Originally, patents were used to allow inventors to share their non-obvious
discoveries with others. Imagine, say, the airplane. Many people tried to
make a flying machine, and failed. Now the Wright brothers succeeded. People
all over would be asking them "Wow, how did you do that?". Without patents,
they would have to answer "We can't tell you, because then you'd take profits
away from us". Patents would allow them to share their discovery with the
world, while controlling the use of the new technology for a specified amount
of time.

The way software patents are used, on the other hand, is different. Once some
idea spreads openly (e.g Lempel and Ziv's compression algorithm), anybody (or
at least hundreds of good programmers around the world) can implement it on
their own. There are no real secrets that people would be shaking their heads
about saying "how did they do that?". And none of the software patents that I
know of ever gave the companies making them any incentive to publish the code
they patented.

Summary: patents were meant to promote sharing of information and research.
I don't see software patents doing that. Ergo, software patents suck.

Mar 28, 2002