Microsoft: Patent overhaul needed now

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Why software patent spam at all?

1. You can protect the methods in your software with closed source, it works extremely well as a protection mechanism. So well that legislative bodies have to force disclosure from MS.

2. It follows that you can't determine what prior art exists in closed source software.

3. Without prior art you give patents to every non inventor that comes along with their non inventions.

I used to believe you could fix that by forcing release of the source when submitting a patent idea. That's better than nothing, but it still leads to lots of situations where prior art exists but hasn't been released. Who would think to try and patent (&a != &b) or plugins!

My view is that patent attacks from patent-play companies will grow. It's a low cost, potentially high profit business. Its doesn't require any inventiveness, courtesy of the closed source nature of a lot of software and its very difficult to defend against.

Its no different than other spam.

I think Nokia will regret backing software patents in Europe, most of the other companies backing them don't make software and had nothing to lose.

Nokia makes a phone software platform and could face billions in bogus patent claims as it makes it more OS like.

MySQL and others software companies also face crippling patent-spam attacks, but at least they came out and argued against them!

Posted by: Nigel Johnstone   Posted on: 03/11/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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