You are an intellectually dishonest second hander and defender of thieves. You are worse than an Obama or Holder, because people know they are against freedom, but you pretend to care about freedom. You only care to SPAM this site with trashy arguments, you never stick on topic, because you are TOO LAZY to actually THINK.

One of the ironic things about software patents in and of themselves is that they rely wholly upon the microcode architecture in their application to even function! What I mean by that is that a software program is more about an end than the means. In modern computing, the compiler (be it x86, RISC, ARM, etc.) takes the more general "what are we trying to accomplish" and turns it into something the hardware can actually process! If you didn't have the compiler to translate the code into what the hardware actually works on nothing would even function! So a computer software program in and of itself is only a derivative or companion work!

Blarman try logic and reason. You need to study some history. Answer these simple questions:

1) Software without any hardware is what?
2) What is a computer?
3) How does software interact with a computer?
4) What is a compiler? Why is it needed?
5) How were the first computers "programmed'? Why were they programmed?

Your position is so absurd as to be off the charts. You and the people on this post are being intellectually dishonest and attempting to avoid the hard work of thinking. You are all a bunch of second handers.

You all chose to spam the site with your religion instead of addressing the serious scholarship of this paper.

db - you're not an expert on computers. Stop trying to tell those of us who are that we're idiots.

Software runs on hardware, but it's NOT hardware. The reason you use software at all is to AVOID having to build single-purpose hardware for every single instruction the computer has to carry out. This makes the computer flexible and able to run a myriad of different instructions rather than being limited to only what the hardware itself is wired for.

I respond when someone disagrees with me. If that troubles you that's unfortunate.

As to the portions related to people independently inventing something, that's on point. Locke's argument is that a person has a property right in the creation of their intellect. I absolutely agree. The idea that only the first person to create something has that right is not supported in the text.

db - we don't try to tell you what a patent attorney does. I'd recommend you stop trying to tell programmers that they are the same as electrical engineers.

william, please see that you have overwhelmed the post. I tried to steer it back to the scholarship linked to the post, but you have no interest in discussing that. This is an Objectivist site. Serious objectivist posts deserve their philosophical due. I remain frustrated that this post went awry.

You can always ask for a license. and if they are not using it, they will be willing to license it, most assuredly. this is a strawman

“Though the Earth…be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men.” (Locke 1988 [1689], II, para. 27)
Land cultivated by the mind and hand or any material improved by the mind (invention) and or hand are equally valid as property. Property is that which the owner has the exclusive right to dispose of as he sees fit.

Since you complained about my hijacking your discussion, you will note that this is the point that copyrights and patents entered this thread.

You were responding to a post where I supported intellectual property rights without specifying the mechanism -- deliberately to avoid being provocative.

it is expensive and time consuming. However, that was a corporate decision which involved many other factors you are not sharing here or maybe don't know. To blame the decision on the patent process is not logical because we don't have all of the factors, including if "the lawyers" made a bad decision. It can be a large investment with a significant return over years.[edited for grammar]

I wanted to stick to the topic of the attached paper. You wanted to make it into a software patenting argument. Because you are unwilling to explore and discuss the moral underpinnings of Objectivist and Lockean thought on the intellectual property we are having a dis-embodied discussion here. This happens frequently with Austrians.
db has written software. He is an electrical engineer and a physicist.
I will not comment any further on this post to you.

IP is no longer IP when you try to patent an invention or brand new process government corruption via the Patent Office come into play. Many years age when I work for my brothers' engineering company the same situation reared it's corrupt head. He came up with a simple solution to strip the liquid cargo from cargo holds of coastal oil tankers that had intank pumps. He ran it by the lawyers and they nixed the idea that it would cost to much money and time to get it through the Patent Office. So, the company built the components and installed the device on the customer's pumps in their ships. He many very little profit on it.
That why so many inventors on You Tube desplay their creations there by making them public.

If I am buying a house, I can have a surveyor search for the property lines. It's a reasonable step to take. I however, know where the property is that I am checking.
It is insufficient to search for patents related to your general product. The nature of software is that an algorithm you use could be in common with a completely different product in a different field and might well be patented.

You keep telling software engineers that they don't know what software does. Have you written software?

Poplicola is right, there is more to a program than instructions for running the computer, there is documentation and structure for supporting the maintenance of the program by other people.

I wouldn't go as far as the literate programming movement, but I do try to converse with others within my code -- even if it is my future self. When you are working on a program for twenty years, you have to leave a lot of notes.

Back in the mid 70's I was reading some code for the sort/merge routine on a mainframe. There was two pages of uncommented assembler code with only a single comment in the middle: "Now I'm doing something tricky". We try not to do that kind of thing.

Yep - some people do not understand that all value starts with the human mind, not physical labor.

No, you have simply declared that it does not happen. That is not showing it.

How could you possibly claim that two people could not independently come up with the same idea? Note, I'm not saying simultaneously, simply that the second has no way of knowing that the first person has done so.

If the second person is unaware of the first person's creation than their creation is the fruit of their own labor and there is no moral reason to deprive them of it.

You are ignoring this possibility, which is probably not all that uncommon, because it undermines the moral support for patents. It then becomes a practical matter.

This is much the same as the argument between first to invent and first to file. I agree with you that first to invent is more just, but first to file is easier to administer as a practical matter.

All property rights are time limited - dead people do not own anything. " exclusive Right" You clearly have no interest in property rights, have never thought about this subject with any depth, but you want to steal and justify it.

as usual there are emoters on these types of posts. and the material covered in the post is not even addressed. this is an Objectivist site. You will necessarily deal with Objectivist ideas, reason and logic. welcome to the dissonance. Look at the post. It was a reasoned and carefully researched paper. I have few comments on this post addressing the ethics. thanks, libertarians. short cut all you want. we will continue to provide careful, foundational values and principles.

A long read but worth it for its clarity and hierarchical development.

It would be interesting to know just when humans began to treat their "inventions" or improvisations as personal property. In earliest times it was simply animals imitating each other when one came up with an innovation, like washing one's food. The 100th monkey paradigm showed that sharing led to improved methods.

With no lawyers to formulate contracts, early man built on each new discovery that emerged from any member of the clan. Physical property was what one could protect. The notion of respect for others' property came later. In the most elementary stage, if I climb a tree to fetch a banana, it is mine to eat unless I care to share it. It was a breakthrough concept, until marauding and pillage became an established practice for acquiring goods. Then we went through the phase of "might makes right" where the chief or king owned everything, even the serfs. We've come a long way, baby!

It seems to me that the first layers of the ownership meme were possession of physical objects, and as the human intellect developed into higher stages of complexity, ideas became a kind of property as well. Once language and writing were achieved, it became easier to document where ideas came from and whose they were. The notion that first-come, first-served, or the first to occupy a piece of land, or the first to find an oil well or copper mine, is its rightful owner is a throwback to a time when there were still things to be found that no owner had already claimed. Finders, keepers.

In today's world, ownership should certainly belong to the creator, although the creator can choose to give it, rent it, or put it into open source. My own logic suggests that anything an individual creates, by investment of energy through muscle or mind, rightfully belongs to that individual along with all benefits or profits from it. That is the basis of a civilized world.

In the ever more complexified social systems of laws, redefined rights, and government intrusions into individuals' lives, devious methods of extraction have been set up, whether through taxes or licenses and fees, through which the amount an individual is allowed to keep is no longer within the individual's control, and more and more of his substance is syphoned away for those others whom the controllers want to benefit.

We have the illusion of still having property rights, physical and intellectual, so we endure. And this system crept in so gradually that we are being bled to death by imperceptible stages, having accepted it as the norm that we own only what the government allows. But Ayn Rand noticed, and there is the antidote if only we can heed it. -- Sorry if I've drifted a bit past the patent law topic.

Constitution, Article I, Section 8, clause 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

You have no evidence on your side. Which countries have the strongest software industries? Those with no patent protection? NO your position is without any fact or reason.

There is no such thing a software patent. There are patents on inventions that are implemented using software and those are the same thing as a patent on electronics.

Actually the founders looked at working requirement and rejected it. Inventors have as much or more rights than manufactures who are just reproducing what has been created.