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The biggest civil rights issue of our time is software patents

3 points by deerparkwater ↗ HN
Software patents M U S T be abolished or there will be no innovation in 10 years

why the fuck would i choose to code all day to try to make sales when that's going to involve reading patents all day and then getting fucked by an asshole in a uniform called a judge

http://endsoftpatents.org/

This is by far the biggest civil rights issue of our time

the US government might as well just outlaw small developers from selling software for the next 20-30 years

4 comments

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drallison
Why are software patents a "civil rights" problem? There is wide agreement that the patent system, especially software patents and business method patents, is in need of reform. Rather than just venting your anger and frustration, you might make constructive suggestions. Do you believe in the patent system at all? Do you believe that some software can be patented? How do you distinguish that software from other software? You claim all sorts of dire things will happen because of current practice. Why do you believe that "there will be no innovation in 10 years" because of current patent practice? Why 10 years? Why not 5 years or 13 years? If things are going to be improved we need to have a clear and rational proposal for reform.
jonhendry
Um, no. Get some sense of perspective. Off the top of my head, no-knock SWAT raids are a bigger issue, because people end up dead. Often as a result of a raid on the wrong house.
hga
Agreed; the whole area that has guns as its nexus is the big one for me (e.g. Heller and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, as well as the minor detail you note). The rights to life and liberty come before the right to "pursuit of happiness" (a code phrase/expansion of the right to property), which is where software patents are an issue, but demonstrably not as big a one as the submitter claims (else HN would be a ghost town).
aercolino
Software and literature are very much the same, and yet there in no such a notion as patents in literature. (Copyright is not a patent) The main reason is that freedom of expression is a human right, and there is no freedom within a patents system.

Words are keywords, and they are public domain. Sentences are snippets and they are PD too. Paragraphs are functions and they are protected by copyright, but the ideas in there are PD too.

I see no space for patents in software because patents shouldn't protect ideas, and if we omit ideas, nothing is left in software. Again, software is literature.

Humanity will undergo a new rinascimento when software patents will be suppressed, because development will be free at last.