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Amazon Asks Congress to Curb Patent Abusers
theodp writes "As Amazon urged Congress to change the law to protect the e-tailler from patent abusers, Rep. Lamar Smith had a question: 'Could not Amazon.com be accused of being a troll for patenting the one-click?' Smith asked, a wry smile on his face." While it's nice to see to see tech companies behind such legislation, it would seem there's some pots calling the kettle black, so to speak.
How about this? Or is this way too "un-american" in this day and age... If the patent can be deemed to improve the general quality of life, or specifically health, education and even understanding - maybe the Government should be able to "buy out" the patent and use it for the good of all mankind.....
First of all, we have to ask ourselves, what, exactly, a patent is. A lot of pro-swpat advocates use terms as Intellectual Property (IP) rights, while those encompass a lot of different concepts, such as copyright (which is already used for software). We can find the following definition:
A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a government to an inventor or applicant for a limited amount of time (normally 20 years from the filing date)... Per the word's original definition, the theory of patent legislation is to induce the inventor to disclose knowledge for the advancement of society in exchange for a limited period of exclusivity. Since a patent grants the right to exclude others from practising the invention, it gives the owner a monopoly in the economic sense. There is an ongoing debate about whether the benefits of patents outweigh the costs, particularly with respect to software patents.
A patent, thus, is not meant as an inherent right for financial compensation for the inventor. A patent is a state-ordained monopoly, that excludes others of exploiting or using similar ideas, even when they have come up with those ideas independently by themselves, for a certain time-period. Now, this seems rather unfair (in copyright this is not the case), but apart from that, why does the state give a monopoly to someone, while we all know monopolies are generally not good for the economy, nor for the consumers? This is why: a patent is a monopoly, given by the state, because it (is supposed to) promote innovation. It follows that, if it doesn't achieve its goal of promoting innovation, it should not be granted, period.
Now, while to some extend this may apply to patents in general (as a study done in the 80ies by the Australian government has shown), seen the particular incremental nature of software, and the more intensive studies done on them, it has become ever more clear that softwarepatents DO NOT promote innovation, on the contrary. It logically follows there is no compelling reason in respect to 'stimulating innovation' to grant patents on software.
Some swpat-proponents point to the USA, and claim there the evidence is shown: "the USA has swpat, and look at all those big, mighty IT-corporations!" This, however, is a complete fallacy: they 'forget' to mention that all those big foreign IT-companies were founded and grew to the behemoths they are today, in the ABSENCE of softwarepatents (which, in the USA, only started in earnest after 1991). So, it is not "thanks to" softwarepatents, but rather the reverse. Actually, it could be argued that the IT-business in the USA bloomed, exactly because they weren't patents around, back then. And in fact, this is well known by anyone working in the business of IT, and exactly what a well-known USA CEO has said in the early 90ies, someone who can know it.
Bill Gates said it best, in one of his internal memos:
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."
Mind you, this has been said by one of the most prominent IT-CEO on the planet, acknowledging exactly what softwarepatents actually lead too. Not surprisingly, since swpat are allowed in the USA, his solution to the problem was "patenting as much as we can" so he could go for "patent exchanges with [other] large companies". Of course, Bill had the means to gather together a multi-million dollar software patent portfolio to defend his company (and thus did.) Most of the SME's (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises), let alone the individual developer, don't have such means and allowing swpat can only spell hardship for small businesses and open source software.
Even Bruce Chizen, chief executive of Adobe Systems Inc. and chairman of the Business Software Alliance, which is leading the charge for the technology industry in the USA, acknowledges that allowing software patents in the 1990s was a bad idea.
Contrary to the pro-swpat camp, it
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---