Excellent news and the headline gets it right.

This is about state-sanctioned monopoly power to raise a barrier to entry in technology.

More and more companies are lining up patent portfolios to play the game of arbitrage. Nothing new gets built that way.

And if it hurts MS de-facto near-monopoly I won't lose sleep.

This is excellent news.

The main problem with the EU's proposed software patent directive, like American software patent law, is that it would allow the patenting of ideas and not just the implementations of ideas, which is how patents traditionally work with tangible products.

In the world of software patents, Dyson would never have got off the ground with his bagless vacuum cleaners because Hoover would long ago have patented the idea of 'a device that uses suction to remove dirt', rather than simply the technical designs of its vacuum cleaners.

The US has seen a number of companies springing up solely to establish patent portfolios (whilst never actually producing or selling anything) in order to take actual, productive companies to court, which is a disgusting state of affairs.

Patents have a role to play in promoting innovation, by rewarding innovators with a temporary monopoly on a particularly innovative implementation of an idea, but software patents serve only to stifle innovation.

Thank you for raising this Alex. I personally was lobbying MEPs over this issue, and it at least gives us breathing room for some time.

This matter particularly affects software companies, but also everyone in general.

If one company controls the marketplace, others have to pay. That means you, the individual will get less choice.

Copyright (although it needs some reform) is adequate protection.

It is not at all clear that weak property rights hurt Microsoft in the least. In fact, the opposite is quite likely true.

MS has long benefited from the fact that they (and a few other large software companies) can reliably get paid for their software. They have the deep pockets necessary to force large institutional buyers to pay up instead of pirate. Smaller software vendors cannot and suffer disproportionately from piracy. MS gets a much higher rate of return on every dollar they put into software than do smaller companies. That is were most of MS profits and market dominance comes from.

The weak property system means that small vendors cannot compete with MS. Even if they write superior code, if they can't get paid for it but MS does get paid for their crap, the small vendor loses.

Without patents, innovation gives no competitive advantage. Instead, the competitive advantage goes to the entity with deepest pockets who can turn anyone's great idea into their own product and get it to market faster and distribute it more widely than anyone else. MS has been stealing other peoples ideas for almost its entire history. It has never created a new class of software or any truly innovative technology. Instead, it merely copies ideas that smaller companies have proven successful.

Whether, patents will work in software or not is not entirely clear. We might have to come up with some sort of intellectual property system that is halfway between a patent and a copyright. What is clear from history is that strong property rights protect the small and weak against the large and powerful. MS might support a particular implementation of patents but if we set upon a truly equitable and enforceable system, they are screwed.

Curious Europeans might ask their representatives why they even bothered to debate the issue.
Since the US already recognizes software patents, if the EU does likewise it will discover on Day One of European recognition that the US holds all the software patents and the Europeans none.

I have been in the software industry in the US for many years. And I can assure you that copyright protection is all a software company needs. No software patents should ever be granted.

Interactive software has been around for 30 years. Thus the wonderful "patentable" ideas are just a spin of what has been done before. Plus many "patentable" ideas are obvious to any experienced programmer.

Patent examiners are not acquainted with the huge body of work that exists nor are they aware of obvious ideas. Thus about 98.9% of the software patents in existence should not have been granted because they were not original ideas.

Shannon Love,

The American software patents system has given us the likes of Amazon's 'one click shopping' patent and, more recently, Microsoft's 'IsNot operator' patent.

Promoting innovation? Helping start-ups? You tell me.

Software patents (which, as I pointed out above, allow the patenting of ideas rather than implementations) open the doors to all sort of wacky patents that hinder innovation. Small firms cannot possibly fight lawsuits against the likes of Amazon because they happened to allow customers to purchase products from their online store using 'one click'.

Well, Patents are an Economic Absurdity, but so are copyrights, as told in my article Microsoft and Government: A Libertarian View on Monopolies. Both are cases of Information Protectionism.

Fare,

thanks for those links.

Btw, I wonder which party those 14 dissenters in the EU parlament represent...

Shannon,

your argument that Microsoft would benefit from less-regulated patent and copyright laws is absurd when you consider their main competition is from open source software.

At least we're admitting that RedHat isn't about innovation, just competition - which in their business model really means "providing support and hoping the brand recognition carries them through", as near as I can tell.

The "sad" thing is that MS really does innovate far more than RH or any of the other Linux companies do. (Arguably, they do so more than the entire Linux "community" does. I, for one, don't count either tweaking Unix, or making an X frontend that Looks Just Like Windows Or MacOS as "innovation". But maybe I'm just jaded.)

Competition spurs innovation, yes. At the same time, so does protection for your innovations. Some patent schemes - and I don't know the details of the proposed EU ones - might stifle innovation. Others encourage it.

Jake: Any idea that is "obvious" to experienced programmers won't hold up if challenged in patent court, as I understand patent law. Anything truly obvious, beforehand, to members of the industry will have its patent voided on a challenge. (Yes, it's not easy to prove that. Nor should it be, or suddenly everything is "Oh, that's obvious. We just never did it for reasons we can't explain. Now let us use this obvious idea we never tried before for free. Honest, it really was obvious. We have no motive to claim otherwise, right?")

Maybe they're only obvious in hindsight, since the courts don't agree; and God knows I've felt that way about lots of new interfaces and ideas. "Why didn't I think of that?" and "Of COURSE!" are not the same as "That's so obvious you can't patent it because everyone knew that."

This is truly a good result.

Sigivald: competition - or at least threat of competition- is a prerequisite for innovation.

Patent Law for most of its work deals in minutia; which is why after the first big idea, the next innovations deal in specifics. If you cannot demonstrate the idea in tangible terms and show how it is better than prior art then you cannot write a claim. Without a claim a patent never gets filed in the first place.

Now onto Corporation vs Bureacracy as the arbiter and the enforcer. He who understands the claim is in the catbird seat, as he (she) can defend or protest. I think this was at the guts of the EU down vote - they really are not competent to dictate software direction.

OSS is innovative.

The real innovation in OSS is not, however, primarily in product yet but rather in process. The fast pace of security fixes is one obvious benefit. Innovation is driven by users and need rather than marketting.

Linux is still young and gaining fast. I expect that the closed source shops will be, more and more, playing catch-up. Firefox anyone? Bittorrent? Embedded whatever (Linksys routers, phones, etc.).

Here among the libertarians, I expect that free (as in speech) would be seen as better, no?

Sigivald: competition - or at least threat of competition- is a prerequisite for innovation.

Oh, that is such BS. Competition is not a prerequisite for innfovatoin. A lot of innovation occurred in an era when there was a lot less competition in a given field or before a field existed and thus no competition. A lot of innovation is the result of some party getting a bright idea, implementing it, and then seeing if there was anyone interested in it.