Should I patent my software? [closed]

Question

I go to a university where students are allowed to make their semester schedule based on the information about the subjects they are going to take, that is, the hours that the courses are available, the professors, and the remaining room for other people. Making these schedules by hand was a very difficult/boring task.

I wrote a pretty nifty Python program that automates this process. You pick the codes for the subject you're going to take and filter out the professors you don't want. Then the program outputs all the possibilities there are if there aren't time conflicts. This program helped a lot of students. The time to make a schedule reduced from 2 days to less than 30 seconds!

Now here begin the problems. My family and all the people that used the program tell me to patent the program before someone steals the idea (that could happen in my country). But I question that myself. Is it necessary to patent a web scraper mixed with a backtracking engine? It was difficult to make the program because I didn't know a lot of things, but now that I have finished, I feel that it would be very stupid/immature to patent such a thing. But on the other hand, I don't want someone else to get the credit for it. What do you think?

Answer 1

In your case, I have a strong vote "against".

1. Computer-aided schedule making is a problem as old as computers, and one of favored subjects of thesis given out to students to solve. Chances are more than good that there is a prior art on your patent.

2. The target audience, as you say, are students. Piracy is rampart in this customer base, so no matter what -legal- protection you apply, you'd better implement some awesome DRM (...on a Python script?!)

3. Software patents are recognized almost nowhere outside USA. There is nothing against a foreign company picking up your patent and selling it locally. And patent application requires pretty detailed description of the mechanism in question, and is totally public, meaning you practically hand them the instructions.

4. Considering the costs of a patent application (and good chance of having it rejected), the chance of return on investment is slim.

5. Software patents are universally considered evil by the IT people. You will lose a lot of professional respect in developer community for patenting software.

6. You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a business model to have people pay reasonable money for a piece of software they use for 30s twice a year.

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edit: Let me add a solution to most of your problems: Software as service. Make a web app that performs your task; make it accessible through micropayments. Piracy problem vanishes, it can't be trivially copied so someone would need to "reinvent" it to bypass your (lack of) patent protection, small "per use" fee synergizes with the "30 seconds twice a year" usage pattern, and you're skipping a lot of distribution headaches.

Answer 2

While you surely wrote a cool and useful piece of software, this kind of scheduling stuff is just daily work for people who work in areas where time scheduling belongs to their kind software, for example managing software for employees working plans like you have in kitchens, hospitals and many other places. There is similar software for schools to plan which teacher will give which course in which class, used at the beginning of each year. All this is tricky and you can be proud if your program works, but not much that hasn't be done before.

If you can get a patent on it may depend on your country's laws, though is most likely not worth the time and money. Set up a website with your name on it and publish as Open Source.

Answer 3

I suspect you could not patent this anyhow.

Essentially with a patent you need to patent the process or method. In the case of a method of screen-scraping, its been done for years, so there is nothing novel or inventive here.

In the case of filtering and selecting (courses, etc) this is essentially a selection and optimisation solution. Again its not novel or inventive.

Putting these two things together might be novel, and it might be inventive, but its still a bit grey. A patent attorney would be able to advise you - but it will cost you a lot of money.

And as pointed out by others, if you patent something you then have to defend it, else you have wasted your money doing the patenting.

You are unlikely to make a financial gain from something like this unless you are very well resourced (and you may then find that somebody else has already done something similar anyhow - there are numerous university student records and scheduling systems around the world). So you are probably better off licensing it in some form (creative commons, whatever) so that you at least have a happy warm inner glow.

For the record: IANAL. But I have done quite a few patent applications over the years.

Answer 4

Patenting will cost a lot of time and money to get it in place. And once you have it in place you must defend it, which also takes a lot of time / money. If you don't have a lot of time/money I think it would be best to release it under some sort of open source license as suggested by Mihai. Do you want to make money of it or just have the fame for it?

Answer 5

Let's assume your program uses something that can be patented.

This means you will have to spend quite some time and money to really patent it.

Let's assume you successfully patented it and somebody else infringes it (knowingly or not - the latter being more likely, especially in a case like this).
Either, they are just some really small company or a single university student, i.e. nobody you could get money from.
Or they are really a sizable corporation with a lot of funds, that can turn you idea into profit and whom you could sue to get some money from. However you can expect the whole trial to go on for many months or even several years and to suck you dry of any money you have. And there is no guarantee you will actually win.

All that to say: You most likely can't afford patenting software.

Secondly, what you speak of is in fact a very nice and helpful project. But it's not really new. That very combination of different routines you created of course is unique, but to me it rather sounds like adapting a generally known pattern to very specific area (your university and the way courses are organized there).
The only scope where the uniqueness is relevant probably is your university (because it's the only place where this unique constraint types apply). Therefor I don't think your solution can be patented.

If you're worried with someone else getting the credit, releasing it as open source is a good idea, as other said. Put it on a public repository (github, google code, bitbucket, sourceforge, ...), so that if somebody claims he did his stuff first, you can simply show that your code was checked in since then and then.
If you want to earn a bit of money from this, then you can hope for donation or get paid for feature implementation.

Once you have released it with a free software license you see fit, you should try to spread the word or even approach your university, so that they use it. You might even get a job to maintain and integrate the project on behalf of the university and might be able to write your thesis on some aspects of the project.

Answer 6

License your program under an Open Source license. Either GPL, BSD, Apache, MIT or - why not - a Creative Commons license.

Or, try a Beerware license.

Some people use WTFPL but I guess this doesn't really apply here.

Anyway, patenting software is a gray area. You should contact a lawyer if it is too important.

Answer 7

Chances are pretty good your solution is a variation of an existing constraint satisfaction approach, search, or scheduling algorithm, so don't get too hung up on patents. If you really think that's worth investigating, talk to a patent attorney for an hour with an expertise in software patents and figure out what he thinks your chances are.

But the area you are describing is pretty well researched area with lots of prior art; chances are, a professor in the CS department will give you better guidance than an attorney on how novel your approach is, and will know the landscape pretty well, and cost you nothing more than your existing tuition and fees. If your approach is interesting enough, maybe it'll make a good graduate degree thesis topic.

Ideas aren't worth that much in practice, and the idea of finding ways to optimize class schedules is a pretty old one; no pun intended, but it's a textbook example of a graph matching problem. If you could turn the technique into a larger business (entirely possible, if you broaden your scope beyond your current problem), you might have a business opportunity, and then you can fund all the patent attorneys your generated profits allow.

Answer 8

It's almost certainly not worth even trying unless you've got a large company to back you up or you can make money yourself off your software rapidly. Here's why.

A patent (which it costs a fair amount of money to get) is not worth much unless you can defend it, i.e., you have to be prepared to bring a civil suit against violators of the patent. If you go after Small Guys, you won't get much money at all (because they've usually not got the assets) and if you go after Big Guys, it's going to cost you millions to reach the point where a payout could happen. And you might well lose. Where do the Big Guys get a benefit? From the fact that they can afford to hold many patents in a portfolio; it's the portfolio's bargaining power that is valuable.

Of course, if having the patent lets you become rich through selling the software then it's a different matter, but there's very few people who have managed that. It's ever so hard to become rich selling software. (Now services, you can do better selling those, even if you give your software away. That's a different market altogether.)

Answer 9

This is a variety of Stable Marriage problem the algorithm and is used a lot(medical schools) to match graduates to internships based on a criteria for best fit.

Answer 10

I'm not sure if you have anything to patent. You even said so yourself with someone steals the idea. If you have a fairly unique/complex technique that is patentable but i'm sure there many ways to implement that idea w/o using the same technique.

What are you patenting again? The idea? bad (good?) news is you cant patent ideas.

Answer 11

You cannot patent it, because you publicly disclosed it already. You have user base (and since it's a script - they can see exactly how it works), and you more or less described it here, giving enough information as to the essence of the idea.

So even if the question was relevant when you started typing it - it ceased being relevant once you clicked "Submit". You cannot patent it any longer, even if all the other (valid!) reasons stated in the other answers would not hold for you.