Software R&D is currently less costly and time-consuming than almost any other industry. Instead of spending time to develop new technologies and then patenting the results, tech companies are competing to file first for patents on every conceivable product in a frenzy not unlike domain-squatting.
Far from encouraging innovation, these patents are closing markets to future players and stifling competition. Protected concepts will be obsolete before their patents ever expire, and indeed some are outdated before the patent is even issued!
Has the time come to lift protections on the software industry and free the courts from ridiculous patent suits? (e.g. amazon.com claiming ownership of the “shopping cart”)
Well, some patents occasionally serve a useful purpose.
Not many companies like giving out their good ideas for free. And for a lot of patentable algorithms it is so easy to reverse engineer an algorithm that may have taken months in development that some protection seems warranted.
So I think it does stifle innovation in the sense that a company may not spent so much on R&D if the best it can do to protect its intellectual property is copyright the algorithm. Also, I think that the people that come up with the good, innovative ideas deserve a reward for that.
Granted, there are a lot of stupid applications being filed. Like amazons. I can’t imagine that application is just gonna sail through. And there is also some stupid enforcement going on, like with the GIF patent.
The other argument is, of course, why shouldn’t software be patented? If you had the same algorithm, but it somehow worked mechanically rather than electronically, it would be patentable. It seems unfair to restrict the patent because of how the algorithm is represented (bits instead of gears)
As I understand it - an exclamation of ‘patent pending’ doesn’t mean you can’t market the same product - though you may have exposure if they are actually approved for the patent. With these cases though, it seems to me that most patents are not going to be approved, or at the very least they will be so thoroughly contested for so long that everyone will be able to make money off the idea until it becomes obsolete.
Really it would probably be best to be in the Technology Law field right now - since they will still be making money off technology created now ten years from now, when probably no one else will be
Part of the reason for the apparent “patenting frenzy” is that you can’t actually patent a piece of software. You can patent an algorithm, and you can patent a look-and-feel – but algorithms and look-and-feel specs take a lot less time to develop than a piece of software that actually implements them and is bug-free enough to be sold.
Conversely, algorithms and look-and-feel specs don’t gain any protection by being copyrighted. A copyright on the code fragment that an algorithm was originally written in doesn’t make it illegal for me to implement your algorithm in a different programming language, or even in the same language so long as it’s not a copy.
The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.
