When the corporate entities aren’t crushing small enterprise with patent law they are sending jobs to Asia by the thousand.

Being in my mid-40’s I’ve watched the hope turn to sour milk in this industry.

Lets face it we want it kind of both ways. If you write and sell some product you want to get paid for it; not for everyone to copy it and leave you in poverty. Yet we don’t want the software industry to become parasitical and litigious with stern restrictions on the use of libraries and algorithms.

Where to now?

I don’t have the answers but I think the future was recently mapped out by the android/Google/htc/Apple/Microsoft model where smaller companies, by becoming exclusive clients of a platform get protection (in the legal sense) from other litigious parties.

@Dad I would take your point even further, and say that patents are just not necessary for software. I can develop a useful piece of software in a weekend, then rewrite it with completely different tech and algorithms the next weekend. As an individual developer I don’t need patents to protect my innovation, because the hard part of making money off software is not writing the code itself. For large companies, we see evidence that it’s an expensive defensive arms race which isn’t really helping anyone innovate anything.

@Nathan There is a lot that goes into it for sure. I have to be careful because of my biased position as a small developer with mostly open source experience. I agree with your analysis of the fundamentals, and that it is ultimately fruitless to try and enforce physical laws on a non-physical space.

At the core of the patent debate is really whether or not ideas, non-physical bits of information, can actually be property. If we examine the justification for property rights: rivaly, the fact that a physical chair can not be used simultaneously with someone else, and excludability, the fact that it is easy to prevent someone from using said chair, it is clear that ideas are the exact opposite of physical property. They can be used simultaneously with others, and preventing copying requires a virtual police state implementing what amounts to thought crime.

What do you think?

Let’s not pretend they’re a victim. Put an end to the myth that big companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple merely file “defensive” patents. If they’re so bothered by the system and merely waiting patiently for it to end, then why aren’t they lobbying against software patents?

Because they’re happy to continue to cross-license. Because they’re powerful enough, with a sizable racket of their own, that they can keep the other ‘families’ at bay. But that’s not passive and “defensive” at all; they’re extracting huge economic advantage from the patent system by trading portfolios and fending off lawsuits, and they’d rather fight the arms race of building their own portfolio to keep their market position than change the law and level the playing field.

Microsoft’s actually lobbying to make it EASIER to register patents (and, of course, IBM is there, who owns ~30% of all software patents)

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h1249

Why don’t I see Google and Apple in the “oppose” column? Why aren’t they using their billions to fix this system if they hate it so?