't mean there isn't one. I have no knowledge of the legal side of patenting or how governments work, so I'm really not a suitable person to come up with a working solution. Does that mean that I'm not allowed to have the opinion that anyone, irregardless of industry, is allowed to have a mechanism to protect their interests?

You asked me what arguments for other patents don't apply to software patents, so that was one of them.

And its an invalid argument. The majority of non-software patents don't have billions of dollars invested into them either.

Out of interest, which software patents are you referring to?

I wasn't referring to software patents.

I agree with the rest of your discussion about copyright vs patents as to which can offer the best protection. Without some form of metric, it's very difficult to determine if there are more people who have pushed copyright infringement to its boundaries in order to get around it vs the number of people who have innocently been caught up in patent infringement.

If patents were made harder to obtain, then the number of innocent infringements would certainly lessen.

I say, the main reason I would want to patent my own ideas is to keep others from being able to legally sue me for using "their."

But this is where we come to the patent issue. As long as people cannot patent "natural" things, then perhaps patents have a slim chance at being ethical. However, is an idea "natural?"

However, these didn't just fall from the sky as a divine gift. Someone looked at some natural phenomenon and said "hey, what if I tweak this a bit, and use it like that..." and then he spent years turning that idea into something that works and is marketable. Or someone looked at a natural resource and said "hey, what if I mash up this weed and mix it like this, and pronto... a new plastic". Surely, those people did considerable work and provide something that is immensely useful to your life and to society in general, so they deserve being paid for that. And, they deserve that someone else isn't just exploiting their work without giving them credit and without giving them a share of the profit.

Only when people abuse this system in one of the ways stated earlier, it becomes much less obvious that they really deserve being paid. Which, unluckily, is the case more often than it's not with software patents. The difficulty is there is no good (and fair) general way to distinguish between good and abusive patents, at least not an easy one.