This case is at it's core, a question of property and rights. As heartless as that may sound, property and rights are principles the United States is built upon. They are laws of the land. The same argument can easily be made to cut profit margins on medical devices. To a further extreme you could argue to take money from the wealthy to pay the medical bills of the needy. I believe that this is what this case boils down to.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Saying the "to promote the common good" is not the phraseology, and that matters from a legal standpoint.
I think more elaboration is needed as to exactly how this patent aims to fulfill its purpose. Then we may have more insight to decipher whether the Patent Clause appropriately defends the holder of the patent in this case.
1. Society defines what is property and who has rights. This can change at any time. That is, there is no absolute notion of "property".
Not too far back humans were property. Some would say the abolition of that notion of property is a principle the United States was built upon.
2. Software is different from other patentable ideas. It completely fails the non-obviousness test. That is, people can easily independently develop or use ideas as part of their own creation since at core it is just mathematics applied to a problem domain. This is similar to the underlying reason why (pure) business processes are not in general patentable outside the U.S.
3. There is no corollary to other social systems, at least not the for derivative health metaphor that you made. You cannot give up something (wealth) that you never "owned" in the first place. Further, anyone can fall sick or be hurt at any time for any reason, regardless of wealth or circumstance. So, there is always a social cost come what may. Whereas, you have to create an idea and choose to follow it.
Innovation is an "option" and therefore easily blocked. This was an objective reason for having a patent system in the first place (whether it has succeeded in that is a different question all together).
You cannot even argue software patents are the most efficient enablers of innovation since some of the most innovative and useful software known to exist either easily predates software patents or were explicitly made available for free (many even while software patentability was available) and never encumbered at any point.
TL;DR. It is only a question property and rights if a society deems it. It does not have to be this way. As easily evidenced by lack of software or business process patents for most of the rest of the world...
"To a further extreme you could argue to take money from the wealthy to pay the medical bills of the needy."
That's hardly an extreme - it's what happens in many advanced nations with universal healthcare. Taxes are collected, and part of them go to paying for medical treatment for everyone, rich or poor.
"property and rights are principles the United States is built upon."
That doesn't say anything about how long the temporary monopolies granted for patents and copyrights should last, or whether everything in every context should be patentable (e.g. software and UI design).
Intellectual property rights are important, insofar as they "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". When this goal is no longer being effectively promoted by the current implementation of the patent/copyright systems, then it's time to consider re-engineering them.
The last point you mentioned is the next logical step in the discussion I believe. As things stand, it would appear the company holding the patents is in the right, from a legal perspective, and that sucks for the little girl. However, were now at the juncture to call in to question the limits and extents of the Patent Clause created to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." On which side of the fence does this scenario fall on. Not such an easy question to answer. In what way do patents "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" anyways?
You make valid points, but make them at the wrong point in the discussion from the point of view of many people here. By seeing many, many examples of this sort, and by our own experiences in the industry, we've already discovered that software patents, in general, hinder 'the Progress of Science and useful Arts'. What you call 'the next logical step in the discussion' is a step we've taken a long time ago.
But, apparently, others who don't share our experience, have not. What would be the best way to explain the situation? Writing comments on hacker news is probably not going to influence any lawmakers....
Historically, you're correct. But the people who codified patent law certainly didn't anticipate the development of software, in which every program of substantial size necessarily uses multiple different patented techniques.
Do you think this is the way property rights and software ought to work together?
> every program of substantial size necessarily uses multiple different patented techniques
Do you think that this is not true of other engineering disciplines? For instance, can an auto maker build a new car without infringing tons of patents? What about robot makers? Airplane manufacturers? Do you believe that nothing that e.g. SpaceX (or your favorite innovation shop) is working on is worthy of patent protection?
> Do you think this is the way property rights and software ought to work together?
This consequence is clearly horrible. However, let's say there was an innovative physical device (with no software) at play instead. Then we'd say that's exactly how property rights work. We'd presumably be happy that in a few years the rest of society would have access to the device without paying the monopoly rates. The point is the monopoly is an incentive that helps an inventor take an idea from concept to useful product. If the idea had value by itself, we could use my idea for a cancer cure and be free of it tomorrow. (Unfortunately, I am missing the useful -- patentable --parts of the cure.)
What specifically is so different about software that would make it unique among engineering pursuits as the only one unworthy of patent protection?
(Not sure why you were downvoted-- seemed like a reasonable response.)
I do think the degree to which software builds on itself is different than in other engineering disciplines, but I'm afraid I don't have evidence to back it up. The closest I can get in the time I've got this morning: consider the amount of (compiled) code Dell ships on a $500 PC and compare that to a $500 mechanical device like a bicycle. I can imagine doing the research to figure out whether the bicycle infringes any patents. With the PC, I can't imagine how it would be possible. You'd have to understand how all of every program shipped on the PC works; I doubt that there is anyone alive who has even read more than half of the code in any single modern operating system. You'd need a team of programmer/lawyers and the source code from every vendor who ships code on the PC.
From there, I'd say that a system where an inventor can't assess whether their invention is infringing without an effort comparable to the amount of work needed to create the invention is a bad system.
Any post that argues that software is worthy of intellectual property protection will get downvotes here. Whatever, I think the discussion matters.
The first counterargument to your position is that it's not based on any guiding principle, but rather the degree of overlap among innovations. That makes it difficult to specify, and hardly seems like reason enough alone to ban software patents. There may be a case for banning software patents, but it seems like the argument would need to be less subjective.
The second counterargument to your position is that you're comparing apples and oranges, on the basis of retail cost. The Dell PC is near the cutting edge of its field, while pretty much everything in the bicycle would have been invented before patents were invented. A better comparison would be the Dell's software vs. a mechanical system developed by Kiva for making their warehouse robots more effective (or a propulsion engineer at SpaceX making some cool rocket stuff). Mechanical engineers pushing the envelope are in the same position as software engineers.
Besides, isn't some of this transitive? If I can make something (unpatentable) in software, but I can build a (patentable) device to perform the same function, what difference makes the software embodiment less worthy? Surely with different incentives the patent system would be flooded with patents on single-use mechanical devices to take the place of the software patent flood we have today.
I can agree with you that the implementation of the current system is a mess, but I'm not sure that translates directly to the case for invalidating software patents. I'm not sure whether software should be patentable or not, I just have yet to hear a compelling case against the principle of software patents vs. other types of patents.
