This is sure to make the legions of software freedom advocates rejoice. Stowe Boyd reported today that the US Patent office is considering invalidating thousands of software patents, which is sure to be seen as a huge victory for the anti-patent movement.
A patent generally allows the inventor of something to protect his work and profit from it. If you go home tonight and invent a pocket sized fusion reactor to power your car using nothing but the fumes from decaying vegetables, you can patent that. You then own the invention and anyone that goes ahead and builds it owes you cash.
The same, theoretically, applies to software, but in reality it can be a very shady area. There have been patents filed in the software arena for everything from a link on screen that can be clicked, to lists of stuff in a database, to a button that enables a user to instantly purchase something without having to go through a shopping cart/checkout process. The problem is that many of the patents out there are, including most of the ones above, are quite frankly ridiculous. If you go home tonight and tackle a thorny programming problem and decide that you will, in code, store a list of things in a database then you just violated someone elses patent. it doesn’t matter that you never read the patent, never got inspiration from it, nor that you invented your own solution that happens to be similar to someone elses, you owe someone a lot of money. Silly huh.
Of course simply invalidating software patents is not the right way to go since I believe there are strong arguments in favor of them, for some specific cases. For example BitTorrent is a fabulous implementation of an algorithm to handle large scale distribution of high volumes of data. It’s not ’storing lists in a database’, and probably does deserve a patent. The same applies to certain crypto algorithms and other inventions that required a lot of specialized research and exploration to come up with a solution.
It will be interesting to see how this one plays out in the coming weeks or months.
