Mostly any employer owns any idea you have while an employee anyway.
Nothing wrong with getting residual payments on a good idea, it’s like receiving deferred pay. Depending on it, not so much.
Agreed on your take on software patents. A utility patent is typically on a method of achieving a given goal, and practically begs other clever souls to find other methods.
A software patent (as far as I can tell, and I’m certainly no expert here!) covers the goal itself.
Yes, that sounds like a good deep intuition of a statement. The method is the goal, the medium is the message. Like a any graphic cursor that uses an inverted field is a XOR cursor.
Ever since Autodesk had to pay $25,000 to "license" a patent which claimed the invention of XOR-draw for screen cursors (the patent was filed years after everybody in computer graphics was already using that trick), at the risk of delaying or cancelling our Initial Public Offering in 1985, I've been convinced that software patents are not only a terrible idea, but one of the principal threats to the software industry. As I write this introduction in 1993, the multimedia industry is shuddering at the prospect of paying royalties on every product they make, because a small company in California has obtained an absurdly broad patent on concepts that were widely discussed and implemented experimentally more than 20 years earlier.Such patents are inherently Marxist, by that I mean using imaginary property in way that is incredibly destructive to real private property, and doing so despotically. The most vicious and unprincipled wins.
Patent Nonsense, John Walker, May 10th, 1993
The big eat the small, and the small have no protection.