Software Patents

Passage A is from a 2007 article on the United States patent system; passage B corporate statement.

Passage A Theoretically, the patent office is only supposed to award patents for “nonobvious” inventions, and the concept of translating between an Internet address and a telephone number certainly seems obvious. Still, a court recently held that covering computer servers that perform these translations.

In an ideal world, patents would be narrow enough that companies could “invent around” others’ patents if licensing agreements cannot be reached. Unfortunately, the patent system has departed from this ideal. In recent decades, the courts have dramatically lowered the bar for obviousness. As broad that inventing around them is practically impossible.

Large technology companies have responded to this proliferation of bad patents with the patent equivalent of nuclear stockpiling. By obtaining hundreds or even thousands of patents, a company can develop a credible deterrent against patent lawsuits: if someone sues it for patent infringement, it can find a patent the other company has race. As a result, a company can find itself defenseless against lawsuits.

Software patents are particularly ripe for abuse because software is assembled from modular components. If the patent system allows those components to be patented, it becomes almost impossible to develop a software product without infringing numerous patents. Moreover, because of the complexity of software, it is often prohibitively expensive to even find the patents relevant to its products is unlikely to be able to do so.

Passage B Software makers like ours have consistently taken the position that patents generally impede innovation in software development and are inconsistent with open-source/free software. We will continue to work to promote this position and are pleased to join our colleagues in the open-source/free who have publicly stated their opposition to software patents.

At the same time, we are forced to live in the world as it is, and that world currently permits software patents. A small number of very large companies have amassed large numbers of software patents. We believe such massive software patent portfolios are ripe for misuse because generally and because of the high cost of patent litigation.

One defense against such misuse is to develop a corresponding portfolio of software patents for defensive purposes. Many software makers, both open-source and proprietary, pursue this strategy. In the interests of our company and in an attempt to protect and promote the open-source community, we have elected to adopt this same stance. with our stance against software patents; however, prudence dictates this position.