“And thus, we had huge patent thickets and massive patent fights that cost billions of dollars…”

Really? Billions? Exaggerate much?

I have one of the best patent attorneys on the planet, and he charges me only $20 per minute. A billion dollars would take him 100 years to burn, even if he charged me for 24 hours a day seven days a week.

The truth is that sites like this are PAID to denounce the patent system on behalf of huge corporations. Huge corporations that have large economic risks because legitimate inventors are empowered by the patent system, and they don’t like it. So, instead of competing with better ideas, they PAY to denounce the system itself and the inventors who benefit from it.

Corporatists, in other words, are doing their best to grind their heels into American Inventors and to crush the most talented and innovative among us to preserve their profits and break the law.

Yes, I know the inevitable backlash will now appear to defend the ridiculous exaggerations and unwarranted attacks, all of you mouthing the same talking points as a large synchronized mob of anti-patent trolls. No one will dare to consider the benefits the patent system has brought to the world for hundreds of years.

Have at it.

The truth remains.

I’m a programmer. In my own field of expertise, software patents have created no value for anyone who develops or uses software. There has not ever been anyone who learned anything about how to create any kind of software from any patent.

My own industry has, however, many different ways of promoting the art of programming–CACM goes back to the earliest days; today, Open Source is probably the best way of disseminating the useful arts. It’s used by everything from single-coder projects to projects involving thousands of programmers and tens of millions of lines of code.

Again, we can promote the progress of our useful art without the patent office, and the patent office is utterly incapable of assisting us in any way.

Software patent litigation has caused enormous direct expenses and loss of opportunities–harming developers and users alike. So the patent “system” is (in my experience) a completely-unmitigated evil.

I’m not an expert on the history of technology, but most of the significant inventions I do know something about, the inventors either (1) did not patent, or (2) ruined themselves suing potential customers or arguing about the priority of independent development, or (3) ruined the industry in the whole country by suppressing other people’s development.

The simple example of (1) might be the Franklin stove, which wasn’t patented because Ben thought it would be better for society if he didn’t ( http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/science/stove.htm ) (2) might be Eli Whitney’s cotton gin–Eli died broke trying futilely to get much more money than the market would bear; (3) might be the airplane, which was invented in the U.S., but the Wrights so suppressed the U.S. market with their patents that the U.S. had to use French airplanes in World War I.

Important electronic inventions, like radio transmission, microphones, and teletype machines were entangled in all sorts of patent disputes which did nothing to promote their art, science, or use–let alone, of course, the actual design or production of them. Other inventions (floppy disk drives) benefited greatly in the early days because patents either weren’t being taken out or enforced.

I don’t know whether this is a universal pattern: I’m not an expert on the history of technology at large. I just find it curious that there’s hand-waving and claims of “great value”, none of that value is actually produced anywhere that I’ve seen any actual historical records.

Google’s value is not that it is patented. Google’s value is that people are always making it better–hundreds of changes to the search algorithm every day, last time I read. Other search engines–not making those minute-by-minute changes, were overwhelmed by spam. Google’s value is that they produce something well, and efficiently. You could use all Google’s patents to build your own competing search engine, and Google probably would think it wasn’t worth suing you out of existence because the cost of litigation and the value to you of the publicity would cause more harm to Google than your pathetic failure of a search engine would cause. One begins to suspect another situation (4), described by the poet Kipling a century ago: “They copied all they could follow/but they couldn’t copy my mind/so I left them sweating and stealing/a year and a half behind.”

I manage to button my shirt and tie my shoes nicely, thanks for caring. However, I suspect that both velcro and zippers fit into case (4): what matters is not the “idea” but the “engineering execution”. I don’t care who had the idea: it matters who can do it quickly, well, and cheaply. If you can’t do, then you’ll exit stage left, broke, pursued by angry customers. If you can do, then it doesn’t matter who else is trying to do.

I might mention Vice-grip pliers, which was a genuinely useful invention: and even as a Vice-grip user I remember how happy I was when THAT patent expired, and much-improved designs appeared from other tool companies. This counts, I suppose, as case (3).

I’m extremely dubious about the economic value of “sliced bread”. I can still find unsliced bread in my grocery store, and it’s generally more expensive that the sliced stuff. Does that mean slicing bread actually destroys its value?