Softwarepatenten.be

Een programmeur uit een groot softwarehuis vertelt aan de Australische Sydney Morning Herald over hoe er in de praktijk omgegaan wordt met softwarepatenten bij zijn werkgever. Het is een zeer interessant relaas, waaruit eens te meer blijkt dat octrooien op software niks met innovatie te maken hebben.

Een citaat uit het artikel:

The lawyer went on to explain that since what was important was the monopoly, it was necessary not only to patent the way we were doing things, but also to think laterally, and patent all the ways other people might do them as well, not so that we could actually do these things ourselves, but so we could prevent others from doing them.

We are a large software house, part of one of the world's largest software companies, writing leading edge security software, and this talk went down like a ton of bricks with the local engineers.

"Don't worry about whether you think the idea is worthy of patenting - that's for us to decide," the lawyer went on.

[...]

So a colleague and I sat down for a few hours one afternoon, and tossed off six fairly straightforward ideas, of the sort that any competent worker in our field might come up with. The lawyer was delighted, but insisted on splitting one of our ideas in two, so then we had seven patents being filed in our names.

Having got into the swing of things, we sat down for a couple of hours again the other day, and tossed off another 10. So far they have all been accepted and filed by the firm's lawyers, which on a time-per-patent basis puts us well in front of Thomas Edison, who I believe previously held the record.

Since we receive a bonus of $8000 per patent, if all goes well we'll share well over $150,000. And there seems no reason we can't keep this game up indefinitely. We should be able to manage around 50 a year, and this nice little earner will see the mortgage paid off in no time.

Meanwhile, the firm spends between $50,000 and $200,000 on legal fees and filing fees for each patent, so we've created over $1 million worth of employment for our legal friends. This is money that the company can't spend on research and development, but there you are.

The company isn't being stupid here, though. It must know many of these patents are of dubious value. But all the large software firms have big patent portfolios and they mainly go unused, in a sort of "mutually assured destruction" arrangement whereby each large firm is prevented from using their patent portfolio by fear of devastating reprisals.

This leads to an interesting paradox. The vast majority of software patents are unused, because people who actually make things often can't afford the risk of using them. Generally, software patents are only used to keep down small company competition, as defence, or by firms that have nothing to lose.

The last includes professional "intellectual property portfolio holders" (who don't produce anything themselves, and are therefore immune to reprisals) and companies that are facing certain demise in their traditional business, and so try to extract value from their existing intellectual property.

Software patents, and their accompanying monopolies, have done immeasurable damage to the world of computer programming, and are one of the reasons the centre of innovation has moved either to open source software, or to corporate working groups where everyone agrees to automatically cross-license all their patents to each other - thus forming a patent oligopoly rather than a patent monopoly.