Patent overhaul gets a boost

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Patents May Be Good for Other Industries: But not for Software

I can see where a patent might reasonably be issued for a process that takes a large amount of resources to work out. E.g. the process for making a drug or for making a fairly complicated mechanical device. Figuring out how to do something in software however doesn?t require a lot of investment (mostly a number of hours of brain power) and almost all computer code use processes and techniques that act as building blocks found in varying degrees in other code. If the building blocks of software become patented en masse, pretty soon it will become financially prohibitive to build software. Not only might you have to pay licensing fees, there would be added legal and work related expenses required to: determine what patents are out there; audit programmers? code to ensure that they don?t have them; develop work-around techniques to avoid those that are patented; etc.

The bottom line is this: patents were developed to encourage investment and innovation in industry. To the extent that patents has the opposite effect on software development, it has no positive effect and should be done away in this industry.

Posted by: P. Douglas   Posted on: 11/03/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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