Copyrights for protecting software seems likely to die on the altar of LLMs. It seems likely patents will become more important.

I agree in general, but can think of at least one counterpoint: https://terathon.com/blog/decade-slug.html

Actually novel implementation is protected, paid the author's bills, and was dedicated to the public domain recently - no massive corp involved.

Anyone who has ever taken part in a software patent litigation ... or in the creation of a software patent, knows intimately that its a bunch of bullshit.

The boogieman that software patent advocates raise is that IP theft and free riding will destroy America if we don't have patents. But literally nobody is creating software to get a patent on it, and software patents don't stop anyone from replicating software.

Instead software patents are just a way for mediocre lawyers to live parasitically off the tech industry.

Imagine a world where we were so worried about bullying that we created a department to monitor all speech on the Internet, and you had to run your speech past lawyers for approval before saying anything. And you could be sued for saying anything by anyone if you didn't get lawyer approval. That would be a world with dramatically less bullying than the Internet today. AND a much worse world with much less communication. AND in that alternate world, the lawyers would argue that there would be more bullying if we put that ridiculous system to an end. And they would be right that there would be some more bullying, AND it would also be right that that degree of bullying would be worth it to have free speech.

Similarly with patents. Yeah, on the margins there might be more IP theft. SO WHAT. This system right now sucks.

From a laymans perspective they also don't seem to work. Apple's multitouch felt like something brand new to consumers and yet other device manufacturers copied it anyway. Facebook entire product line is dependent on ripping off competitors unique features. What's the point?

>For software Copyright is a far better instrument. Let the one with best implementation win... That's where the cost is: Implementing, testing, shipping, maintaining. Protect that.

But this is minimally protectable, and you can copy the idea just not the exact implementation. Copyright does not have a 'doctrine of equivalents' equivalent. It also supports independent creation. Copyright also does not cover functional elements. You cannot copyright an idea, only the expression. So maybe you can elaborate more on why your point makes sense?

Unfortunately patent offices are using loopholes that reintroduce software patents. Patent law says that a pure software patent is not possible, it has to be combined with a specific hardware application to make it an invention. So they fill in a patent for "XX implemented on a hardware operating on land, in the air, in space, on, or under water.". That's essentially a software patent.

You may have heard about a little thing called MP3? Basically, Fraunhofer in Germany filed for (software) patents in the US. They made sure to wait some time for MP3 to become a thing before they started going after people and collect royalties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing,_ownership,_and_...

> Clearly this is an attempt to prevent similar patents from being weaponised against them in the US.

Why do we assume that Mistral is a "good guy" protecting themselves? I'm not sure they necessarily are. Could just be trying to grab any ground they can.

I mean, maybe they are the "good guy", but I don't think we know either way.

September 26, 2025: https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/

Unfortunately there are many patents that simply combine an old thing with a new thing in the obvious way. Since the new thing is new, the combination is "novel".

You pay the lawyer in thousands to use a language which meets the criteria for the patent. Thousands of software patents are repetition of each other with some thing in particular worded differently

I didn't carefully read either of these, but it reminds me of https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/ (note it predates the filing).

Seems that this is a patent application from March, so a challenge should still be possible. But it would have to come from a named entity afaik (not a lawyer).

Improvements in existing tech can be patented. An RPC call that an AI writes for itself and then executes is a novelty from prior art. Whether it’s non-obvious is up for debate but if it gets past the patent officer that debate happens via lawsuit

Software patents are probably unenforceable in most cases, at least in the US and Europe, are essentially unenforceable. The European Patent Office, very sensibly, denies software patents.

The USPTO has a strange insistence on granting them even though they aren't legally valid. Therefore, if you have a lot of money, you might file a software patent for one of four reasons:

1) You hope that the US courts might one day change their minds and start enforcing software patents.

2) You hope that you might scare people in to giving you licensing fees even though you know the patent won't be enforced.

3) You want to prevent others from scaring you in to giving them licensing fees.

4) You want to get a patent because it's impressive/looks good on your resume.

That is why all patents exist. It's ridiculously time consuming and expensive to get a utility patent for anything. I invented something at my old company 5 years ago and the patent process is still ongoing, should hopefully get awarded this year. It costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and you need to actively litigate infringements if you want to keep it. 99% of patents exist just for legal bullying and the other 1% are actually novel, useful inventions.

Almost all these patents exist as a war chest and a deterrent against other companies. Everyone theoretically perpetually infringes on each other's obscure patents all the time, but there is a detente between the big players because they hold the gun to each other's heads. If you as a small guy enter the game, you're just shot.

In theory patents are also to protect smaller players (though not dirt poor), from getting their work ripped off by bigger players after demonstrating feasibility. The idea of being an "inventor" professionally only really works with patents. Software patents pushes this model to logical extremes though. I run a small startup that trains models for medical devices and the only way to get any of the large players to care about implementing improvements you make (and not rip you off) seems to be to have some patent protection. They are mostly interested in the patents as assets to prevent their competitors from acquiring. In all honesty I'm not completely convinced on software patents either but we've had to adapt.

It builds corporate value. If you end up with a portfolio of patents that someone might want to acquire, you've just created a new market for your company. Individual software patents of common quality probably don't matter.

Economically, it’s to avoid free-rider effects. This benefit largely seems alien to tech people because the industry inherently has other moats: network effects, data and code in a server instead of a product sold to consumers that competitors can easily disassemble and reverse engineer, etc.

The real truth is that's how Edison used them and they've been the primary use of patents since inception.

I don't disagree, but Mistral is hardly a "rich player" in the current AI bubble.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and X are each valued at a trillion or more. Mistral is valued at $20B, 50x less. Even Deepseek is several times bigger than Mistral.

They exist so you can not be forbidden to do what you invented.. but there might be unintended correlation ;)

Precisely the reason is to give breathing room for big players to invest in development of technology so they can capitalise exclusively for a period

in what world is mistral a big player?

Mistral is not a rich player in the context of AI. It is minor smaller company, basically.

Or it’s a patent for ”a method” of doing that, that is much more specific?

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/ try this

Believe it or not, but law offices make heavy use of https://patents.google.com/

Businesses know no shame, if applying for a trivial patent is useful, they will of course do so.

The real problem is patents which are trivial and/broad being granted.

Not the first time, not the last time in US patent history ...

“Claude, please review my repo for any work that could be novel enough to receive a patent. Be liberal in your definition of ‘novel’”

including Anthropic[0] and OAI[1]

[0]: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...

[1]: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-programm...

Likely from Palmer Luckey, who coined the term 'Chinese instruction manuals'

I think you do not need to register a patent, you can just publish the idea with a verifiable date, that could be considered as a "prior art". I would suggest to make a free website where anyone can publish any ideas although I do not understand how one can prove the publish date. And then the community could publish everything that might be potentially invented in near future to prevent others from getting a patent.

For example, I would publish the idea of a "self-driving car" that can drive without or with minimal human supervision using a computer. I believe this is pretty novel and can be called an invention.

Also I hope this patent is valid only in US and cannot be enforced in China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_patent_aggregation

In the US, the patent office almost always grants patents as long as the correct process is followed. They don't really concern themselves with whether a patent could be successfully challenged, they just care about whether the the application is shaped like a patent. They leave it to the courts to invalidate all the bad patents they approve. It's pretty terrible: the very least they could do is ask a random dude in the relevant industry whether there's anything novel there at all, and they don't even do that.

This will not fly anywhere outside France Polish here and the very first question I have is "who would decide which cultural industry representatives would get the money"? And what right the decision makers have to decide that. How about they send few k EUR a month to my friend who is a struggling painter :-D

Somehow I doubt that will happen.

It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.

Voices like this are useful to spark a debate on AI basically taking content owned by other people and selling it, but no one will agree to implement anything like what is proposed.

Mistral aren't an EU mouthpiece. They're a startup backed by Microsoft, nVidia, and Salesforce.

There are many ways for a business to survive outside of innovation

They all do that, when OpenAI reached a licensing deal with Reddit, it's to prevent less financially capable competitors to enter the market. (And I'm not saying that's right either)

"Fair use" is not a defense in patent law

Plenty of things with prior art are successfully patentend. And are successfully enforced, because it is cheaper to pay the troll to cross the bridge than to take it to court. It isn't until the sue the wrong person who has the backbone and the resources to contest it that the patent gets revoked.

One could also have their preferred AI draft + deploy the white paper prior to flush.

> So we are just vibe patenting rubbish and rebranding it with AI?

"Patenting rubbish" is a description of pretty much all software patents since forever.

It's closer to a trojan horse talking to its C&C server than a typical RPC scenario.

In particular it's the server telling the client to execute arbitrary code in response to a request from the client.