Bruce Perens has written an (anti) software patents article for CNet
Bruce Perens, a co-founder and director of Software in the Public Interest and a member of the board of directors of Open Source Risk Management, “the Industry’s only Vendor-Neutral Provider of Risk Mitigation Consulting and Protection for Open Source Users,” has posted an article entitled “The Open Source Patent Conundrum” on Cnet’s news.com.
Not surprisingly, the article has a strong anti-software patent slant. It is also quite critical of the US Patent and Trademark Office, and even our patent laws.
Perens correctly points out that software patents disproportionately affect small and medium-sized businesses. What should also be noted, though, is that this is not unique to the software industry. Disproportionate impact of patents on smaller businesses is a fact of life in all industries in which patents are used to protect innovation by the big players. Accordingly, this observation should not be used as a rallying cry against software patents alone. If disproportionate impact is your concern, perhaps your position should be one against all patents, not just software patents.
And the positive impact of patents on small and medium-sized businesses should at least be given a passing glance. Perhaps what should also be noted is an estimate of the money that flows into small and medium-sized businesses as income on their innovations in the form of licenses of their patents, trade secretes, know-how and other forms of intellectual assets. I know of several examples of small businesses that survive on such income.
Some even pay the bills with the income from a single software patent.
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Comments
I think you’re misreading the paragraph you’re commenting on. Bruce writes, “Every significant software program and business Web site today infringes on one or more software patents granted in the United States.” By this, he doesn’t mean just web sites that sell software, but _all_ web sites.
I take the point to be that every business in existence has to do patent searches before using a computer. Did you modify any Movable Type code when you set up this site? Then you may have been infringing a patent, and should have done a full patent search before making the fix. When you designed those rubber stamps for Acrobat, did you do a patent search first?
Patents on pharmaceuticals only affect pharmaceutical companies; patents on tractors only affect tractor companies. Software authoring is massively decentralized, so software patents affect anyone who strings together a few lines of instructions on his or her laptop. Because of this massive decentralization, the chilling effect software patents can have is indeed unique.
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