@vyodaiken This makes no sense. You don’t foster competition by handing out monopolies.
— Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) September 16, 2014
That’s not how it looks from here but I think part of the muddiness in the software patent argument is the result of arguments that really attack the entire idea of patents but are advanced as being specific to software patents. The whole idea of a patent is that you do foster innovation and competition by “handing out monopolies”. Maybe that idea is wrong, but if you think it is wrong you are likely opposed to patents – period. Tim Lee and many of the other
people who dislike software patents confuse the issue by simultaneously claiming that (1) software patents are inherently worse/different than other patents and (2) that software patents choke off innovation because of properties that turn out to apply to all patents. Opposing patents in general, however, is a more radical proposition than opposing software patents – perhaps more a more radical proposition than people feel comfortable making.
My position is that many patents are wrongly granted for “inventions” that are neither novel nor un-obvious and that the system for adjudicating patents is way too slow, error prone, and expensive. But patents themselves serve a useful purpose. The obvious example is Excel which is effectively a monopoly without the benefit of any patents at all. The work of the innovators was, without patent protection, rapidly copied by companies with better marketing and greater resources. Innovation stopped. End of story.
And “business method” patents, in general, are not really software or computer patents at all. Usually they are efforts to patent a well known method of doing business adding some technology to the mix to buttress a claim of novelty. One could have similarly claimed a hundred years ago that making sales calls via telephone was an invention or that delivering adverts by TV instead of by radio was an invention.