Europe Rejects the Software Patent Directive!

Although the government's granting a patent for an invention may be good for stimulating innovation in some fields, a patent for an idea whose primary implementation is purely in software only stifles innovation.

Ideas are routinely invented, modified, and independently re-invented by writers of software, amateur and professional, all over the world. Moreover, the nature of software development is such that, in comparison with an industrial plant fabricating a physical product of equivalent complexity, the scale of investment in the software effort is orders of magnitude smaller. On the one hand, it is naturally much easier to innovate, to produce, and to distribute a useful piece of software than it is to do so for a useful physical product; on the other hand, it is the complexity of an invention that determines its liability to patent lawsuits. So, while it may be reasonable to expect a large company, with capital investment in a factory and transportation infrastructure, to license patents or else to defend itself with lawyers against patent lawsuits, it is unreasonable to expect a small company, whose software product is nevertheless of a complexity equivalent to that of the large company's physical product, to bear the same burden.

The software patent serves only the interests of two groups:

• large, multinational corporations, each of whom uses its software patent portfolio for cross-licensing deals with other corporations so as to avoid the stifling effect on innovation that software patents would otherwise cause and
  
  
• those relatively small companies, each of whom has as its only income the use of software patents to extort money from those who would try to innovate and to produce something useful.

Unfortunately, software patents have existed in the United States since 1981, when a court decision explicitly allowing them went largely unnoticed by the public. In Europe (except in the U.K.), however, there is not presently a bureaucratic mechanism for patenting an idea readily implemented in software. In fact, by the time the advocates for software patents starting pushing European institutions to provide such patents, the danger had (largely from experience in the United States) become apparent. The European free software community organized and led the campaign to oppose the establishment of software patents in Europe. After a long battle, it seems that a victory has been won today.

For a more detailed explanation of why software patents are evil, there is a speech given by Richard Stallman at Cambridge in 2002. There is also an article presenting a mathematical model of the adverse effect of patents in certain fields such a software.