Supreme Court

In moments of political despair, Amy reminds me that we have three branches of government. Around issues that I care a lot about and have engaged in over the years, the Judicial Branch seems to be the most functional right now, at least from my perspective. This was reinforced by two things this week. The first was a conversation Jason and I had with senior staffers of a non-Colorado senator. They wanted to meet with us, and the agenda was open-ended around issues that startups and investors were interested in, especially ones we have been visibly talking about such as patents, immigration, and net neutrality. Several times I asked a different version of “what can we do to engage constructively” with Congress and the answer was essentially “nothing right now.” While the conversation itself had some substance to it and I liked the people we spent time with, the message I took away was that Congress didn’t have the ability, based on the current political environment, to take any action on any of these issues. ...

Five years ago, in August 2010, I asked the question Have We Reached The Software Patent Tipping Point? Oracle sued Google over a series of Java-related patents they got when they acquired Sun . My favorite line from the whole thing was James Gosling’s (who was one of the authors of one of the original patents and a key creator of Java) when he wrote The shit finally hits the fan. ...

Fred Wilson beat me to it this morning with his post A Big Win For The Patent Reform Movement but he’s got a couple of hour time zone advantage over me. Regardless, I love Fred’s punch line: So it was with incredible joy that I read these words by Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla Motors and possibly the most innovative entrepreneur in the world right now. [Elon wrote in his post All Our Patent Are Belong To You ] “Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.” ...

I’ve been railing about the evils of software patents – how they stifle and create a massive tax on innovation – since I wrote my first post about it in 2006 titled Abolish Software Patents . Seven years ago this was a borderline heretical point of view since it was widely asserted that VCs believed you should patent everything to protect your intellectual property. Of course, this was nonsense and the historical myths surrounding intellectual property, especially the importance and validity of software and business methods, have now been exploded. ...