A System Apart

of Software Patents.

I’ve read and considered the arguments made by Gruber, Stallman & Bray on software patents, and from previous conversations i’ve had with Stallman leading up to the EU swpat defeat i’ve concluded to side with him.
I concede and concur with Stallman in that Software patents are inherently problematic and incur nothing but cumulative damage to society.

So let’s see what happens if [an inventor] tries to use a patent to stop them. He says “Oh No, IBM. You cannot compete with me. I’ve got this patent. IBM says let’s see. Let’s look at your product. Hmmm. I’ve got this patent and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one, which parts of your product infringe. If you think you can fight against all of them in court, I will just go back and find some more. So, why don’t you cross license with me?” And then this brilliant small inventor says “Well, OK, I’ll cross license”. So he can go back and make these wonderful whatever it is, but so can IBM. IBM gets access to his patent and gets the right to compete with him, which means that this patent didn’t “protect” him at all. The patent system doesn’t really do that.

Transcribed from a talk, Richard Stallman on patents.

You can without hesitation liken it to a game of cards, the one with the most powerful hand, wins.

One of the comments I heard one time too many, from politicians and lobbyists — you know who you are Atea — was that Patents are needed to incentivize inventors.

We can discuss what patents should do, or what it does in theory or, what it ideally does, but at best, it’s a purely academic exercise.
We need to evaluate the common good vs. the problems arising from patent law in its current form.

Various patent offices across the world, has shown that its virtually impossible to distinguish method patents from one another.
This isn’t something that’s the agencie’s fault per se, as Stallman postulates, it more often then not takes a computer scientist or systems-alpha-geek to realize that two given patents are functionally identical, or that a patent represents something really rather trivial and already in widespread use.

Now we realize that its seldom just two patents a single patent office clerk handles, in actuality its a vertical climb.
Where they more likely than not handle tens of patents a day without direct access to all prior patents and foremost what’s known as “prior art” its impossible for a single clerk to handle software patents as such.

Now Copyright law, is a vertical drop in comparison for a clerk to evaluate.
Software patents have however resulted in a bloody mess of inconsequential, invalid and duplicate methods being patented and rather wrongly enforced by threats and then settled outside of court.

none of that helps society or furthers innovation.

yes. this is my shot across the bow in reaction to the Apple vs. HTC patent war.