@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.

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.

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.