In 2008 I was invited by Pamela Samuelson, who I met through several Silicon Flatiron events, to be on an advisory board at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. I attended the one meeting that we had and a subsequent symposium and wrote about it in the post Entrepreneurial Companies and the Patent System. As with most things like this, I found it fascinating, stimulating, and frustrating all at the same time and hoped that I’d contributed something useful to the discussion.
I read the paper titled High Technology Entrepreneurs and the Patent System: Results of the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey when it came out at the end of June 2010. I thought it was a solid paper although there were some things that I struggled with which is typical for me in any academic paper, especially when I get bogged down in arguing with myself while trying to parse the footnotes. But I was optimistic that as the authors started talking about the article, some thoughtful and constructive discourse would result.
I was appalled when I started seeing soundbites emerge from at least one of the authors of the paper from weak conclusions buried in the midst of the data. My partner Jason took one of them on when he wrote his post 76% of Venture Capitalists Believe that Software Patents are Important (NOT!) In this post I think Jason does an excellent job of dissecting the data and explaining why this is not only an incorrect conclusion from the data, but a terribly misleading soundbite.
Fortunately, Pam Samuelson (one of the other co-authors) has set the record straight with her excellent summary of the Berkeley Patent Survey on her post on O’Reilly Radar titled Why software startups decide to patent … or not. Her essay is very digestible and focuses specifically on the issue of software patents and what she believes they reported in the paper. She reached the following conclusions which she states in her intro:
Pam is balanced in her intro as she concludes by saying “While the three findings highlighted above might seem to support a software patent abolitionist position, it is significant that a third of the software entrepreneurs reported having or seeking patents, and that they perceive patents to be important to persons or firms from whom they hope to obtain financing.”
The juiciest conclusion is about halfway through the essay and is “One of the most striking findings of our study is that software firms ranked patents dead last among seven strategies for attaining competitive advantage identified by the survey.” Another one was “We were surprised to discover that the software respondents reported that patents provide only weak incentives for engaging in core activities, such as invention of new products (.96) and commercialization (.93).”
I’m glad Pam took this on and put this out there. I look forward to more studies she does from this research set.
I’m far away from Washington DC today. Actually, I’m a lot closer to Russia than I am to DC and that makes me an expert on Russia. Wait, someone else said that (although the people next to me and Amy at dinner last night were speaking Russian.)
But my friend the Internets (actually, the Web) brought DC closer to me today. While I’m only involved in a handful of things related to politics and DC, several of them popped up somewhere in my world in the last two days. So, I thought I’d share them with you.
Let’s start with software patents. I’m still seriously bummed about Bilski – not the specific ruling, but the fact that in my opinion the Supreme Court wimped out on something that is very important. Several friends have told me that the Supreme Court did exactly what they were supposed to – they ruled on a vary narrow and specific issue that was put before them. A few other friends of mine, including several lawyers that know a lot about the Supreme Court, said it looked like the Supreme Court came close to making a significant and profound ruling – with plenty of hints buried in the stuff Justice Stevens wrote. I can’t interpret any of the Supreme Court inside baseball, but I do know how I feel about software patents and expressed my frustration in an article that I co-authored with Paul Kedrosky titled Software Patents Need to Be Abolished that showed up in the Huffington Post yesterday. In case you need more evidence around the stupidity of the whole situation, take a look at the crap van Rijn is going through. Or maybe this patent from Microsoft on “how to turn a page in an electronic book.”
DC Topic #2 is the Startup Visa. Inc. Magazine has a great article about the issue and the Startup Visa titled The Immigrant Advantage. My friends Kevin Mann (British) and Thanavath Jaroenvanit (French) – both of TechStars Boulder 2008 – co-founders of Graphic.ly – and one of my inspirations for the Startup Visa movement) are prominently featured. And the Kauffman Foundation just came out with a study that concludes that Job Growth is Entirely Driven by Startups. I’ve had a few encouraging conversations about the Startup Visa movement recently, including hearing about a new co-sponsor of the Senate Bill (“The Startup Visa Act of 2010”) as well as talking to a handful of prominent organizations that are close to signing up to get behind it.
Finally, LeBron James has apparently signed with the Miami Heat. I have no idea what that has to do with DC, other than I’m sure the Wizards were trying to get him also.
My friend Sawyer was as disappointed in the outcome of Bilski as he was in the ending to LOST. In fact, he asked if I’d change his pseudonym to Joseph Adama of Caprica but I vetoed this over extreme nerdiness. Nonetheless Sawyer let loose on Bilski and helps clarify both his perspective on why the Supreme Court took such a milquetoast approach as well as what one of the unintended consequences of their action – or lack thereof – will be. And for those of you who have forgotten Sawyer’s background, he’s a patent attorney that is channeling his opinion through me. And we’ve been discussing setting up a very large data center on an island somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Seeing the reaction to Bilski, what has struck me is how surprised and disappointed some people are with the weak will of the Supreme Court to act to limit the damage that software patents are causing, and will keep causing, to innovation in the U.S.
As I’ve written before, software patents amount to an innovation tax, transferring wealth from people who build things and make stuff to investment bankers, hedge funders, and, most of all, patent prosecutors and litigators. If you think that bankers and lawyers drive innovation, this is a “good thing”; otherwise, this is an utterly disastrous government-sanctioned redistribution of wealth that discourages software innovation. Software innovation continues, by the way, in spite of the patent system, not because of it.
Courts may or may not understand the negatives of the patent system, but they’re the last place we should look for positive change. As others have written about, the Supreme Court has become a rubber stamp on public opinion and on Congress. On the issue of IP, Congress is in the pocket of media companies, biotech companies, large software companies, and lawyers (all of whom can afford to litigate IP suits), and popular opinion skews in the “pro-patent” direction because awareness and interest are low when thousands upon thousands of people remain unemployed for the longest periods of time in decades.
Given a fearful, conservative Court unable to affect meaningful change in most areas until the whole country is behind it, the expectation that the Supreme Court would strike software patents down was folly. Judges don’t know enough, and don’t care enough, to stick their necks out against the monied special interests that control the levers of power. The current system, constructed in part by the pro-patent judges at the Federal Circuit, who have appointed themselves as the ultimate shepherds of this country’s pro-patent mentality, will continue to rule the roost. And the PTO, headed now by the pro-patent former head of IP at IBM, David Kappos, will continue to treat patentees like “customers” and pump economy-destroying patents out as it if were the Fed printing money.
So, yeah, we’re a little screwed. The Federal Courts have bought into the patent system; the PTO grants patents like there is no tomorrow; and Congress is poised to pass a completely eviscerated “patent reform” bill that will make patents harder to render unenforceable, among other things. The outlook is bleak. So what’s the answer, as more and more software patents are issued, and more and more startups and small businesses are sued into nothingness?
Move VC and seed investment in software abroad. This, I think, will be the unintended consequence of Bilski and the alignment of the government against innovation in software. When patents are the rule, and only big companies can play the patent game, small companies, the ones that are driving lots of employment and lots of innovation, will move to places that are both cheaper to live, and less risky legally.
As a counterpoint, a law professor claims that “startup executives reported that nearly 70% of venture capital firms and 50% of angel investors said that patents were important to their investment decisions.” This study was, of course, repudiated by the most credible person on it, Professor Pamela Samuelson. As Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson have said repeatedly, patents have almost no impact on VC investment because, among other things, it takes 4-5 years to get them, and in the current software startup climate, your business will prove itself in 1-3 years one way or another. The fiction that strong patent rights lead to more domestic VC investment is highly damaging and utterly false in software, an industry where low capital intensity and low barriers to entry make product and user acquisition, not “IP,” king.
What Bilski means for software is that the advantages of starting software businesses abroad have become even more clear. The tax situation and cost of living in, say, South America, is much better than in the U.S. currently. Now that startups have to live in fear of the uncertainty of the U.S. patent system, when they could be wiped off the face of the Earth by legal fees and customer loss in the span of a few months by the mere filing of a patent suit, and with an entire government that seems to have no sympathy toward their small businesses, why start a software company in the United States? A determined group of developers could start the same company in, say, Brazil, make their venture money last much longer, and with a higher quality of life at a lower cost of living. Seed and VC investment beginning to move to more hospitable legal climates is inevitable, and Bilski will be the straw that begins the flood of such investments overseas. The only barrier is moving the developers abroad, but communities already growing in foreign countries could begin an exodus that our government seems to want to encourage.
At minimum, U.S. startups will begin locate some portion of their operations abroad. Although the law is unsettled, and highly dependent on the patents at issue, the AT&T v. Microsoft and NTP v. RIM cases indicate that moving operations abroad, like the creation of golden masters and the location of web servers, could insulate some portion of a company’s operations from U.S. patent damages, which cannot be extraterritorial. For sure, locating everything in the U.S. is an invitation for patent plaintiffs to claim worldwide damages on software patent system claims involving a server.
Surely the Supreme Court didn’t intend to drive our most innovative companies abroad, but it may be time for innovators in the U.S. to fight the system the only way that they can when the whole government is out to get them – get out of dodge.
More from our friends Nate and Natty at Everlater – this time on debugging.
One of the most important techniques we used when learning how to code is debugging. It allowed us to do two things: fix our own code when it was broken and parse through others’ code to better understand how they were doing things.
From a backend perspective, debugging is essential. When I first started writing code, I would write what I *thought* was the correct way to do it. Ninty-nine times out of a hundred I was wrong and the code would blow up with some ugly exception that I had no clue about. Copying and pasting the exception into google got me decent mileage, but the real silver bullet I discovered was just start from the beginning of the method and step through it using the ruby debugger and figure out where I had gone wrong. Almost always I had forgotten to assign some variable or I was calling a method that did something different than I thought.
The other huge thing that is related is that I read and still read copious amounts of open source code written by other people. I’m better at understanding it now, but at the beginning I would take a debugger and walk through the code myself to try to figure out exactly how their code was working so I could make my own code better.
This is super important on the front end as well. Using tools like firebug or web inspector to take apart existing sites and figure out how they’re doing something or making something beautiful is a great way to learn better techniques for front end development. They’re also essential for figuring out how to fix a layout when it’s broken, or how to figure out why an ajax request didn’t respond the way you would expect.
This is a great, free resource to use when learning how to program and really helped us to bridge the gap from a basic programming book to what current philosophies on development were. A huge hat tip goes out to Jeffrey Kalmikoff for posting a comment on a previous post in this series that made me remember how important this is.
Somewhat related are tools that help you keep your code/team in order. By far the most important is a good version control system. This is something that they don’t ever teach even in college classes, but it’s hugely critical to building a project in the real world. We use git at Everlater and it’s been an amazing choice. When coupled with GitHub, it makes working even in a team of two seamless even if you’re working on almost the same code.
Also important is some way of keeping track of the quality of your code as your project grows. This includes a good issue tracker (we simply use the to-do list feature of the free version of Basecamp), and a good way to know when there’s something wrong in your application (Hoptoad is great for Rails devs.)
I know it’s been a few weeks since my last Nate and Natty / Everlater post on learning to program. I’ve gotten a few notes asking for more – expect a couple of posts over the next few days. In the mean time, here’s Nate’s view on how to divide tasks between partners – in this case him and Natty.
Having good systems in place around your coding is just as important as the coding itself. Natty and I spent a huge chunk of our time figuring out a great workflow that would allow us to program more effectively, and we think it’s paid huge dividends over the lifespan of Everlater.
The first and most important decision we made was to work together and divide the tasks we had to learn in half. I (Nate) took most of the backend server tasks — everything from SysAdmin stuff to Ruby/Rails and a good chunk of the javascript that interacted with the server too, and Natty took everything that appears to the user — everything from learning Photoshop/Illustrator to HTML/CSS and quite a bit of javascript as well.
Nothing too special about our division of labor, but it bears worth repeating that this worked well because we worked so closely together to make sure that the other person still had an idea about what was going on. I needed to know the basic structures of the HTML Natty was creating so I could work on the javascript, and Natty needed to know a good deal of Ruby for creating and displaying the content coming out of the database. We’ve worked on how we pass work back and forth, and while I believe it’s pretty personal, having some basic workflow where you have several stages of planning, we do something like this:
At each point in the process Natty and I would sit down and talk about how it was going, and implement our side of the task. It bears repeating that this is also a highly personal part of learning how to program. The following worked very well for Natty and I but other people might be better off pair programming the whole thing, work at completely different speeds, etc. The most important thing is thinking about the workflow in general and making sure it’s a conscious decision rather than something that just happens.
I’ve been quiet on my reaction to Bilski because I’ve got an OpEd floating around that might get published in the next few days. It’s been rejected by one major publisher because according to the senior editor “it didn’t fit their opinion on the case” and another major publisher because “no one really cares that much about patents.” Ok – whatever. Fortunately, I have a blog, but I’ll wait a few more days and see if I can get someone in the traditional media to care.
In the mean time, my partner Jason has written a post titled Bilski Redux and Why You Shouldn’t Believe Everything You Read and Fred Wilson has also weighed in that it’s time for Congress to buck up and take some action in his post Bilski and Patent Reform.
For a great summary of the case, take a look at the Groklaw article titled Here’s Bilski: It’s Affirmed, But . . .No Decision on Software Patentability.
I expressed my opinion briefly in a ReadWriteWeb article titled Supreme Court: Software is Patentable… Sometimes where I said that I was profoundly disappointed with the outcome.
“They had a chance to address a serious and deep issue surrounding innovation in the software industry. Instead of taking a clear and forward looking position, they effectively punted on the hard stuff, surrounded it with ambiguity, and increased the mess we find ourselves in surrounding software and business method patents.”
I’ve got a lot more to say but let’s see if the OpEd shows up somewhere else first. If not, I expect Independence Day will liberate me.
This morning, as I was waiting for my laptop to grind through its startup process I started wondering why I had a laptop. I travel a lot and had it with me in San Francisco and Los Angeles this week, but hardly used it. And, when I did, I was frustrated with how long I had to wait for it to “get started”.
Today, while I was waiting for my laptop to sync email (Outlook 2010) I grabbed my iPad, opened mail, and read/reply/deleted all of the email that came in over night. I was finished processing the email before my laptop was ready to be used.
I had this same experience yesterday morning in LA. Except then I processed all of my overnight email on my HTC EVO phone which was also acting as the hotspot for my laptop to connect. And, throughout the day, I just did email on my phone instead of firing up my laptop.
The only time I used my laptop last week was a three+ hour stretch in San Francisco when I was at First Round Capital’s office (thanks Josh for the use of your desk) in between meetings. I had turned on my laptop at 8:45am when I got to FRC’s office, did a board meeting from 9am to 12 (the laptop was in a different room), and then used my laptop from noon until I left around 3:30. By noon it had fully synched itself.
As I write this, I realize that Android and Apple both sync faster with my email on an Exchange data store than my Windows 7 laptop with Outlook. A lot faster. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I’m connecting over 3G or Wifi – my Android phone, iPad, and iPhone are ready to go right away whereas my laptop takes anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes to get into a fully usable state (where the disk doesn’t spin an slow things down, or Outlook is non-responsive, or something else funky is going on.) I’m on a Lenovo X300 with 4GB of RAM so it’s not the hardware.
I wrote this post on my iPad using the cute little iPad keyboard doc. It appears my laptop is once again useable, but it’s probably too late for me this morning. Time for a run.
Today’s first Tech Star video has nothing to do with TechStars. Instead, it will go down in history as another nerd period piece by Terry Kawaja from GCA Savvian. I first met Terry when we hired him to be CFO of Raindance Communications to help take it public. We had a twisted sister streak then which he maintains to this day. Enjoy the video – it’s a great one. And – I’ll see you later this morning with the real TechStars Founders 2010 Episode 4 video.
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
