As reported in The Financial Times, a consortium of technology mega-corporations won a significant victory on Monday night when the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee rejected proposal for large scale amendments to the software patents directive. This is really bad news. If the software patents directive goes through in its current form it could quite easily put me and many of my clients out of business.
For a clearly written explanation of what is wrong with software patents, please take a look at Richard Stallman’s article in Monday’s Guardian: Patent absurdity.
Please try to understand this: this is not an abstract political issue; software patents could quite literally put me and many other SMEs out of business, whilst strengthening the anti-competetive monopolistic practices of the software giants, which will mean less choice and higher prices for everyone. Write a short letter, fax, or email to your MEPs asking them to vote against software patents. You can find out who your MEPs are and how to contact them here.
Gary L. Reback, named one of the “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America” by the National Law Journal, and whose clients have included Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Oracle, Apple, Borland, and Novell, wrote an article entitled Patently Aburd in Forbes magazine in 2002 outlining all too clearly what the realities of an American style patent system were:
My own introduction to the realities of the patent system came in the 1980s, when my client, Sun Microsystems—then a small company—was accused by IBM of patent infringement. Threatening a massive lawsuit, IBM demanded a meeting to present its claims. Fourteen IBM lawyers and their assistants, all clad in the requisite dark blue suits, crowded into the largest conference room Sun had.
The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM’s notorious “fat lines” patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.
After IBM’s presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues—all of whom had both engineering and law degrees—took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM’s claims. We used phrases like: “You must be kidding,” and “You ought to be ashamed.” But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun’s technology infringed even that one.
An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. “OK,” he said, “maybe you don’t infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?” After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.
In corporate America, this type of shakedown is repeated weekly. The patent as stimulant to invention has long since given way to the patent as blunt instrument for establishing an innovation stranglehold.
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