Freedom to Innovate
p2pnet.net News Opinion:- The idea of a patent is a short term government sanctioned and legally enforceable monopoly. The idea is to foster and support invention and innovation which might be beneficial to the market and mankind by making sure inventors are allowed to financially benefit from their inventions in a protected manner for a time.
So what do you do when Patent law starts to become an impediment to innovation and is used to make the market less efficient and hurt consumers ? What happens when “intellectual property” becomes a joke for basic business processes that companies that managed to spend money to get filed as patentable end up beating it over the heads of competitors or extorting companies with legal blackmail in the form of lawsuits until they cough up dough or have to go to court ?
Basically, hire legal representation. In fact, as the recent SCO case has shown, and the Amazon 1Click suit against Barnes and Noble, this is becoming the new competitive playing field when you can sue over intellectual property infringement where you can’t compete and wish to block competitors from implementing even obviously basic features.
Past patent claims have tried to sue “infringers” on the basis of using html frames, taking payments online or even displaying graphic images on websites. Even Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and one of the people at the centre of the original 1Click controversy and Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly technical books thinks there is something fundamentally wrong with the US patent and trademark system that desperately needs fixing. And you know something is deeply wrong when even the US Federal Trade Commission and the National Academy of Sciences are pushing for revisions to the US Patent system.
Traditionally, only big companies suffered the effect of these legal maneuverings, and you and I only suffered indirectly through reduced competition and innovation in the market. Increasingly, spurious patents are effecting individuals, small businesses and even charities that use software and use Internet technologies.
The situation has gotten so bad that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a new campaign this past week to root out, expose and crush patents that are a threat to public and consumer good by finding prior art that could invalidate them.
Basically, the campaign will be :
- Identifying the worst offending patents;
- Documenting the prior art that shows their invalidity; and
- Chronicling the negative impact they have had on online publishers and innovators.
This campaign becomes even more important as you realize the US is working on exporting this patent chaos to other countries. US and European big business interests are pushing heavily to have the same sort of patent protections it has in the US extended to the European Union and other countries where software and business process patents are generally not recognized.
While the resistance to this happening is strong the wind from Brussels
seems to be supporting business interests and US lobbyists more than popular opinion.
Daryl Manning
