In an environment where inventors were not sufficiently motivated to produce sans patents, patents might quite legitimately be "promot[ing] the progress of Science and useful Arts" in part by providing that motivation.
That doesn't conflict with anything I said; I never said patents don't motivate inventors; I said motivating inventors was not the purpose of patents, it's merely the side effect of the method used to get inventors to give up their trade secrets.
But back to software patents, if the real societal good of patent law is disclosure than there is no need for it at all in the software world. As soon as Visicalc sold their first spreadsheet every programmer knew how to build one. There is no benefit to society to grant the monopoly in exchange for instructions on how to build a software idea.
No, that's an argument against patents functioning well to achieve disclosure. The purpose of patents is clear: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts and requires no debate nor arguments.
The straight forward way is to give a financial incentive for inventors to tinker and come up with new ideas.
The way you're suggesting is to give inventors (that are already inventing without need of incentive) an incentive to disclose their invention and then that will promote other inventors to build on top of the invention even though they will have pay the original inventor for the privilege.
My point is that neither of these methods are effective at promoting progress in software.
The reason patents exist, as you've repeatedly asserted, is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. We are discussing two mechanisms by which that might be accomplished (and by which it is quite arguably accomplished in some fields).
> The reason patents exist, as you've repeatedly asserted, is to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
Then our discussion is over as that is the only point I was making.
> We are discussing two mechanisms by which that might be accomplished
No we are not, as how to accomplish promoting science was not anything I commented on at all. You may be trying to discuss it, but I'm not interested in that digression.
"[M]otivating inventors was not the purpose of patents, it's merely the side effect of the method used to get inventors to give up their trade secrets."
You seriously need to explain how, because as far as I can tell your claim here is nothing but brain-damage. As we've agreed, "promoting the progress of science and useful arts" is the purpose of patents. PROMOTING DISCLOSURE IS A MECHANISM, and PROMOTING INVENTION IS A MECHANISM and YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT BOTH, dismissing the former as ancillary and pushing the latter as central. A claim that you weren't talking about mechanisms... baffles me. Without some clarification, I'm calling it quits on this thread.
No I was not talking about both, I dismissed them as mechanisms to bring the point back to the only thing I was discussing, the goal. I don't care about the mechanisms and if you can't see that then maybe you've got some brain damage to cope with and you should stop talking.
Holding on to the slim remaining chance you're not trolling...
I quote you again:
"[M]otivating inventors was not the purpose of patents, it's merely the side effect of the method used to get inventors to give up their trade secrets."
Let's break this down a little:
"X was not the purpose of patents, it's merely a side effect of the method used to get Y."
And now you're claiming you weren't talking about X and Y?
Note that I've shown this to others, and they don't understand your position either, so if it's brain-damage it's not uniquely mine.
You as much as said it's not a goal at all, whereas it can absolutely be an instrumental goal (which is what I'd read the parent as responding to, and how the issue is often - though not always - framed) without being a terminal goal.
