Tech Nonsense

Monday, July 30, 2007

Software patents

I had just read an interesting post at codinghorror about the problematic situation in software patents .

The author, Jeff Atwood, says

Something has to be done, or else we truly are staring down a coming software patent apocalypse

This reminded me of a crazy idea I had a few years ago: an automated system for generating prior art. If it works, it would be a sort of a "denial of service" attack on the patent system.

A patent is only valid if the invention has not been previously described to the public ("prior art"). If a description of an invention has been published before the date claimed by the patent, then the patent becomes worthless.

What if an automated system were to create (and publish over the web) such a huge amount of "prior art" that only really really good inventions would not exist in its database?

The algorithms could be "designed" randomly by the system. They could be random changes to known algorithms, or just plain random. It doesn't even matter if most of them don't really work or do anything useful, as long as some of the randomly generated "inventions" would deny patentability of other inventions.

To create such a system, you'd need a formal way to represent algorithms, plus a mechanism that describes this formal representation in human readable form. The output of the description mechanism doesn't even have to be very good (have you ever tried to understand the software described in a patent?).

Anyone up for the challange?