Making a new home for patent trolls
February 7th, 2009Business, Development, Local, Open Source, Political 3 CommentsI live on an island that often gets bad press for being a ‘tax haven’. Those in the local financial services industry don’t like that term of course, pointing out how standards-compliant the finance industry is, and how many information exchange agreements we have with other countries (the line ‘the lady doth protest too much’ bubbles to the surface in some people’s minds I’m sure at this stage). So, we’re not technically a tax haven according to the OECD definition, but we’re certainly a place for people to stash their money and avoid paying tax on the income they derive from it in the juristictions in which they live. There’s no getting around the wider political debates about whether that’s a morally respectable position to take, particularly that the reason taxes can be so low is that the state doesn’t have to pay for defense, which is sponged from the UK government, provides precious little in the way of healthcare, and generally takes a right-wing policy route that seems to actively promote social division, but let’s leave that for the moment. Obviously being somewhat of a left-leaner I find it all slightly distasteful and am quite grateful my career path has so far kept me doing other things. I don’t deride people for choosing to be involved in that business – it’s their choice, and certainly it pays better than most of the alternatives in a small locality, but for a little while now (certainly since developing my own political opinions rather than inheriting them from the community around me) I’ve felt much better to be ‘aligned’ with the goals of whatever organisation I’m spending my working time with. Seems to me that we spend so much of our lives working, it probably ought to be for something we actually believe in, and I personally can’t say I have any significant motivation to help people avoid paying tax. While I can, I’ll keep doing other things, although increasingly our local government doesn’t seem very interested in seriously promoting much else.
However, I have been dismayed with one of the latest developments locally which are supposedly ‘branching out’ beyond financial services, because it’s actually worse - our IP law has been revised now so that patents from any juristiction can be re-registered locally to obtain the same protection (previously, it only applied to IP registered in the UK I believe). Simple enough, except that articles in our local news have been chest-beating about it specifically with reference to the fact that now, patents that wouldn’t be valid in the UK can now be registered, so long as they are valid in another juristiction – and in particular they singled out business method patents as registered in the US, which are currently not allowed in the UK. They’re happy that ‘asset holders’ can now ‘bolster their protection’ by re-registering their ‘IP’ even though the UK would have thrown it out as worthless.
Ugh. One of the things I was proud about in the UK is that bullshit patents on business methods weren’t valid. I was happy that total nonsense like the Amazon 1-Click patent and it’s ilk were deemed not to be valid inventions, for they are widely acknowledged to suppress innovation and play directly into the hands of patent trolls. The world is blighted by people who register widely known techniques as patents with a registrar who is so ignorant and/or compromised by conflicting interests that they’re incapable of acknowledging the prior art, and an entire industry wastes precious resources either fighting patent spam, or building their own equally rancid pile of patents as a self-defense mechanism, all instead of actually inventing significant things, or you know, making great products that stand up in their own right. If even half the time that went into the overheads of establishing, debating, licensing and fighting low-brow, pointless patents was spent on the creative process, who knows how much we’d actually advance the human race. Instead, that effort gets spent on lawyers instead – it’s no wonder that the people lauding these ‘advances’ are from that particular profession.
At a time when everyone else, even big companies like Microsoft in the US, are recognising that software / business method patents are proving corrosive to the industry, locally our law makers are puffing themselves up over having allowed such nonsense to happen here too.
But hey, it’ll make a quick buck, both for the registrar and for our local legal firms, so it’s ok right? Favouring the financially convenient over the holistically respectable seems a common line around here. I despair sometimes.
February 7th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
I believe software is written, not invented. Same with business methods – you write them down and publish… copyright is for that stuff!
I expect the big businesses like MS only really ever defensively patent as they’ve had problems with people upholding patents against them in the past – though that Novell thing goes against that I guess.
I see it a bit how like the domain name goldrush where people would buy a domain and hold a company to ransom for it if they didn’t get there first.
February 8th, 2009 at 1:04 am
I completely agree with you so many times have I visited a news story talking about some new programming idea when all of the sudden someone in the comments links to someone who has done it 10 years earlier.
I’m currently looking at head tracking and even things like Johnny Chung Lee’s virtual display has been done and researched years before his own work on it. My point here is that things keep getting innovated, forgotten, re-discovered, and then patented.
It’s really a shame and I’ve never seen even one programmer in support of software patents.
February 8th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
@Paul: Microsoft has been pretty schizophrenic on this issue, at times banging the patent drum, and at other times being pragmatic about it (I think Gates pretty much admitted that MS probably wouldn’t have got started if the patent situation had been like this in the 80s). It’s hard to know what the real position is, but at least so far they have used all their patents defensively.
@Andrew: Yep, no-one who actually knows what they’re talking about think business method patents are a good idea. The people that like them are the execs of large companies and lawyers.
There’s nothing wrong with patents per se, in established industries. If an industry has matured to the stage where the vast majority of the techniques are not patented, and things that are really have to be genuinely new, and take a lot of research & development. Engineering and pharmaceuticals for example. The problem with business method patents is that they let any legally savvy Joe with a bit of money to invest to patent a technique which is actually well known, and took an hour in the pub to scribble down. Provided you have the cash you can get this patented and even if it’s invalid, the process for overturning it is hugely onerous.
Even for vaguely ‘new’ ideas, in still rapidly developing industries like IT, the 10 year monopoly is completely out of sync with the investment. The web, games etc are changing so fast that a 10-year exclusivity on an idea is absolutely ridiculous, and completely undermines the forward progress of the industry.
I think that if software is to be patented, it should be for a maximum of 2 years, and there should be a significant financial penalty for trying to register patents which, in the eyes of any industry expert, are covered by prior art. The money raised from these penalties should go towards legal assistance for challenging dodgy patents.
However, I think that anything non-physical should never be patented, particularly ‘techniques’ or ‘methods’. Imagine what would happen if carpentry techniques, or (in a juicily ironic way) legal filing procedures were patented for example. People can’t get their work done, because the approach to achieving something is roped off.
Patents only promote innovation when 99% of the techniques required to produce products are not patented, so people can work in that industry and know that only if they’re using the very cutting edge 1% that they’ll have to worry about patents. Even if you accept that non-physical things can be patented (and I don’t), software techniques are simply too new to start roping them off into exclusivity islands, especially for long periods of time.