On the eve of re: Bilski, the anxiously awaited Supreme Court decision on business method patents (with potential implications for software patents), I decided to collaborate with the End Software Patents coalition and send out 200 copies of the short movie they recently produced called Patent Absurdity about why software should not be able to be patented to a focused list of key people. The letter follows.
Dear XX
My name is Brad Feld and I’m a venture capitalist who has a popular web blog about innovation and investing in tech start-ups at www.feld.com.
I’m writing to you about a new documentary film "Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system", and including a DVD of that film with this letter. I hope you will spare 30 minutes to watch.
I selected you as one of two hundred influential people to receive this DVD because I wanted to make sure that the film is reaching the right people–people who can help inform the debate over the patenting of software. Specifically, I’m hoping the film will bring you to an understanding of why patents on software are a massive tax on and retardant of innovation in the US.
I’m including with this letter a full list of the 200 people who are receiving a copy of this film as well as publishing those names on-line at: https://en.swpat.org/wiki/Who_should_see_Patent_Absurdity.
Any day now the US Supreme Court will issue a ruling in a landmark case known popularly as "Bilski". This ruling is likely to have significant impact on the US economy and the prospects for the new innovative companies that I partner with and who create great new products and services.
Patents, as you are probably aware, are government granted monopolies that last 20 years. They allow the patent holder to restrict others from entering the market. Historically, patents have covered novel machines, processes for industrial manufacture, and pharmaceuticals. In more recent years, patents on software have been granted–hundreds of thousands of patents. These patents cover essential techniques in computer programming, and their existence is having a chilling effect on the startup companies that I work with. These start-ups are finding it increasingly difficult to make headway through this software patent thicket.
Here are some specific points I would like to bring to your attention about software patents:
* The financial cost of defending yourself against a software patent claim are impossible to overcome. Just to analyze whether the claims being made against you are justified will incur legal fees in excess of $50,000.00, and more than $1 million in legal fees before trial. Yet it costs the price of a postage stamp for a software patent holder to make a legal claim against you.
(https://www.wsgr.com/PDFSearch/09202004_patentpirates.pdf)
* Economic research demonstrates that software patents are acting as a drag on the US economy.
(https://en.swpat.org/wiki/Studies_on_economics_and_innovation)
* Programmers – those skilled in the art of writing software, would be expected to benefit from, and support the patenting of software. They do not. They uniformly despise them as a limitation on their art.
(https://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/indprop/comp/analyses_en.htm)
* Venture capitalist like me, who work with new innovative start-ups can testify that software patents have a chilling effect on the market.
(https://en.swpat.org/wiki/Statements_from_venture_capitalists)
* With well over 200,000 software patents having been issued, non practicing entities and hedge funds are buying up tens of thousands of these trash patents and using them to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from US companies. This activity takes the form of a protection racket.
(https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml)
I would be happy to offer my time to answer any questions you might have about this film and what we can do to help end this software patent absurdity.
Yours sincerely,
Brad Feld