Software Patents

Patents (legal monopoly) were originally installed to help creators profit from their ideas before anyone else could. I.e. by giving them a monopoly for a fixed period of time; innovation could lead to profit even for a small-timer, since you owned the exclusive rights. The idea is good; but this has gone from bad to worse ever since.

Software vs. Music

Software can be seen as a set of instructions, and to simplify the illustration; we can view the instructions as keys on a piano. I.e. each key resembles one instruction, and by performing instructions in a certain order; we execute a program, just like we get music by pressing the keys on a piano in a specific order.

Music

By pressing the keys of a piano in the same order as someone who wrote a song; we are playing his/her music, and the creator of the music (composer) should be credited for that song. I.e. it's reasonable that other people cannot say that they wrote your music, you should be given special rights as the creator.

Software

The same goes for software, if someone writes a program (a set of instructions) it's reasonable that others cannot hand it out (or sell it) as theirs.

Problem

How large can parts of a piano play or a program be, before it's considered essential to the invention? This is where software patents are messing up this entire industry; i.e. patents are not handed out song by song, or chorus by chorus to use the piano example; they are literally handed out for just a few keystrokes. If composers had to check through a list of hundreds of thousands of illegal keystroke combination as they were composing music; writing a song would be rather difficult. And this is what's happening in the computer industry right now.

Similarity

To make matters worse, programs often do stuff which is quite similar. What Firefox does when it fetches a web site, is not all that different from what Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari or Chrome does. If we allow software patents on a small set of instructions; writing a program will be almost impossible in a few years without violating tons of patents.

Innovation

By allowing software patents in their current form, patents laws are forcefully fighting innovation, which is the opposite of their reason for existence. As I see it we only have two choices; drop these laws entirely or rewrite the patent laws to fit this area.

We can all do something here, I suggest we start off by violating as many as these patents as we can before this is turned into law here in Europe as well.