Man parents are insane. How could something like that possibly be patentable? How does giving gigantic companies monopoly on a fucking setuid bit do us any good?

Do/did intelligent people like Dennis Ritchie really not feel any discomfort by the fact that their great work robs the world of that very work through the parent system?

No that's not the insane part. The insane part is that this is the only patent that came out of entire Research UNIX project [1].

[1] See the answer to question 25 on Rob Pike's blog: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/01/unix-quiz-answers....

> How could something like that possibly be patentable?

If, _back_then_, it was new, non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_having_ordinary_skill_i...), and not the only way to do what it does, why wouldn’t it?

Now, was it, back then? I wouldn’t know, but I think there is a decent chance it was.

I should probably have been more clear, but I'm not that concerned about whether it's patentable from a legal perspective as patent law currently exists. Clearly current laws are interpreted to allow such patents. I'm more concerned about, why do we think it's a Good Thing™ that companies just get state-enforced legal monopolies over those kinds of ideas.

Not just companies, people. That's why. It means that if I came up with a really novel way to solve the problem of protecting file contents I, an individual, can protect myself from some massive company just copying the idea and selling it.

As with most laws there's good and bad.

I wasn't concerning myself with people here, but with companies. Corporations are not people. Whether patents are appropriate for the lone independent inventor is its own discussion.

Once a person starts the company they typically sign the patent over to it although they are still listed as the investors. This is how intellectual property works.

It would be very difficult to have a patent system where patents are owned exclusively by individuals, especially single individuals.

I don't understand why you are saying this. The issue I brought up was giving a state-backed legal monopoly of a basic idea to a company. I have not said I'm in favour of giving a similar monopoly to an individual, just that it's a different discussion which frankly isn't very relevant here since the patent in question is owned by AT&T and NCR.

But to address what you said directly, I don't think it would be hard to have a system where patents are owned by an individual rather than a corporation. There's no fundamental law of the universe which says that patents must be assignable to corporations, or that patents must be assignable to someone other than the inventor at all. Though again, I am not advocating for such a system, and again, I am not sure why you are bringing it up.

Let’s establish the principle first: could a person patent it?

It's possible Bell Labs had the patent but also was entirely open to others using the idea freely.

So is it good to give a company the state-backed legal monopoly on the idea of a permission bit to run an executable as a different user, as long as the company elects to be real nice about it?

Yeah i don’t get that either, and agree that it does seem weird.

maybe it was one of those that slipped through the patent office as outside their true expertise?

It's novel and useful.