I agree that wholesale copying is an issue. However patents are almost never going to be the appropriate response to that for software companies. With software you can always go for copyright violation and/or misappropriation of trade secrets. By contrast, given that it can easily take the better part of a decade to actually get your patent assigned to you, you are very unlikely to have patents that cover the innovative parts of your technology.
Instead software patents seem to be mostly used to sue people who independently invented the same thing. They enable rent-seeking and provide no educational value to spread innovation. (Which naturally arises and spreads in our industry on a time scale that is too short to get patents assigned.)
How do I know this? Because the one has happened based on my work, and the other came close to happening. At one of my employers, a rogue employee cloned the code base and then took it to some Eastern European programmers to reimplement the website. It was litigated based on copyright and trade secrets - no patents were available for that lawsuit.
However a different employer of mine took out two patents based something I did when I was there. Since then a number of companies have infringed on those patents, and could be sued for large sums. By luck the patents have wound up owned by an organization that is unlikely to ever let them go to a patent troll. But I've spent years fearing that that work will get used to stifle independent innovation.
> I agree that wholesale copying is an issue. However patents are almost never going to be the appropriate response to that for software companies. With software you can always go for copyright violation and/or misappropriation of trade secrets
Only if software is the product you're selling. I worked at two companies that had patents on software algorithms, but our software was just a reference implementation. Explain to me how a company like ARM would operate relying on just copyright and trade secrets. I think ARM represents a great and valuable business model, and patents enable that business model.
> Instead software patents seem to be mostly used to sue people who independently invented the same thing.
I don't think you can point to any statistic to back this up.
>> Instead software patents seem to be mostly used to sue people who independently invented the same thing.
>I don't think you can point to any statistic to back this up.
I think that was already clear from the word 'seem'. To me, the same thing seems to be true, actually. That /might/ be caused by the number of software-patent cases I see that fall into this category, or are about trivial inventions, while I simply don't see the cases that do have some merit.
On the other hand, I've never yet seen a software patent related case where I could actually relate to the suing party.
Instead software patents seem to be mostly used to sue people who independently invented the same thing. They enable rent-seeking and provide no educational value to spread innovation. (Which naturally arises and spreads in our industry on a time scale that is too short to get patents assigned.)
How do I know this? Because the one has happened based on my work, and the other came close to happening. At one of my employers, a rogue employee cloned the code base and then took it to some Eastern European programmers to reimplement the website. It was litigated based on copyright and trade secrets - no patents were available for that lawsuit.
However a different employer of mine took out two patents based something I did when I was there. Since then a number of companies have infringed on those patents, and could be sued for large sums. By luck the patents have wound up owned by an organization that is unlikely to ever let them go to a patent troll. But I've spent years fearing that that work will get used to stifle independent innovation.