Patently Stupid

Being a software engineer, I tend to stay up to date on latest tech news especially in my industry. Over the past year it seems as if the amount of patent lawsuits in the tech industry have skyrocketed. This is a scary thing, since in my opinion most technology patents do more harm than good.

Some recent examples can be found here, here, here and here.

Among these are numerous other examples of companies becoming patent trolls which is completely killing off innovation within companies. This needs to change. If companies continue at this rate, anyone attempting to start a small business will be more scared of being sued into the ground because of some obscure patent purchased by a company from twenty years ago. If the government was to protect small businesses and innovation within this company they would reform this whole process from the ground up. It does nothing and it’s completely damaging.

I believe patents are the wrong answer to protect intellectual property. Copyrights allow a much more flexible model to protect intellectual property from ones work, and would allow new companies to develop simliar, although completely different business models.

But hopefully some of this is going to change. Google has recently called for patent reform now that the patent wars have heated up dramatically. Also, recent discussions on patent reform have stalled due to the debt ceiling crisis.

I’d like to look back in ten years and hope all dreams of having the creative freedom and innovation of a software engineer is not crushed by patent trolls.

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  1. robertschultz posted this

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