Software patents are mostly garbage and unneeded. And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible).
Show me one useful software patent that (a) is not "obvious to one skilled in the art", and (b) benefits society by being granted a monopoly. Just one!
Software rarely requires expensive research that would be worth protecting.
Rather than enabling a fair market, this takes fairness out of the market.
Software patents are like getting a patent on "Murder story with final revelation of who did it." Maybe add one or two features, like a "detective with hat", etc.
In one fell swoop you would be able to own most murder mysteries.
Software (like books, stories, art, etc) is better handled by Copyright law. May the one who actually has a better product win!
I agree with your rant. I have a similar one. I personally think that software should mostly just not be patentable at all, since (among others) these things are not patentable according to US patent law: scientific discoveries, mathematical methods, aesthetic creations, and rules or methods for performing mental acts.
In addition, software is also copyrightable, which makes much more sense than patents for protecting unauthorized use. IMO, patents for software should be mostly eliminated, and even copyright terms should be much shorter.
5 years full copyright, 5 years noncommercial unrestricted fair use with mandatory attribution, then straight to public domain. Berne Convention be damned, and multigenerational copyrights can go straight to hell as well.
Software patents are stupid, and even more so with AI soon to be able to take arbitrary compiled code and produce readable, well composed source in a target language with documentation and optimizations.
Studios and platforms and funds and giant corporations that "own" terabytes of IP are a cancer.
We're going to have to fix copyright. Until then, pirate everything.
> IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on Generalized Continued Fractions and their Series Transformations and was awarded a Patent
A good portion of the perception and use around patents is the word "awarded", which implies that there was some evaluation, either objective or subjective, by an expert in the topic and that the invention met some high level of… something that made it worthy of being "awarded" for the "work" that it took to invent. Most parents are not evaluated like that today, and software patents specifically probably never have been.
> Software patents are mostly garbage and unneeded. And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible)
I want to know about these patents that you want your name off of! What were they for? Why do you want your name removed? This is the opening to a great story, please tell!
What would you think about still having software patents, but having them expire in 2-5 years? I feel like the concept of a patent is still a good one, but the time it takes to go from zero to a product is drastically lower with computer programming. The patent length should reflect that.
How would you feel about patenting language? I.e. If you speak with certain words or certain patterns then you have to pay a royalty (only for 2 to 5 years).
First off, I think that's a false equivalency, as patenting is about ideas (in a platonic sense), not about instances of ideas (which is what copyrighting is).
Secondly, we already have that in limited forms with trademarks and copyrights.
Thirdly, I think the concept of intellectual property is one of the most brilliant social innovations in the past 500 years, as it aligns incentives to innovate (why would I innovate if someone will just steal my work?).
>it aligns incentives to innovate (why would I innovate if someone will just steal my work?)
it was true 200 years ago. It stopped being true about 100+ years ago. Whether somebody innovates or not became unimportant, as a bunch of other people would still innovate the same thing. Just look at airplanes innovation back then - multiple people were doing it simultaneously, and the fact that Wright brothers got patent actually slowed down airplane innovation in US for couple of decades after that.
One cannot (in the US) get a patent for software itself. This was settled a while ago. There needs to be more in the claims. In fact, the patent discussed here does not claim continued fractions and nobody would be in danger using them even if the patent issued as is (which is not certain, because the patent claims rather trivial modification of a classic neural network architecture, which should be brought up by the examiner as obvious).
Patents are propelling the society when they work as intended. They made XIX century and at least good chunk of XX century. Without patents, people fall back to copying each other, because it is much easier to copy than to innovate.
Patents go way back possibly as far as 500 BC, with other examples dating to 1331 etc, yet the introduction didn’t kick off any great wave of progress.
Instead a wide range of factors like better plants feeding both population growth and an ever larger percentage of society could do something other than grow food where the real root causes here. Devoting land and labor to cotton for example requires a surplus of food.
What was the societal benefit of putting 20 years of monopoly on that algorithm? I don't think potential profit was a big motivator in that research work.
And that patent got invalidated in most of the world anyway.
You think they were just going to sit on that and do nothing if they couldn't get a patent? Or that they'd turn it into a product without the underlying math being revealed right away? I don't believe either of those for a second.
There is a rather long history of the workings of cryptography products kept secret, so yes, it is entirely possible that the underlying math would have been kept as a trade secret.
It is also possible that it would have never been created in the first place because resources were allocated to other patentable inventions.
Of course, in the case of RSA, a similar algorithm was developed separately by the British government and kept secret for 24 years.
> Given the history of RSA in particular, I'm extremely skeptical of that.
Well then you might want to read about RC4 which only became public after it was leaked. Prior to being leaked, it was RSA's cash cow and one of the most popular encryption algorithms worldwide due to it's speed and the fact that it was exportable (with a 40 bit key).
Indeed, RSA was rather notorious for keeping crypto algorithms as trade secrets (RC2, SecuriID OTP, etc.)
You quoted the wrong part of my post. A trade secret algorithm supports the idea that it would have been made anyway.
Looking at RC4, how widespread was it before that leak? How many users did it have? Wikipedia lists it being added to a bunch of protocols but all after the leak.
Also more recent cryptography has lots of extremely public competition between nonpatented algorithm proposals, which largely undermines this entire realm of study as a reason to continue to have software patents.
>Show me one useful software patent that ... (b) benefits society by being granted a monopoly. Just one!
that's a bullshit criterion, and nothing about what you said applies to software in particular.
it's generally agreed that monopolies are bad for society, but patents only grant a temporary monopoly to reward innovation, in exchange for which society gets disclosure (at the time patent systems were promulgated, many ideas died with their inventors as trade secrets) and encourages more R&D by creating a system for payoff.
The only "system for payoff" I've seen with software patents is patent trolls. Are there cases of software inventors being rewarded for their software more fairly because they had a patent?
I think every every company I've worked at that had R&D had some kind of reward system for patents. Yes, most of the software patents were nonsense but those who have their names on it still did get paid.
It's not bullshit. You said it yourself, the benefits are supposed to be disclosure and encouraging R&D.
But disclosure is rarely an issue with software, and patents are bad at properly disclosing software details in the first place.
And in software there's already a huge motivation to do R&D, while patents are more likely to block useful work than in most fields. Even if I think of highly optimization-motivated fields like video encoding, patents slow down innovation more than they accelerate it.
So can you name some software patents where those motivating factors actually worked? It's a fair question.
The patent system for software is garbage, but it also doesn't seem to jive with the title. They don't claim to invent continued fractions, what they patent is applying them to some domain.
> A method, a neural network, and a computer program product are provided that provide training of neural networks with continued fractions architectures.
It's a bit like the propelling device https://patents.google.com/patent/US1331952A/en -- it doesn't invent or patent shoes, or invent or patent springs, but it patents attaching springs to shoes.
It would seem using continued fractions with elliptic curves what the author wants to do, wouldn't be covered.
However, I still think it can still be challenged if someone can show that continued fractions have been used in with NN before. Or even better, maybe pytorch or other open source projects can explicitly reject crap that's patented. If you put your shit in a junk patent, take it out of the project and enjoy yourself, don't spread it around. So, if the authors of the patent are the ones pushing for the inclusion, then someone should challenge that and have it removed unless the patent is withdrawn.
The problem here is whether just applying some well studied technique to a new area like AI is really inventive enough to be patentable. There were loads of patents which basically added "in a computer" to some existing technique. Just because NN's are novel doesn't mean people should be able to get an exclusionary property right over the use of well known techniques in NN's because they put in half a day's work to be the first to apply that technique to NN's. This isn't the Guinness book of records.
Misleading. This has not been patented. The author links to a patent publication, which happens to the vast majority of patent filings in the U.S.
There was a rejection of this patent application mailed by the USPTO in August 2025.
Rejection is when the fun begins. Note that I'm not a lawyer, but I do have 20+ patents, none in the software realm. Rejection means you get to revise your application and re-submit with a new deadline and new fees. Your chances of getting it accepted on the second or third try can vary.
Applications are seldom withdrawn or ultimately rejected altogether, but may be granted with severely narrowed claims. Also, you can revise the claims without changing the text, within limits, which results in granting of a patent with a very broad text followed by narrow claims
Is there not a legal way to fight this back? With this patent application, someone is trying to establish an advantage *against everyone else*. So legally, anyone might have self-interest to sue the applicant, if the application is fraudulent (because for example it is a stolen 200-year-old mathematical method). I mean, such patent applications should not be a freeroll, they should also entail some risk for the applicant.
Before this devolves into the morass of outraged comments that usually comprises any discussion of patents, here is the golden rule I coined for such threads:
RTFC: Read the Fucking Claims
The claims are the only part of the patent that really matter because those are the only enforceable language. Plus, this is a patent application so the claims have not even been examined yet.
Without commenting on the merits of this patent itself, remember that new applications of existing techniques are still novel, and hence patentable. In fact, if you think about it, almost all inventions and innovations are just applying novel combinations of well-known techniques to new use-cases. (Anything that doesn't fit that definition and introduces genuinely new methods is usually in the "groundbreaking" category.)
So I'd guess "applying old technique to new problem" is probably the case here. I'm no subject matter expert, and there may be prior art that invalidates this, or it may not meet the non-obviousness bar... but when the "200 year old math" came about neural networks were not really a thing.
Whether or not the patent was actually granted in this case, I have not been able to think of a compelling reason to have patents for software. In fact, I think most intellectual property laws need to be seriously rethought.
If the objective is to maximize investment by protecting successful results, I don't think our system is doing a very good job.
This is the primary reason IP patents should be thrown out. They're far too easy to get, exist primarily for the purpose of rent seeking, and generally provide nothing useful to the public knowledge.
While we might get to laugh at those silly people with their software patents (and describing them as toilet paper is quite funny) it still has real world effects for us.
For many years I had to install a linux distro and then mess around with freetype because there was a valid patent on subpixel hinting that was valid in the US and irrelevant in Europe but because the distro's I used at the time where US based I got caught in the cross fire.
Given the huge imbalance between US tech and Europe Tech (and rest of the world really) in software they sneeze, we get flu.
That only stopped been a problem when the patents expired[1].
That's why you should always use either European or Canadian mirrors.
On FreeType, maybe Clear Type related; but I remember some slight hinting methods not related to cleartype which looked far superior on flat LCD screens IMHO.
Another one was Lame and MP3. And I remember the codecs issue with the Penguin Liberation Front for Mandrake, LIVNA for another distro and Debian Multimedia, among others.
Software patents are mostly garbage and unneeded. And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible).
Show me one useful software patent that (a) is not "obvious to one skilled in the art", and (b) benefits society by being granted a monopoly. Just one!
Software rarely requires expensive research that would be worth protecting. Rather than enabling a fair market, this takes fairness out of the market.
Software patents are like getting a patent on "Murder story with final revelation of who did it." Maybe add one or two features, like a "detective with hat", etc. In one fell swoop you would be able to own most murder mysteries.
Software (like books, stories, art, etc) is better handled by Copyright law. May the one who actually has a better product win!
Sorry for the rant.
I agree with your rant. I have a similar one. I personally think that software should mostly just not be patentable at all, since (among others) these things are not patentable according to US patent law: scientific discoveries, mathematical methods, aesthetic creations, and rules or methods for performing mental acts.
In addition, software is also copyrightable, which makes much more sense than patents for protecting unauthorized use. IMO, patents for software should be mostly eliminated, and even copyright terms should be much shorter.
5 years full copyright, 5 years noncommercial unrestricted fair use with mandatory attribution, then straight to public domain. Berne Convention be damned, and multigenerational copyrights can go straight to hell as well.
Software patents are stupid, and even more so with AI soon to be able to take arbitrary compiled code and produce readable, well composed source in a target language with documentation and optimizations.
Studios and platforms and funds and giant corporations that "own" terabytes of IP are a cancer.
We're going to have to fix copyright. Until then, pirate everything.
> IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on Generalized Continued Fractions and their Series Transformations and was awarded a Patent
A good portion of the perception and use around patents is the word "awarded", which implies that there was some evaluation, either objective or subjective, by an expert in the topic and that the invention met some high level of… something that made it worthy of being "awarded" for the "work" that it took to invent. Most parents are not evaluated like that today, and software patents specifically probably never have been.
>> IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on ...
we've been through several such cycles - "...on computer", "... on Internet", and now " ... with AI" .
(of course i have several, including couple with AI, and i'm against patents, especially software ones)
I'd be super cool with software patents if they actually open source the software and had actual usable modules included with the patent.
otherwise I agree, copyright is the way to go.
> Software patents are mostly garbage and unneeded. And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible)
I want to know about these patents that you want your name off of! What were they for? Why do you want your name removed? This is the opening to a great story, please tell!
A huge chunk of software patents are also “well known thing, but with software”. Looking at you, Sonos.
Even if these things were novel at one point, doing them again in software is not novel.
What would you think about still having software patents, but having them expire in 2-5 years? I feel like the concept of a patent is still a good one, but the time it takes to go from zero to a product is drastically lower with computer programming. The patent length should reflect that.
How would you feel about patenting language? I.e. If you speak with certain words or certain patterns then you have to pay a royalty (only for 2 to 5 years).
First off, I think that's a false equivalency, as patenting is about ideas (in a platonic sense), not about instances of ideas (which is what copyrighting is).
Secondly, we already have that in limited forms with trademarks and copyrights.
Thirdly, I think the concept of intellectual property is one of the most brilliant social innovations in the past 500 years, as it aligns incentives to innovate (why would I innovate if someone will just steal my work?).
>it aligns incentives to innovate (why would I innovate if someone will just steal my work?)
it was true 200 years ago. It stopped being true about 100+ years ago. Whether somebody innovates or not became unimportant, as a bunch of other people would still innovate the same thing. Just look at airplanes innovation back then - multiple people were doing it simultaneously, and the fact that Wright brothers got patent actually slowed down airplane innovation in US for couple of decades after that.
Let me see if I understand your argument correctly:
1. Before 1900, when someone came up with an idea, it was unlikely that someone else came up with that idea.
2. Because only one person had that idea, patenting protected their idea from being stolen.
3. After 1900, however, multiple people would have the same idea, but only one person could win.
4. Because only one person could win, it became a net loss to all the others, as they could no longer innovate.
4a. One example of this is the wright brothers.
Is that correct? If so:
1/2. I believe that people have been coming up with the same ideas simultaneously for a long time. Leibniz and Newton comes to mind, for example.
3/4. But would any of them have been able to get investments into their projects if they couldn't patent it and then reap the benefits?
One cannot (in the US) get a patent for software itself. This was settled a while ago. There needs to be more in the claims. In fact, the patent discussed here does not claim continued fractions and nobody would be in danger using them even if the patent issued as is (which is not certain, because the patent claims rather trivial modification of a classic neural network architecture, which should be brought up by the examiner as obvious).
Patents are propelling the society when they work as intended. They made XIX century and at least good chunk of XX century. Without patents, people fall back to copying each other, because it is much easier to copy than to innovate.
> One cannot (in the US) get a patent for software itself. This was settled a while ago. There needs to be more in the claims.
The "more" is basically busywork for lawyers. We effectively have patents for software itself.
Patents go way back possibly as far as 500 BC, with other examples dating to 1331 etc, yet the introduction didn’t kick off any great wave of progress.
Instead a wide range of factors like better plants feeding both population growth and an ever larger percentage of society could do something other than grow food where the real root causes here. Devoting land and labor to cotton for example requires a surplus of food.
> Without patents, people fall back to copying each other, because it is much easier to copy than to innovate.
This is probably the only argument I've seen in favour of software patents in which I see any merit!
I agree that software patents are generally garbage and hurt innovation.
Unfortunately, there are probably many people here on HN that make a living off software patents.
RSA
What was the societal benefit of putting 20 years of monopoly on that algorithm? I don't think potential profit was a big motivator in that research work.
And that patent got invalidated in most of the world anyway.
The societal benefit was having RSA publicly described. MIT isn't a charity.
You think they were just going to sit on that and do nothing if they couldn't get a patent? Or that they'd turn it into a product without the underlying math being revealed right away? I don't believe either of those for a second.
There is a rather long history of the workings of cryptography products kept secret, so yes, it is entirely possible that the underlying math would have been kept as a trade secret.
It is also possible that it would have never been created in the first place because resources were allocated to other patentable inventions.
Of course, in the case of RSA, a similar algorithm was developed separately by the British government and kept secret for 24 years.
Kept secret by the government is very different from kept secret in a product anyone can buy and encrypt arbitrary messages with.
What are some message-sending cryptography products where people didn't know how the encryption worked for a long time?
> It is also possible that it would have never been created in the first place because resources were allocated to other patentable inventions.
Given the history of RSA in particular, I'm extremely skeptical of that.
> Given the history of RSA in particular, I'm extremely skeptical of that.
Well then you might want to read about RC4 which only became public after it was leaked. Prior to being leaked, it was RSA's cash cow and one of the most popular encryption algorithms worldwide due to it's speed and the fact that it was exportable (with a 40 bit key).
Indeed, RSA was rather notorious for keeping crypto algorithms as trade secrets (RC2, SecuriID OTP, etc.)
You quoted the wrong part of my post. A trade secret algorithm supports the idea that it would have been made anyway.
Looking at RC4, how widespread was it before that leak? How many users did it have? Wikipedia lists it being added to a bunch of protocols but all after the leak.
Also more recent cryptography has lots of extremely public competition between nonpatented algorithm proposals, which largely undermines this entire realm of study as a reason to continue to have software patents.
Gold star comment.
>Show me one useful software patent that ... (b) benefits society by being granted a monopoly. Just one!
that's a bullshit criterion, and nothing about what you said applies to software in particular.
it's generally agreed that monopolies are bad for society, but patents only grant a temporary monopoly to reward innovation, in exchange for which society gets disclosure (at the time patent systems were promulgated, many ideas died with their inventors as trade secrets) and encourages more R&D by creating a system for payoff.
The only "system for payoff" I've seen with software patents is patent trolls. Are there cases of software inventors being rewarded for their software more fairly because they had a patent?
I think every every company I've worked at that had R&D had some kind of reward system for patents. Yes, most of the software patents were nonsense but those who have their names on it still did get paid.
Guessing those rewards are in the hundreds of dollars, probably a fraction of the engineer salary that went into the technical work.
It's not bullshit. You said it yourself, the benefits are supposed to be disclosure and encouraging R&D.
But disclosure is rarely an issue with software, and patents are bad at properly disclosing software details in the first place.
And in software there's already a huge motivation to do R&D, while patents are more likely to block useful work than in most fields. Even if I think of highly optimization-motivated fields like video encoding, patents slow down innovation more than they accelerate it.
So can you name some software patents where those motivating factors actually worked? It's a fair question.
The patent system for software is garbage, but it also doesn't seem to jive with the title. They don't claim to invent continued fractions, what they patent is applying them to some domain.
https://patents.justia.com/patent/20230401438#history
> A method, a neural network, and a computer program product are provided that provide training of neural networks with continued fractions architectures.
It's a bit like the propelling device https://patents.google.com/patent/US1331952A/en -- it doesn't invent or patent shoes, or invent or patent springs, but it patents attaching springs to shoes.
It would seem using continued fractions with elliptic curves what the author wants to do, wouldn't be covered.
However, I still think it can still be challenged if someone can show that continued fractions have been used in with NN before. Or even better, maybe pytorch or other open source projects can explicitly reject crap that's patented. If you put your shit in a junk patent, take it out of the project and enjoy yourself, don't spread it around. So, if the authors of the patent are the ones pushing for the inclusion, then someone should challenge that and have it removed unless the patent is withdrawn.
The problem here is whether just applying some well studied technique to a new area like AI is really inventive enough to be patentable. There were loads of patents which basically added "in a computer" to some existing technique. Just because NN's are novel doesn't mean people should be able to get an exclusionary property right over the use of well known techniques in NN's because they put in half a day's work to be the first to apply that technique to NN's. This isn't the Guinness book of records.
Misleading. This has not been patented. The author links to a patent publication, which happens to the vast majority of patent filings in the U.S. There was a rejection of this patent application mailed by the USPTO in August 2025.
Rejection is when the fun begins. Note that I'm not a lawyer, but I do have 20+ patents, none in the software realm. Rejection means you get to revise your application and re-submit with a new deadline and new fees. Your chances of getting it accepted on the second or third try can vary.
Applications are seldom withdrawn or ultimately rejected altogether, but may be granted with severely narrowed claims. Also, you can revise the claims without changing the text, within limits, which results in granting of a patent with a very broad text followed by narrow claims
Relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainitpeter/comments/1ovy31o/exp...
Is there not a legal way to fight this back? With this patent application, someone is trying to establish an advantage *against everyone else*. So legally, anyone might have self-interest to sue the applicant, if the application is fraudulent (because for example it is a stolen 200-year-old mathematical method). I mean, such patent applications should not be a freeroll, they should also entail some risk for the applicant.
Before this devolves into the morass of outraged comments that usually comprises any discussion of patents, here is the golden rule I coined for such threads:
RTFC: Read the Fucking Claims
The claims are the only part of the patent that really matter because those are the only enforceable language. Plus, this is a patent application so the claims have not even been examined yet.
Without commenting on the merits of this patent itself, remember that new applications of existing techniques are still novel, and hence patentable. In fact, if you think about it, almost all inventions and innovations are just applying novel combinations of well-known techniques to new use-cases. (Anything that doesn't fit that definition and introduces genuinely new methods is usually in the "groundbreaking" category.)
So I'd guess "applying old technique to new problem" is probably the case here. I'm no subject matter expert, and there may be prior art that invalidates this, or it may not meet the non-obviousness bar... but when the "200 year old math" came about neural networks were not really a thing.
When I worked there many decades ago, I had pressure and saw people get rewards for patenting everything you could. Seems like things haven't changed.
Isn't this just a patent application? Also what are the actual patent claims? I was not able to find a link to the application.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20230401438A1
I don't think they are patenting any classical math as the blog claims. It's an architecture using CF that is patented, I believe.
Ofcourse, patents are trash.
Whether or not the patent was actually granted in this case, I have not been able to think of a compelling reason to have patents for software. In fact, I think most intellectual property laws need to be seriously rethought.
If the objective is to maximize investment by protecting successful results, I don't think our system is doing a very good job.
I remember reading that IBM holds a staggering number of patents - over 150,000 in the US alone.
This is the primary reason IP patents should be thrown out. They're far too easy to get, exist primarily for the purpose of rent seeking, and generally provide nothing useful to the public knowledge.
Reminds this: https://theonion.com/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-181956466...
Good in case of Europe has a shortage on toilet paper.
Also, this might be tangentially related to Fractan. Any Mathematician there? if there's some relation, the patent might be void/null.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN
While we might get to laugh at those silly people with their software patents (and describing them as toilet paper is quite funny) it still has real world effects for us.
For many years I had to install a linux distro and then mess around with freetype because there was a valid patent on subpixel hinting that was valid in the US and irrelevant in Europe but because the distro's I used at the time where US based I got caught in the cross fire.
Given the huge imbalance between US tech and Europe Tech (and rest of the world really) in software they sneeze, we get flu.
That only stopped been a problem when the patents expired[1].
[1] https://freetype.org/patents.html
That's why you should always use either European or Canadian mirrors. On FreeType, maybe Clear Type related; but I remember some slight hinting methods not related to cleartype which looked far superior on flat LCD screens IMHO.
Another one was Lame and MP3. And I remember the codecs issue with the Penguin Liberation Front for Mandrake, LIVNA for another distro and Debian Multimedia, among others.