These days I’m regularly exposed to patent trolls. Sometimes I read about them, sometimes friends email me about them, and sometimes companies I’m an investor in gets sued by them. Whenever I read the claims in the lawsuits, I often think that the claim in question is “obvious.” For those of you out there who know how patents are supposed to work, for something to be patentable it needs to be “non-obvious” as well as “unique.” While the specific claims may not be obvious to the patent troll, especially those who are lawyers who own patents they’ve picked up from other people (bankrupt companies, individuals who applied for and got a patent, patent factories), they are often extremely obvious to any software developer.
For a while I was frustrated by software patents. I tried to educate some of my friends in government about this. I was hopeful when the Supreme Court heard Bilski that they would take a stand on it. And I hoped that the people I talked to in the Obama administration, who acknowledged that they understood the issue, would try to do something about it. I hoped that the Patent Reform Act would actually have some teeth in it that would help address the completely messed up dynamics around software patents and my strong belief that this is a huge tax on the innovation process.
I had zero impact. Zero. As I sit here at the end of 2011, the software patent situation has spun completely out of control. In addition to endless patent trolls, who are multiplying like tribbles, large companies are now fighting massive legal battles with each other using patents. Some of the inventors (including a number of amazing software engineers) listed on the patents are finally speaking up against the patents, but since they’ve assigned them to companies they are no longer at, or the company that owns the patent acquired the company the original patent creator was at, their only recourse (and impact) is to get tangled up in a lawsuit as a witness.
In his 2003 letter to shareholders, Warren Buffet famously called derivatives, “”financial weapons of mass destruction” that could harm not only their buyers and sellers, but the whole economic system. “ You may recall that AIG, thanks to its non-transparent and heavy investments in derivatives, was almost bankrupt once the mortgage-backed securities it was insuring began to drop in value. The $85 billion bailout of AIG was the beginning of the government’s response to the financial crisis and we are still feeling the after-effects of that calamity.
Today, we are experiencing a similar threat to innovation with patents playing the role of “weapons of mass destruction.” Sadly, the America Invents Act, which seeks to provide the Patent Office with tools to operate better and passed recently, does precious little to address the patent litigation mess.
Like derivatives, there are thousands of software patents that are not transparent and remain available to do damage in the hands of patent trolls – and even respectable companies – who use them in lawsuits that bear little relationship to protecting inventions or spurring innovation. As others have detailed, there are increasingly destructive dynamics at play here and the easiest solution is to abolish patents in areas – most notably, software and business methods – where they are doing more harm than good.
Unlike the financial system, which derivatives helped bring to its knees, it is not clear how our innovation system will get to a breaking point that will require attention from policymakers. The Supreme Court could address the problem, but it missed a golden opportunity in the Bilski case, where it declined to end (by a 5-4 vote) the patenting of business methods. Perhaps the Supreme Court will realize that the situation requires fixing, looking for other ways to limit the damage.
The are simple options, such as disclosure where patent applicants should be required to disclose the source code behind their inventions, thereby ensuring that the invention is real and not merely a basis for a future lawsuit, which is what many software patents have become. Indeed, this requirement of the Patent Act (Section 112) is applied with some rigor in the biotech context, but has yet to be happen with regard to software. Such a change cannot come soon enough.
At some point the software industry is going to have to do something about this. We seem to not be able to rely on the government to take action that will affect change. I can only hope there are other leaders in the software industry, especially the amazing developers creating the innovations in the first place, who will take some collective action before it’s too late.