The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion's Blog

I’m the kind of guy who believes that any attained knowledge and experience should be shared with your peers. If you come up with a great new idea, then it is in everyone’s best interest to share it with the world and let as many people as possible benefit from it. That’s probably the biggest reason why i love the idea of Open Source Software so much, though i’m not dogmatic about it. Then again, a lot of people aren’t interested in what is in everyone’s best interest and are merely looking out for themselves or their shareholders.

In the software development industry, many of the large corporations have been quite busy on the software patent front in the last couple of years. Every single idea or innovation that those companies could get patented has probably been patented by now. And for what? What’s the large scale benefit that has come from it? Some small companies have won patent suits against big companies. And who benefited from that? The consumer? Not really. A very large minority of people benefited from software patents on a financial level at best. Our industry sure didn’t benefit from it. The consumer sure as hell never benefited from it.

I’ve always compared software patents to nuclear weapons. Every large country wants them, yet nobody truly wants to use them unless they have no other choice. If a large country ever uses nuclear weapons, they know that retaliation will occur and that there is no true benefit. In the case of nuclear weapons, once they are used everybody loses. It’s pretty much the same thing with software patents. Some small companies who are only interested in a quick profit will be glad to use them, but only if they know damn well that they can’t get hit with a counter-suit for patent infringements that they might have been guilty of. But big companies? How many of them have truly benefited from them? The only value they’ve shown to have so far is as a defensive measure. As in: if you sue us for patent infringement, you know damn well that we will counter sue you based on the patents that we have and that you are surely violating. A nice example of that is the current Apple-Nokia dispute which will end up costing only Apple and Nokia money and not a single consumer is actually going to benefit from that. The only people that will truly benefit from it are the lawyers representing both parties.

So really, what’s the point in software patents? Microsoft has amassed a boatload of patents in the past 10 years or so, and what do they have to show for it? They lost one patent dispute which prevents them from selling certain version of MS Word and none of the patents they hold is going to save them from that particular ruling. In fact, can you name any situation where a big company truly benefited from a software patent they hold? Sure, Amazon has its One-Click patent but that didn’t really prevent other e-commerce sites from offering a highly usable alternative. I can’t really think of any other situation where a patent has really benefited a large corporation.

The only people who’ve truly benefited from software patents so far have been niche companies who happened to got lucky, and lawyers representing both sides in the disputes. That’s it. If a small company or individual happens to have had a certain idea or implementation patented at the right time, they could simply wait long enough until they could sue a large company for infringing on their patent and watch the money come in. The large companies (you know, the ones we buy our products from) simply add their expenses to the cost price of the products that we buy. Does that sound fair to you? And before you go all “we should protect individuals and small companies” on me, think very carefully on how many of those patents have been awarded in a fair manner. I don’t really follow software patents that closely, but as a former Linux user who was concerned for some of his favorite software projects, i’ve seen my share of awarded patents where there truly was quite a bit of ‘prior art’ that should have prevented the patent from ever being awarded in the first place.

The thing is… if you have a great idea and want to profit from it, then you need to market it right and provide the best possible consumer experience. You know that countless competitors are going to copy your ideas, and most of them will do it without being guilty of infringing your worthless patent. No matter how valuable your idea is, it doesn’t mean anything if the total package doesn’t entice the consumer to purchase your product over someone else’s. So why even bother with software patents in the first place?