A site has been launched in Europe demonizing the idea of software patents. The tone of the site is utterly hysterical, and I found myself a little baffled while reading it. The thrust of the argument seems to be that large corporations can manipulate the patent system to eliminate smaller competitors, resulting in consumers being swamping by offerings of inferior, buggy software. But it isn't clear why that just hasn't happened in the United States, or why this problem would be unique to the patent system (surely it happens with copyright as well, or indeed with any type of legal claim?). And surely small companies have used patent claims for protection against large ones in many cases. The site also makes the now rather tired claim that open source products are superior because they are subject to public scrutiny--as if patents were not published, as if the teams of open-sourcers pouring over ever bit of GPL code with nothing better to do than look for bugs for free (yeah, right) would do something substantially different from the teams of programmers paid to debug for a proprietary software release. There surely are some interesting arguments somewhere out there about the wisdom of patenting software, but one won't find them at this site.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 6:56 AM | International, Patents, Software

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment | Post a Comment(0)