The patent tax

The patent tax

The word is poorly choosen, yes.

Patents are a fiction that exist through government-support though, and their existence does impose significant cost and (perhaps more importantly) risk to all businesses and individuals who produce, sell or use software.

The risk is greater the more innovative you are. It is also greater for smaller companies. A small innovative 10-person software-company would quite likely go bankrupt as the result of only *one* patent-case. MS and IBM are unlikely to.

Patents do not, infact, promote progress in software. Thus they're a net liability and should simply be removed.

But I agree -- they're not a tax. They're just a unnessecary risk invented by government. The risk brings nothing. There are literally nobody who reads sw-patents in the hope of learning something new. (indeed, if you develop software you're well-adviced to stay as far away from reading patents as you possibly can, lest it be deemed willfull infringement)