The Call of the Open Sidewalk

This was in response to someone on Reddit who suggested that software patents on video compression methods were somehow more reasonable than other software patents because it was hard to come up with such methods. It seemed blogworthy.

Digging a trench is really hard too. How long does the trench have to be before I can get a patent and prevent anyone else from digging a trench that long?

Video compression patents are an excellent example of why software patents don't really make sense. If I somehow decode some compressed video the result is a bunch of coloured dots on a screen representing a moving image. The output is pure unmitigated data.

Now the people that believe in software patents will tell me that I can't use my computer to interpret the H.264 bit stream in the H.264 way without the permission of the 1600 or so patent holders. I can interpret it in an infinite number of other ways. That is OK. Just not the one way. That is even if I have read the standard and do the programming myself. There is just something magic about the one interpretation.

I happen to believe that the invention of the general purpose computer is on a similar level to that of the invention of fire. If I believe in software patents I also have to believe that I can only use this incredibly powerful invention in very circumscribed ways. Imagine the reaction if the people that used to spend time tenderizing meat with rocks tried to get a royalty from the people using fire to do the same thing. The fire users might patiently explain that the world had changed in a very fundamental way. They might instead suggest that the people trying to make their wonderful new thing as useless as the old thing just go fuck themselves. I will leave it to you to decide which group I fall into...

At any rate, suggesting that software patents are real in some way is deeply offensive. You should expect to get called on it...

posted at: 17:22 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry