Software patents should be abolished (2009)

cdixon.org

40 points·charsi··3 comments

What I remember of RIM, is they took some guys code. He innovated, and they took it. He told them, and just asked for a mention in the authors page. A quick thanks mate. I'd suspect it would help him land future jobs, and be fun to talk about.

They rejected it. He died and his estate sold the rights. Then BB got sued. They should have been sued, and deserved what they got. Don't steal from devs

If they "took his code", that's a copyright issue, and patents aren't necessary to prevent it. Regardless, "e-mail, but on mobile internet" is not something that should be patentable, and even if this one case were justified, the overall effect of software patents is negative, and consists mostly of incidents such as Microsoft only supporting filesystems they have patents on, and extorting with them any device manufacturer that wants to interoperate with Windows [1], or patent trolls threatening small businesses for connecting their printer to the internet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT#Legal_status

The whole patent system is a mistake.

It does fosters innovation, but it doesn't offset the cost it causes to innovation. It is very likely the common defense of patents suffers from the broken window fallacy.

The main purpose it seems to serve nowadays is to make it easier for certain classes of corporations to gain funding. And that is really it.

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