Donald Knuth Quotes

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.

Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.

Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.

patents are an arm in the hands of large enterprises which use them in order to block all inconvenient innovation or to restrict the development of free software. The American experience with software patents is particularly negative and merits reflexion

People are getting patents on things that are too general.

With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed.

Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas.

In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them.

Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call 'incremental innovation' - innovations that build, in some way, on others.

I am a strong believer that intellectual property rights need to be protected.

Patents should be for technological innovations. So a program for a new machine tool should be patentable but a non-technological innovation, such as grammar-checking software for a word-processor, should not be.

support … continued widespread innovation by resisting the wider application of patents

We believe that patents exist to reward the inventors of truly outstanding ideas, not to allow big businesses to stifle competition with an ever-growing tide of trivial, incomprehensible, overreaching patents. We will stop the abuse of patent law by raising the bar on how innovative an idea has to be before it can be patented, and by prohibiting patents on software, business methods, concepts and works of nature. We will require a working model to be provided to the patent office before a patent is granted and we will strictly enforce the current rule that patents are invalid if they are "obvious to someone skilled in the art".

The IP system is an artificial construct that excessively rewards owners of intellectual property, granting them monopolies over inventions and ideas that, in many cases, are the product of generations of thinkers and/or publicly funded research.

Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief.

Every piece of software written today is likely going to infringe on someone else's patent.

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.

It's not healthy for patents to be used to stop other people from doing business.

This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth.

I've never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I could avoid doing it... Lawsuits are a ridiculous way to do business.

The quality of American patents has been deteriorating for years; they are increasingly issued for products and processes that are not truly innovative - things like the queuing system for Netflix, which was patented in 2003. Yes, it makes renting movies a snap, but was it really a breakthrough deserving patent protection?

The intellectual property situation is bad and getting worse. To be a programmer, it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology.

Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent.

Content zips around the Internet thanks to code - programming code. And code is subject to intellectual property laws.