It’s Clear Why Software Patents Need to Disappear

If in that respect's whatsoever deterrent example to be learned from Google's news-making activities these past hardly a years, information technology's that software package patents are a job.

The most recent exemplification, of course, is Google's $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility, distinctly a strategy for gaining the last mentioned's goodly catalog of patents.

Also continuing to make news lately is the whole Lodsys debacle, in which both Apple and now Google are having to struggle off–at of import disbursal–the attacks this manifest trolling is making against developers for both Android and iOS.

Then, of feed, there's the recent $4.5 billion collective purchase of Nortel's old patents by Orchard apple tree, Microsoft, RIM and others, purposely leaving Google in the dust.

Elsewhere in the mobile arena, meanwhile, we've learned that HTC is compensable Microsoft $5 for every Humanoid handset it sells, creating the smitten situation in which Linux-based Android has become a significant money-maker for Redmond.

The inclination goes on and along, but the bottom line is this: The moveable arena is decent increasingly patent-focused, and that's a big problem. Now, more than ever, it's clear that software patents need to be abolished. Present are precisely a few reasons wherefore.

1. Software Is Just Math

It is non possible to patent a mathematical concept, and for the very same reasons IT should non be possible to patent computer software. Wherefore? Because all software is fundamentally honorable a series of mathematical operations that are performed on inputs to generate results, whether a numerical value, text on a page operating theatre music from your speakers.

Even as information technology would be ridiculous to grant a patent on the algorithmic rule for calculating "pi," for example, so it is every bit nonsensical to allow patents on software, all of which can be reduced to a Set of comparable mathematical algorithms. The fact that such patents are routinely acknowledged is a huge signal that those in charge of granting patents don't really translate what information technology is being patented.

2. Immense Sums Are Being Wasted

As Google's Motorola Mobility purchase vividly illustrates, patents are wildly expensive. They also start an insane amount of time to apply for and win. Imagine if all those resources could represent spent on innovation instead.

3. Just Lawyers and Megacorporations Do good

The only beneficiaries of software patents are lawyers and titan companies look-alike Microsoft and Oracle, which are the only if ones with pockets deep enough to acquire, protect and assert them. Not coincidentally, it is oft the same types of companies that are motivated to gather up patents primarily. Since such megacorporations have often become less forward-looking themselves over the years, they bottom follow up on a scheme of sitting back and collecting licensing fees connected their patents rather.

4. Monopolies Are Being Expanded

Along similar lines, because IT tends to be the giant corporations that can afford and are motivated to buy out patents, those very Lapplander patents tend to boom their monopolies, as they begin to lay claim ownership of more and more of the scholarly assets in their industry. Give the sack that possibly Be a just thing? No means.

5. Conception Is Being Quelled

Software innovation depends hard on the exchange and iterative development of new ideas, but such exchange is on the button what software patents are designed to preclude. Many patents have been acknowledged that are excessively broad, too, qualification IT nearly impossible to develop original software without fear of infringing.

6. Humble Companies Are Beingness Shut Out

For all of the above reasons, you could be the most brilliant and creative software developer ever, but if you don't have got pockets deep enough to pay brawny licensing fees and start a patent warfare chest of your own the agency Google is being forced to do, you are simply out of luck. End of story.

7. Consumers Pay the Price

Small businesses suffer as a result, but ultimately the even bigger failure–As e'er–is the consumer. Under this organization, ascendence of ideas is falling into the hands of the companies that are pregnant, stout and unable to innovate, merely because they undergo the money and no other easy way to earn more. That, in turn back, means the little guys–the innovative ones–can't land to market the next big thing that could change consumers' lives, at any rate not without a heavily exaggerated price.

IT's most-valuable to note that the plain problem is not contained to the mobile world. Back in 2005 a group of companies including IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips and Sony created the Open Invention Network to forbid patent of invention aggression against the Linux ecosystem, for example, and sporty recently the likes of Cisco and Chirrup have joined in.

Patents are causing harm throughout the software industry, in some other words. What's especially crazy about IT all is that we merely don't need software patents. We have copyright, and that provides innovators with more than enough protection at a divide of the disbursement.

It's time to cancel this insane patent arms bucket along, or we will every last fund a steep damage.