Pickles and patents
I don't know about you, but when I am shopping for pickles I like to shop for innovation. Of course I rarely do find it. Until the other day. The new bleedy-edge pickles from Peter Piper have some new advanced tecnology. It is a tray that sits at the bottom of the jar below the pickles. The tray has a handle that goes to the top of the jar. When the jar becomes less full you just pull the handle up, up comes the tray and you get the pickles without having to put your hand in the brine that always seems much colder than it should.
If you know me long enough (a week), you'll sure to hear me bitch about patents. When I say patents, I almost always mean software patents.
One of the trickier parts about a patent is saying.. Hey that is obvious, but of course you said that after you say the invention so you can't really trust your answer.
Pickle jars have been around for at least 100 years I would guess. I would say that is enough time for someone to come up with the "obvious invention" of a tray in a pickle jar. Because nobody came up with the idea, I think that makes it a "non-obvious invention".
So I think patents should work like this.. If nobody comes up with the same idea in 100 years.. You can have your patent. Of course you'll be dead so it won't matter, so you might as well not bother with a patent.
Say you did give the patent. This is for a pickle jar here. A pickle jar has 2 parts. A jar and a lid. I am sure you can come up with other minor appearance crap, but that already is covered under copyright. So that is pretty easy. Now let's take software. My current codebase has 445 .hpp/.cpp files for 1.3meg of code (60k lines). My project is small compared to most projects. It is not uncommon for a program to be a million lines of code. I would guess I violate over 500 patents in my 60k of code. Of course it is impossible for me to know I violate. I could never program because the patent office can grant patents faster than I can make sure I don't violate them. I would say that I have at least 50 patents I could get myself (stupid ones on par with most other software patents) in my code. So, my little project is worth 550 patents. Ok. I am now just babbling, it is past my bedtime and I don't have a point.