Patents And Uniqueness

I was reading a post from the blog of TaxiSurfer this morning, and it reminded me of a few conversations I have had over the last couple of weeks with software developers / engineers about patenting their work.  Patents have been in the news a good bit lately, and companies like Google are buying up patents in order to protect themselves from patent trolls.

When I was at Bandwidth.com, we were working on a pricing engine that allowed real-time internet service pricing from all of the major providers.  It was interesting, and at the time a pretty new idea.  It was essentially Expedia for buying business internet.  During the development process, we caught wind of a competitor filing a provisional patent around much of the same technology we were developing.  We, in turn, filed a provisional patent as a defense against their efforts.  I happened to be the guy in charge of working with the patent attorney on getting all of the information together for the filing.  While tedious, I learned a lot about the patent process and what is required for something to actually be patentable.

Back to current day.  I had two separate conversations in the last month with developers who had written some software they were interested in patenting.  My initial reaction to these conversations is generally one of rolling my eyes.  As technologists, we tend to think that we are the only ones thinking about a problem, and we fall in love with our ideas to the point of blindness.  ”You are so beautiful.  I must protect you from those who would seek to do you harm.”  The reality is that there are at least 500 other people on the planet, right now, working on the same problem in pretty much the same way.

The goal, in these particular cases, was to patent the idea and then run around finding people who might be violating the patent and “offer to work with them”, much in the way the mob “offers to protect you.”  It’s white-collar extortion, and just like this case with TaxiSurfer, it’s anti-competitive.  All the time spent suing people could instead be spent making the product better, to the point where people will use it because it’s the best out there.

If a pharmaceutical company invests ten years in finding a cure for a particular illness, they deserve some market protection to recoup their investment and profit from their willingness to take the risk.  If I spend two weeks in my basement building a cool iPhone control, the idea of a patent should be considered absurd.

Stop the hand-wringing over whether someone else is doing what you are doing and how you will sue them, and focus on doing it better or carving out a niche to serve.