Includipedia Blog

An absurd patent threatens to destroy Web 2.0 websites, including Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, etc:

The Register has an article about one of the patents up for sale in the latest Ocean Tomo auction that could potentially be used to sue pretty much every web 2.0 company. The patent, for “a global sideband service distributed computing method” is described by its owner as being a core component in any kind of AJAX implementation, and lists out basically everyone as infringing. Any site that uses AJAX? Yup. Google, eBay, Yahoo? Yup. Amazon’s S3 service? You bet.

Software patents are not just absurd, they are actively harmful to the Internet economy. That’s why we need to End Software Patents. Now.

The more I learn about patents, the more I wonder if the whole system should just be abolished — I’m not just thinking software patents here, which clearly are absurd, but patents in general. It seems to me that there is little or no evidence that patents do any good at all, and lots of evidence that they do harm.

An article in Techdirt demonstrates this:

Back in 2005, we pointed out that Seagate’s CEO, Bill Watkins, should be worried about the future of flash solid state drives (SSDs) eventually replacing hard drives. It’s taken some time, but those SSDs are starting to show up in laptops like the MacBook Air and the Lenovo Thinkpad x300. […] So what’s Watkin’s response? If SSDs get really cheap, he’ll just sue everyone for patent infringement. Yes, even though SSDs are totally different technology than a standard hard drive, Seagate’s holding on to patents that cover “many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer.”

If the USA (and other developed economies such as the EU) had a market economy, then Seagate would be forced to compete on the quality of their products — and they’d be successful to the extend that they made stuff people wanted, which would benefit us all — rather than using legal tactics to knobble the competition. The present system allows rent-seeking patent holders to harm competitors, consumers, and (indirectly) everyone.

Slashdot is reporting that the End Software Patents project has its website up. The website points out that:

Every company is in the software business, which means that every company has software liability. We estimate costs of $30.4 billion a year due to software patent suits (see our 2008 State of Softpatents report), and not just by Microsoft and IBM—The Green Bay Packers, Kraft Foods, and Ford Motor are facing software patent infringement lawsuits for their use of the standard software necessary for running a modern business.

OK, so there are costs associated with software patents. But aren’t there benefits too? Apparently not:

Estimated economic benefit from software patents, as calculated by several pro-software patent economists: $0.

By the way, you can win a prize of $10,000 for writing a paper on software patents:

The End Software Patents coalition is sponsoring a competition for the best paper on the effects of the patentability of software and business methods under U.S. law. Papers may be from law, economics, management, computer science, or any other field. Papers may be empirical or qualitative.

Prizes:
First prize: $10k
Second prize: $4k
Third prize: $1k