Protect Innovation
I have been talking for some time to a group of people interested in preventing the spread of patents into the software arena (or rather the further spread as they are already sadly commonly granted in the US). I am very sympathetic to their core argument that patenting does more harm than good when applied to software.
Software patents stifle rather than promote innovation as coders find themselves prevented from using more and more methods and algorithms without paying license fees and needing complex legal machinery. And there is no evidence of a shortage of new ideas coming forward in software that would mean that the incentives of monopoly control that patenting offers are needed.
This means that the public interest, which is what I am interested in, is best served by a regime that does not grant patents on computer software. People who put their effort into creating software have all the protection of copyright law over their implementation of a particular idea or set of ideas. I cannot see how society is generally served by allowing anyone to have exclusive rights over the ideas themselves.
The original idea behind patents (from the Latin word to make open) was to persuade secretive inventors to share their ideas. They gain the exclusive rights in return for sharing with the public an idea that noone else would arrive at independently. In the wonderfully creative world of software with millions of people able to access the tools they need to program, there just isn’ t the need for this exclusivity in return for exposure trade-off. We are all hitting on the same ideas anyway.
What patents are doing is to grant exclusivity to the first to file, normally those with good lawyers, in return for a worthless exposure of something which a thousand others may arrive at simultaneously. This is simply a function of the size of pool of software writers which far exceeds the number of car engine designers or drug company biochemists who work in fields where patenting can have more applicability.
I am really pleased that the latest site explaining all this expresses the whole basis of the campaign in its title, calling itself Protect Innovation. Good luck to this site and all who sail in her…
All I can say is I agree 100% with this and it is a shame you are leaving parliament at the next election.
‘Software patents stifle rather than promote innovation’ – best summary of why the EU should oppose stupid, monopoly-protecting software patents I have read. Ever.