On the surface, patents seem like a good thing. Just as trademarks and copyrights protect creators in other lines of work, patents are supposed to be a method of ensuring the financial interest of inventors. They are meant to encourage the open sharing of knowledge, ideas, and subsequent inventions under the supposedly reassuring guise of protection. From our reading on intellectual property, a patent is described as “an exclusive right granted for an invention – a product or process that provides a new way of doing something, or that offers a new technical solution to a problem.” That doesn’t seem so bad, does it? With a definition like that and an ultimate goal to “encourage innovation, which in turn enhances the quality of human life,” how could anyone argue that patents are bad? Going just by their definition, patents are good ethically because they protect the hard earned inventions of our nation’s brightest engineers, they’re good economically because they encourage competition and innovation in the marketplace, and they’re good socially because that competition and innovation breeds advances that benefit society. Patents may have been created with good intentions, but their transition to the modern world of technology and computer software has been anything but smooth. What once protected innovation now stifles it. What once guided companies to innovate and create their own products now persuades them to cease creative efforts entirely. What once encouraged anyone and everyone to be an inventor now turns people and even companies into trolls.
In my opinion, patents still have a place in society, if they’re reigned in from their current overcomplexity, ambiguity, and most of all, application to the software industry. Patents make complete sense when applied to a physical, invented object. The readings use the perfect example of Eli Whitney inventing and patenting the cotton gin. A patent on the cotton gin prevented others from profiting on Eli Whitney’s invention – something no one else had created before. It would be unethical if Whitney had to sit back and watch others benefit by selling something he spent a great deal of time and effort inventing. Worse still, society would be at a loss if Whitney was forced to hide a patentless invention for fear of others stealing it. Yet just as the example of the physical cotton gin perfectly demonstrates the good of patents, many modern cases of software patents demonstrate the bad. I’m not entirely set against all software patents, but I do think that patents are more naturally suited to being applied to physical inventions.
I think the real issue at hand is how ambiguous and vague patents have been allowed to become. In the “This American Life” podcast/radio segment, the hosts describe how current litigation is ongoing concerning existing patents that cover website functionality so that “when you scroll your mouse over certain sections, pop-up boxes appear.” Whatever happened to patents only being for ideas that are “non-obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art?” I think this example demonstrates that it’s not necessarily patents on software specifically that are the problem, but rather patents on broad, somewhat obvious and/or rudimentary software practices. Both the patent office and the Supreme Court are at fault for allowing the current state of vague software patents, as evidenced by the article “The Supreme Court doesn’t understand software, and that’s a problem.” That’s not just a problem – it’s a catastrophe for a world increasingly reliant on software for nearly every facet of life. In my opinion, this lack of understanding by the officials who grant, oversee, and rule on patent cases is the fundamental cause of today’s patent troll mess.
Unfortunately, I believe that the current status quo of patents and patent trolls is solid proof that the current system is broken. Even one of the leading technology innovators in the world, Elon Musk, acknowledges that “receiving a patent really just [means] that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit.” It might be time to reconsider the workings of a intellectual property measure that was devised specifically to protect people exactly like Musk. When an innovating technology company like Tesla abandons all of its patents in favor of an open-source model while a ‘company’ like Intellectual Ventures – that doesn’t actually create anything – hordes patents by the thousand, there’s obviously a problem.
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