India is saying software patents are not novel enough to protect, and directing its patent examiners not to grant them.
Our examiners grant patents left and right with little consideration for if they're novel.
The same problems affecting software continually affect every other industry. Software is more visible than other R&D but if software needs to be excised from patents then everything probably should.
What would be the effect of closing shop and saying no new patents in the United States? I think this would be the best outcome. I mean do patent applications actually help people recreate the invention after the patent expires? If not, why should patents exist at all?
Patents were created to promote innovation. That hasn't been working effectively in the world of software.
The idea was, in exchange for sharing your idea, the government will protect you. So, you get some profit and a head start, and everyone else gets to build upon your idea after some period of time.
Tech giants like Google lately are not enforcing many useful and innovative patents. They create them as a defense. That says something about their view of software patents.
If you're asking for my opinion on patent reform, I'd drop the term on software patents way lower, like 3-5 years. That's enough time to generate a customer base for the filer and allow others with the same idea to have a chance to compete within his or her lifetime.
I can't speak for other fields. I would not agree that software patent reform means everything needs to be shut down.
Software has it worse than traditional engineering because the field of software engineering is only about two patent life lengths old, and both development times and product life cycles are incredibly short for most things. It makes little sense that a new algorithm gets the same protection length as a better brake system for trains. Shorter life cycles also makes defering to courts comparatively less effective and more expensive, encouraging misuse of the system.
Of course software engineering isn't the only field with this problem, but it's one of few.
For example the Apple iPhone uses custom chips for things like encryption and security. So in India they would accept the patents.
India doesn't see business methods, software, and mathematical method as valid for patents because they are not tangible in real life but more like information.
If they are part of hardware or some physical device that is tangible they can issue a patent.
This is quite different from the US Patent office, and most likely India did it to give small companies access to the same information that big companies use by refusing to patent their software unless it is associated with hardware. If it is all software, anyone can use it.
This is a big attack on companies like Microsoft that use software patents to sue other companies. Suddenly in India, they can no longer do that unless it is tied to hardware in some way.
Today it's different from US patent office. For most of the US Patent office's history, it was the same.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Street_Bank_%26_Trust_Co....
But yeah I see now that US patent office used to be like India, but now it accepts any patent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Street_Bank_%26_Trust_Co._v._Signature_Financial_Group,_Inc.Or it may be saying Indian firms are not producing sufficiently novel software, so there is no net benefit to Indian society in granting them. It could be the majority of filers are foreign companies. Why protect inventions made by outsiders, who will only use it to tax local companies? This may sound far fetched, but historically most nations have gone this phase as they develop: Until they can produce state of the art technology indigenously, IP tends to hamper development, so IP laws tend to be weak. Once a nation starts becoming competitive in innovation, they tend to ratchet up their IP laws. There are studies about this, will try to find them.
(I've worked with the Indian software industry and still have close ties with it. I see even less innovation there than I see in the west. On the other hand, the startup scene is booming, so there's hope.)