I work for a large company that encourages employees to submit ideas for patents and makes it very easy. You simply submit an idea and the army of lawyers broadens it into a patent application. I've patented several ideas for the company this way that will no doubt never be implemented - they will only be used for lawsuit purposes.
Now I want to implement some of my own ideas. The problem is - for me as an individual, the cost of filing a patent is a big risk. It's expensive, and I don't know which of my ideas is going to turn out to be the valuable one. The best way to find out is to implement and release, and see if the product is successful. If it fails, I'll try the next idea. The problem is that once I've released and know the intellectual property that's worth it for me to spend my meager funds protecting, it has become public knowledge and can no longer be patented.
So the small inventor or start-up has a dilemma - they are the ones that need protection for the ideas the most so that huge companies cannot spend huge resources overwhelming them, but they do not have the resources to patent their ideas.
The obvious solution - software patents go to the first to implement. Then big companies can't buy the entire intellectual property space and small inventors can try implementing their idea without worrying about whether they should spend all their money protecting the intellectual property.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a large company that encourages employees to submit ideas for patents and makes it very easy. You simply submit an idea and the army of lawyers broadens it into a patent application. I've patented several ideas for the company this way that will no doubt never be implemented - they will only be used for lawsuit purposes.
Now I want to implement some of my own ideas. The problem is - for me as an individual, the cost of filing a patent is a big risk. It's expensive, and I don't know which of my ideas is going to turn out to be the valuable one. The best way to find out is to implement and release, and see if the product is successful. If it fails, I'll try the next idea. The problem is that once I've released and know the intellectual property that's worth it for me to spend my meager funds protecting, it has become public knowledge and can no longer be patented.
So the small inventor or start-up has a dilemma - they are the ones that need protection for the ideas the most so that huge companies cannot spend huge resources overwhelming them, but they do not have the resources to patent their ideas.
The obvious solution - software patents go to the first to implement. Then big companies can't buy the entire intellectual property space and small inventors can try implementing their idea without worrying about whether they should spend all their money protecting the intellectual property.