Non-geek notes on software patents

Imagine if some huge corporation suddenly decided to patent the idea of dinnerware, then started charging you a fee every time you ate dinner.

Absurd, you exclaim, and rightly so. However, this is what is happening in the software world. And, because most people shy away from anything that looks even remotely "technical", companies are getting away with it.

A few cases in point.

• Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, patented what he calls "1 click shopping." (U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411, "Method and System for Placing a Purchase Order via a Communications Network.") Because of this patent, web sites everywhere are forced to either unnecessarily complicate their on-line shopping carts, pay a fee to Bezos, or face litigation.


• The company Catrack owns patent 4,197,590, which describes a particular way of writing graphics to a screen using something called XOR (exclusive or). The company has collected huge fees over the years for this, something that was already commonly known and widely used.


• Rene K. Pardo and Remy Landau own a patent for recalculating numbers in a spreadsheet based on the formulas in the spreadsheet when a single value is changed (U.S. Patent 4398249: Process and apparatus for converting a source program into an object program) and have collected huge fees over the years.

These are all ideas that could be invented in a garage by a teenage geek. It's getting more and more difficult in the United States for anyone to develop any kind of software without having a team of lawyers at hand to examine all algorithms used and to be prepared to defend them against liability.

If such patents had been in place during the early days of computing, the computer/internet revolution would never have gotten off the ground. And the fact that they are in place today will likely force the US to become a technological backwater, as countries such as China, Japan, Germany, France, Sweden, etc. with less generous software patent policies become the centers of inovation.

There's a huge legal battle going on in Europe now that will determine the future of such patents there. Microsoft and other American corporations are spending millions trying to push for stronger European patent laws, but it's beginning to look like the European courts will be less easily bullied than their American counterparts.

Hopefully as the general public gets more technically savy, these coups will be more under public scrutiny and less likely to succeed. But by then it could well be too late.

Side note - I swiped both of the images in this story from the excellent news/discussion site Slashdot. I hope I don't get sued.