🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Nov15.134707.11434@uvm.edu> wollman@emily.uvm.edu (Garrett Wollman) writes:
>In article <PREECE.91Nov14171837@neptune.urbana.mcd.mot.com> preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece) writes:
>>I don't think I understand this argument at all.  What has the cost of
>>production to do with the patentability of something?  Are you saying
>>only expensive things should be patentable?
>
>If I understand him right, Russ is trying to explain how software is
>*fundamentally* *different* from other types of invention, which is
>the reason many people believe that software should not be patentable.

I believe the argument goes as follows:

Manufacturing facilities (i.e. factories) are expensive, so a manufacturer
would like to have some assurance that he'll be able to recover his
investment.  Assuming that there's a market for the product, he can do this
best by making sure that he's the only source of the new product.  Without
patents, the only way he can do this is by keeping the design of the
product secret and hoping someone else doesn't invent it.  Patents allow
him to have a monopoly in exchange for not keeping the design secret.

Software is different.  Yes, there's some initial capital outlay, but it's
relatively small compared to the cost of building a factory.  It presumably
costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to build the manufacturing facility
for paper clips that cost a penny apiece; on the other hand, it costs
$5-10K to buy a computer that can be used to write programs that go for
hundreds of dollars apiece.  The paper clip manufacturer has to sell
thousands of boxes of paper clips to recoup his investment, while the
software developer only needs to sell a few dozen.

Furthermore, the software developer's investment can be amortized over many
different products.  Factories can be converted as well, but there's
usually significant retooling expenses.  There's no retooling expense
required when converting a computer from a word-processor development
machine to a database development machine; the most significant expense
that might be considered retooling would be purchasing new peripherals
related to the new application (e.g. when going from development of word
processors to paint programs you would probably buy color display hardware).

-- 
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar