Burn All Gifs: An Interview With Don Marti Continued

ahref: What do you think about software patents in general - should software patents never be issued? Should particular kinds of software patents never be issued?

DM: In the USA, software products are already covered by copyright, trademark, and software licenses. No other industry enjoys as generous a legal advantage as the software industry, and software patents are not necessary to encourage the industry's continued progress.

ahref: Some analysts say that software patents actually encourage innovation - that without patent protection, it would be harder for entrepreneurs to get funding from investors, and it would be easier for large corporations to steal ideas and crush small competitors. Any thoughts on this argument?

DM: Show me a small, independent software innovator who has successfully used the patent system this way, and I'll show you fifty cases where large, uncreative companies have used patents to stifle competition. Patents are now merely weapons used by corporations against each other, and real innovators suffer.

Look up software patents on the programmer site slashdot.org some time -- all the stories are about patents squashing innovators, not about innovators using patents to succeed.

The most economically useful software project of all time -- the Internet -- is entirely unpatented. Literally millions of programmers make a good living without patents.

Why should software be covered by trademark, copyright, license, and patent? No other field of endeavor has that much legal power being thrown around.

In, say, pharmaceuticals, where copyright would be useless and getting doctors and patients to sign licenses would be silly, patents may be useful to allow companies to get a return on research investments. But in software, where copyright, trademark, and licensing ALREADY cover companies' work, adding patents is turning the balance too far toward the lawyers and too far away from the genuine innovators.

ahref: If there was one thing you could've patented (keeping in mind you'd only have the patent for 20 years), what would it have been, and when?

DM: A patent only gives the holder the right to sue infringers -- and a license to be in a courtroom and in lawyer meetings for 20 years sound pretty hellish to me. Let's just keep patents out of sofware entirely, since we don't need them, and let the patent lawyers go back to the hardware companies and the drug companies. They won't starve.

How do you feel about software patents, readers? Do they limit innovation, or encourage it? Come talk about it with other web professionals.

Edward Piou is an ahref.com producer and runs ep Productions, Inc., a development company based in the Washington, D.C. area.

view a printable version of this article