Microsoft patent infringement

A jury yesterday awarded a Chicago company $520 million dollars in damages for infringing a 2001 patent on the concept of embedding small programs (like plug-ins or applets) in web pages.

Now, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, and I like nothing more than them having to distribute money against their will. But this is stupid.

All software patents are bad. Theoretically, patents are supposed to encourage innovation for the public benefit by providing a short exclusive time of use. Unfortunately, since they have been applied to software in 1991, they have been used solely to stifle innovation. Practically every piece of commercial software can be found to violate dozens of software patents, which are often broad descriptions of obvious technologies.

Apple, as a big innovator, has lots and lots of patents, and they love to use their evil lawyers to extract hefty penalties and stifle their opponents. So does Microsoft. The Chicago company mentioned above is pretty much formed solely to use the stupid patent.

Before software patents were legal, software innovated more rapidly than it does today. If I wanted to make a spreadsheet like Microsoft's, I could just write one, and as long as I didn't use their name or steal their source code, I could conceivably write something better and whip them in the marketplace.

Not any more. Not for technical reasons -- modern software is often so bloated and buggy that crushing it would be a simple task.

If any program is "non-obvious" (a theoretical requirement for patents), then just keeping the source code secret should be more than sufficient to protect it. That's just what all of us developers used to do. It worked.

And the 17 year duration of the patents is so enormous compared to today's rate of innovation that the protected technology won't become useable by the public until a decade after it's obsolete. So the temporary protection has essentially become permanent.

Let me repeat: All software patents are bad.

Filed Wed - August 13, 2003, 12:46 PM in

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