Those who can, do. Those who can’t, patent business methods.
November 4th, 2009legal, Personal, Political 4 CommentsThere was a time when patents represented innovation. Thanks to the relaxing of patent rules as championed by the US patent office in a blatant attempt to curry favour with dubious business interests, and make a bit of money at the same time, those days are gone.
These days, patents are a tool for those who have no business model other than litigation, either because their primary business model failed, or by design because filing patents and hoping a lawsuit or three will stick (or rather, be settled out of court) is easier than actually building something good.
Inventors are supposed to be builders of things, things that astound and amaze us, and that further the interests of humankind as a whole. Patents should protect their genuine innovations. But now, for every genuine invention that’s patented, there are a thousands of restatements of ideas that have been sloshing around the IT world for the last 30 years. It seems that now, to be an inventor and make money from patents, you just need a lawyer, a web browser, a bit of seed funding and the ability to fill in a few forms. The pool of human knowledge does not expand, and the resulting patent lawsuits positively put a drain on the people who are actually going out there and trying to make ideas work in practice. You know, the doing part. The making it work part. Not just sitting on your arse filing paperwork.
Whenever I see yet another failed company trying to pretend it has value from its highly vague and often derivative patent portfolio and attacking companies that are actually out there creating stuff people like, I want to stab all the world’s patent lawyers in the face with a biro. The world is terribly, terribly screwed up when we reward people for savvy administrative & legal navigation over, I don’t know, doing something that matters.
There are too many vested interests in the industry for people to actually own up and admit that a huge proportion of the patents being registered are piles of steaming horse manure, especially since they’re paying their lawyers handsomely to produce it – even those who produce them ‘defensively’ are just as bad. The more they produce of it, the more it stinks up the place for everyone. In London repeated cholera epidemics finally made authorities deal with the Big Stink, we could do with the equivalent in IT instead of the big players merely brushing the problem under the carpet (mostly because they don’t want to lose their own expensive portfolios from their balance sheet), metaphorically walking past with scented hankerchiefs under their noses.
November 4th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
This is the sort of thing that really annoys me – people who play the system get rewarded rather than people that work hard. It’s part of the reason that I gave up my job to do my game, in my previous job there were a lot of people who *did* things and made it happen (coders) and a lot of people who talked about it in meetings with seldom any actual knowledge or insight (*some* managers and/or consultants). Always seemed to be the weasels that got recognition / rewarded, such is life I guess.
November 4th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
If Obama wouldn’t have already that many other issues to deal with, this would be a high priority thing (at least in my eyes). It’s really unfair what is happening there in many cases.
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Really gets my angry and so Steve: If you should ever put your “face stabbing” idea into practice, call me and I’ll come along
November 5th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
….so, if the court finds WebMap’s claim *valid,* then what can you surmise? Maybe that the system actually works to protect innovators? Or… ?
November 5th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
.. or that the court just patrols a fundamentally flawed system. The judiciary is only there to enforce, regardless of how limp the rules are. The fact that this patent is even registered at all means the system doesn’t work.
“Business methods” such as this in no way deserve patent protection. Basically it’s just a strung together list of simple processing steps that any high school student could have thought up. Wow, people could use the internet to communicate that they saw a bird at a given set of coordinates and combine that information into a database which others could query? And he thought of this in 2004? Wow, it’s a revelation. Or, alternatively blindingly bloody obvious to anyone with the most basic knowledge of web development and an interest in ornithology. At this quality standard almost every competent dev I know could have filed about 200 patents in their careers – except most of them aren’t deluded enough to think their small combinatorial experiments are worthy of patent protection (plus the fact that until recently the European patent systems were encumbered by that inconvenient thing called common sense). The hubris in some of these patents is staggering, as is the fact that they were approved at all.