by Flemming Funch
Software patents is a crazy obstacle in software development. In many jurisdictions one can "patent" some operation one does in software, like being able to sell books by one click, or using two clicks to select something. All of which makes it very difficult for a programmer to just solve some problem the logical way, as one in principle needs an army of lawyers to first verify that one didn't accidentally violate somebody's patent. Now, one way of seeing the sillyness in this is to consider what would happen if one could acquire patents on literature. Kuro5hin article here.Arthur Conan Doyle's patent on detective fiction would have expired long ago, but not before preventing Agatha Christie's career. C.S. Lewis' patent on the fantasy novel would have discouraged Tolkien's already reluctant publishers. Without this inspiration, the fantasy trilogies that fill an entire wall in every bookshop would never have been written.
Today we would have patents on smaller and smaller points of style or story. Every opening scene, every surprise ending, every combination of characters, every imaginative sex scene would be protected by a patent.
How could any budding author know what story ideas were already 'owned'? No one could expect him to have read every novel published in the previous 25 years! His profession would have become a minefield. Every day he would fear some lawyer 'discovering' that the hero of his latest story was actually covered by a patent owned by an author he'd never heard of, from a book he'd never read. See, that's really the same thing. The idea of a patent made some sense when we were talking about physical devices, and it was reasonable to give the inventor a few years to develop it themselves, before their competitiors could just copy it. But it becomes insanity when we're talking about simple and obvious software development techniques. Just like it would be crazy if I could patent a sentence in the English language, or a plot point in a book.
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