What patents supposedly exist for does not match the net effect they have. (And remember, we only care about "stimulating inventors" because it gives the general public a net benefit, just like copyright theoretically exists to encourage the writing of more creative works.) People have this theoretical vision of patents protecting small inventors/businesses from some other company building the same product better/cheaper and putting "the little guy"/"the underdog" out of business. That romantic notion needs revision, because it doesn't work anymore, if it ever did. Patents today (and software patents in particular) tend to fall in three major cases:
- Small company gets a patent, thinks it will protect them, and either never uses it or quickly learns that their one patent will not protect them from the thousands held by whoever they want protection from. They also don't have the time or money to waste on litigation rather than just building a product.
- Large company gets a patent, adds it to the war chest, uses it as a giant stick to force anyone working in the same general area to pay up. Small companies have to pay up, and Free and Open Source Software gets excluded entirely (or just publishes their code anyway and says "screw patents", which works nicely for people not worth suing but makes anyone else using their code a target).
- Patent trolls, who write or more commonly acquire patents, wave them around like a stick, and extort money from people actually being productive.
One of these cases derives no benefit from software patents, and the other two turn software patents into net losses for the public. So, tell me again how software patents represent a useful tradeoff for the general public, and why we should grant an artificial monopoly that would not otherwise exist?
