Holding a contrarian view could carry out great benefits: there has always been a need for a procedure to protect any innovative software from reverse engineering that at the same time allows for its appropriation and exclusionary use, as well as it precludes any imitation of its functionality, implementation details aside. This procedure really exists, it\u2019s the proverbial patent: a negative right, temporal and exclusionary, to protect any novel intellectual property in exchange of publishing enough information to replicate it. In some sense, it\u2019s the only open window for the ordinary citizen to introduce its own personal legislation, a strong general purpose tool, however double-edged it may be.<\/p>\n
The frontal and so popular opposition to software patents transcends the software world: indeed it can be found in past centuries and for other technologies; for example, the most cited case, and therefore so full of hyperbole<\/a>, is the decades-long delayed adoption of the vapour machine due to the machiavellic use of the rights conferred by one of its patents.<\/p>\n Regarding current practices, a detailed study of the descriptive statistics of the use of software patents<\/a> shows that they have been the fastest growing category for decades, though software companies have not been granted many of them because the biggest appliers are other industries similarly intensive in their use of IT<\/span> capital but also with a strong record of filing for strategic patents. Note also that in the absence of strong patents rights, custom and common sense have required the use of copyright protection (which also does not need to give up any source code) even if it\u2019s a far weaker protection: in fact, both of them are complimentary, but their actual use is substitutive<\/a>, because whenever one of them is weakened, the other gets used much more.<\/p>\n From a purely economic point of view, studies show a statistically significant increase of the stock value<\/a> of the software patent-owning companies and they happen to be a mandatory prerequisite to enter markets in which the incumbents already own strongly interdependent patent portfolios. And contrary to general opinion and practice, their use in software start-ups<\/a> is, overall, positive: they increase the number of rounds and their amount, as well as survival and valuation in case of acquisition. From a strategic point of view, software patents raise barriers to entry acting as a deterrent mechanism to the kind of competition<\/a> that just follow profits without investing in any kind of sunk costs in the search of technological advances: in short, an increase of 10% in the number of patents entails a reduction in competition between 3 and 8 per cent. And even if their valuation is a very complex matter, the intrinsic value of software patents is higher than that of the rest of patents<\/a>.<\/p>\n In practice, the biggest burden in their granting and defence is the search of prior art: that is, even under the assumption that the inventor is operating under the principles of good will and full co\u00f6peration, he can\u2019t get access to the full prior art because most software is developed internally for companies and never sees the public light. This gives rise to a great number of non-innovative and trivial patents, and others that ignore the prior art on purpose, a matter which sometimes can be difficult to settle (vg. Apple Multi-touch<\/a>, Amazon 1\u2011click<\/a>). Fortunately, malicious uses don\u2019t fare well<\/a> in the Courts of Justice: the strategies of the so-called patent trolls aren\u2019t successfully long-term, that is, those who are operating within the letter of the law but against its spirit, and are using the patent system to extract rents from others that are using them for productive purposes, a problem that carries a very high economic cost<\/a>. Only their fair use brings a true premium to business valuations<\/a>, that is, building a good patent portfolio that does not enter into practices of dubious ethics like filing for patents that only pursue the cross licensing with competitors to avoid paying them for their intellectual property. Holding a contrarian view could carry out great benefits: there has always been a need for a procedure to protect any innovative software from reverse engineering that at the same time allows for its appropriation and exclusionary use, as well as it precludes any imitation of its functionality, implementation details aside. This procedure really exists, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[14,13,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=965"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1609,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions\/1609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe fastest way to begin to learn how to write software patents is to start with this set of documents<\/a>. And since real learning only happens from the best sources, there are lots of noteworthy software patents, examples to follow for their high degree of inventiveness and the business volume that they backed and helped generate:<\/p>\n\n