Patent abolition and strategies (was: What is Florian's strategy?)

Patent abolition and strategies (was: What is Florian's strategy?)

Posted Oct 2, 2010 15:04 UTC (Sat) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
In reply to: What is Florian's strategy? by FlorianMueller
Parent article: Microsoft sues Motorola, citing Android patent infringement (ars technica)

You might be right that patent abolition will not happen anytime soon. Even then, we still should push for abolition as much as possible, for several reasons.

The first one is embedded in the very sentence you wrote... Anytime soon. Compare today's society with what we had 100 or 200 years ago, and see how much changed. A strong push for patent abolition today might result in patent abolition, or at least weakening, 50 years down the line.

The second one is that strong calls for abolition present an opposing force to calls for patent expansion. Even if it does not result on abolition or even weakening of patents, if it prevents or even reduces expansion of patents, it is still a win.

The third one is that not all countries have software patents. Not only that, on some countries software is explicitly excluded as a patentable subject. A strong push for patent abolition, especially if focused on abolition of software patents, helps prevent the law on these countries being changed to allow software patents. Which is important because you never know which countries will be important 50 years down the line.

The fourth one is that it results in less aggressive enforcement. If enough people are anti-patent, the most egregious attempts at enforcement of patents will be avoided, so as to not provide good examples for the anti-patent crowd.

Of course, nothing in this prevents the development of ways to reduce the negative effect of software patents in countries which allow them. Both workarounds and calls for abolition can be pursued at the same time.

---

to post comments