Patently stupid
The European Patent Office is looking again at whether or not it should follow the American model and allow software patents. Such a move would please software companies like Microsoft, but it can only add costs for the rest of us.
Patents were first conceived to help inventors develop their inventions and get a reasonable financial reward on them without having their ideas stolen. In Britain, that means your invention has to be a technical innovation, it must not be obvious or common knowledge, and you are supposed to be able to produce working versions of your invention. Computer software has long been ineligible for patenting because software is simply a method for doing something, not an invention in itself.
In the USA though it is quite different, and many would describe the US patent system as a "land grab" where the first to claim an idea is granted the patent rights regardless of who invented it or how well known it is, and without any evidence that you are trying to develop the idea yourself. In addition, in the USA it is permitted to patent methods and software.
One of the most famous software patents to date is the Eolas patent. Eolas is a US company which claims to have invented the idea of a browser which supports plug-ins to play video etc within a web page and it successfully sued Microsoft for $521 million in 2003. This judgement was overturned in 2004, but then reversed again in 2005, and finally settled out of court in 2007.
You may think software patents only affect big companies working on system software, like Microsoft and IBM, but if you look through the US patents directory you will surely find at least a few patents which claim rights over something you do in your own business. For example, if you sell books online, there is a patent entitled "Methods and apparatus for buying and selling books" which describes an online shop but claims to have invented the concept of selling books this way. If you are in the marketing business and you use computers then there is a patent in the US for a "Method and system for collecting and processing marketing data" whilst if you have any sort of online database of companies with a search form, someone might claim it violates the patent entitled "Online business directory with predefined search template".
Google provides an online search for a large portion of the US patents database so you can see the craziness of these for yourself. Some of my favourites include the patents for: a toy skunk; a shark protector suit; a device for cooling an infant's brain; a combined scarecrow and advertising placard; and sunglasses with attached false eyebrows.
One of the strangest of all must be a recent application from IBM who reason that meetings which are scheduled for one hour often don't need the full hour but, according to IBM, "Meeting attendees will fill the full hour for which the meeting is scheduled regardless of whether the entire hour is necessary to address the business at hand." IBM's brilliant idea is to patent a scheduling system which allows meetings to be scheduled for less than an hour. I wonder how many one hour meetings it took them to dream that one up?
28th May 2009
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.