Incomplete Analysis of Patent Problems
Posted Dec 8, 2003 19:49 UTC (Mon) by
josh_stern (guest, #4868)
Parent article:
Microsoft aiming IBM-scale patent program at Linux? (Register)
As software developers, we frequently get outraged at the admin of
software patents by the USPTO
in part, because what is patented often seems like the sort of
trivial solutions to a given problem that developers would come to on
their own in their everyday work.
This is related to a general (and theoretically recognized) concern
about patents that they often do not strike a desired balance
between encouraging innovation (intended consequence of patent law) and
restricting competition (considered to be an unintended or necessary
evil part of the law).
But the importance of network externalities in modern technology
fields is related to a whole different type of theoretical problem
with patents that hasn't received enough attention. That is that
the value of a granted patent will often lie in its ability to
act as a gatekeeper for a technology standard rather than in any
intrinsic technological capability of what is patented. This
case of VFAT would appear to be a classic example of this. FAT
itself was a technologically backward filesystem even at the time
of its development in the 1980s. It is only significant because
of widespread use. Similarly, VFAT/FAT32 are only signficant
because of their standard use. Only Microsoft had the marketplace
capability to make any extension to FAT a standard. So allowing
a patent on this type of thing is simply a covert mechanism to
restrict competition and/or collect monopoly rents without any
element of encouraging technological innovation (arguably the patent
capability offers both incentive and mechanism to do the reverse).
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