The US is hobbling itself with software patents. China pretty much ignores all patents and will win in the global market because of this. US companies need to quit the stupid patent wars, lest the become irrelevant on the world markets.
Frankly, it seems that most (nearly all) patents have only a trivial amount of money invested to create the idea, other than what the patent lawyer costs. For example, "playing checkers --- with a computer" patents. Ending all patents would not slow down innovation at all.
There is one exception, drug patenting, where billions are spent developing a drug and getting it approved.
Did you read this ?
> where billions are spent developing a drug and getting it approved
I do grant that the practice of patenting small incremental changes to existing patented things ("this drug, with slower release!") does seem a bit questionable, but overall it still seems like a good thing. I'd be interested in hearing your argument for why it's not a good fit.
So, you might say, only big business could afford to file patents. Not exactly, $1m is well within the reach of a startup.
But even for big business, they're not going to file 1000 patents at a cost of a billion dollars.
Patent trolling would become an untenable business plan.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/microsoft-still...
As I've stated elsewhere in this thread, you don't have to be a dick about owning the patent. It's your patent, and you can do with it what you want. There are patent pools that are managed to ensure they can't be used for evil that you can donate your patent to if you can't afford the time to manage it.
This algorithm is a great example as its a general use encoding mechanism. If I develop software to encode and decode radio transmissions to a satellite using it, patenting it will prevent it from being using for say image encoding and decoding across the web. That use has zero impact on my concrete implementation or my commercial sector.
Even for overlapping industries, if there are zero patents, and two competing companies independently come to the same technological solution what is the justification for being able to patent that? If they didn't come to it independently because its available publicly on the web, then its prior art and shouldn't be patent-able anyway. If one reversed engineered the other solution and reproduced it, that's perfectly legal for other industries under certain circumstances and is explicitly allowed under the DMCA. I'm not arguing its right, but if that is supposed to be illegal patents as designed are the wrong tool for enforcement.
This isn't a patent covering a specific use of a specific algorithm for a specific industry (which even then I don't think should be patent-able) but the general algorithm itself restricting ALL uses of it. This is an existing concept that was intended to be open, already exists in the real world, and is on route to becoming part of international standards being gobbled up by Microsoft. There does not appear to be a significant or meaningful contribution to the work in this patent and should really have been rejected due to prior art.
Saying the original author should have patented this is also facile as that takes an enormous amount of resources that isn't available to most lone developers, or researchers, especially when the intent is to give it away freely to world.
You're also glossing over the personal value of time expenditure to do that which even with professional guidance can take hundreds of hours. It is absolutely prohibitively expensive for something someone is going to give away for free and even most small independent companies.
There should be no reason that a donated public idea or concept should require any expenditure for protection.
I do feel that if I spend my time creating something on my own, I should be free to use it, yes. Unfortunately, the patent system means I'm not necessarily allowed to use something I invented and created myself, because it may be patented.
As John Carmack said:
"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying."