I’ve been railing against software patents for a number of years. I believe software patents are an invalid construct – software shouldn’t be able to patented.
For a while, I felt like I was shouting alone in the wilderness. While a bunch of software engineers I know thought software patents were bogus, I had trouble getting anyone else to speak out against software patents. But that has changed. In the last few month the issue of software patents – and the fundamental issues with them – have started to be front and center in the discussion about innovation.
There have been two dynamite stories on NPR recently – the first on This American Life titled When Patents Attack! and one on Planet Money titled The Patent War. If you have an interest in this area, the two are well worth listening to.
In the past week, the discussion exploded starting with a post from Google titled When patents attack Android. The word “patent” shows up in 20 of the Techmeme River articles from the last week. Martin Fowler, a software developer, had a well thought out article titled SoftwarePatent. And they kept coming, such as Why Google Is Right Yet Short-Sighted To Complain About Mobile Patents.
But my favorite was Mark Cuban’s post titled If you want to see more jobs created – change patent laws. He starts strong:
“Sometimes it’s not the obvious things that create the biggest problems. In this case one of the hidden job killers in our economy today is the explosion of patent litigation.”
And he ends strong:
“We need to face the facts, patent law is killing job creation. If the current administration wants to improve job creation, change patent law and watch jobs among small technology companies develop instantly.”
I hope my friends in the White House are listening. And to all the software engineers who are co-authors on patents that they aren’t proud of, or think are bogus, or were forced to create the patent by their company, or were paid a bonus by their company to write a patent on nothing, or are now working for a company that is getting sued for a patent they co-authored that they aren’t even sure what it says, speak up!