[wonder cow]

In this interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee (credited with inventing the web), he expressed his opinion of software patents.

The interview is much more broad than just this topic, but I like
his thoughts on this matter.

I find software patents to be absurd. It is similar in my mind to getting
a patent on a song. It just does not make sense.

Will software patents have a negative effect on the development of the Web?

There are major issues here. Eolas, a spin-off from the University of California, claimed ownership of a unique combination of embedding objects into a Web page so that it happens automatically through use of compiled code. This is an example of a random patent of a combination of existing technologies.

The claim was based on that fact that it's done by compiled code, but any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable. Programming is always about reassembling existing stuff - novel ideas are rare. Even with the development of the Web hypertext was already there and so on.

A bright idea is OK, but getting people to adopt common standards is impeded by patents. At W3C we have a working group that had to stop work on a project for 18 months (a lot in Web years!) to answer a patent issue. This affected the livelihood of people in companies that were doing really good work.

Often, the cases we've seen involving patents on Web technologies have been spurious at best. There are many cases in which a patent's novelty is extremely unclear, but the legal costs of discussing it would be prohibitive.

Patents are often used by large companies who can afford the legal fees, or some one-man-bands who have nothing to lose and hoping for a pay-off from a larger company. They are often defensive against other patents. Because of this W3C now has a patent policy.

To be fair most larger companies have now had a serious change of understanding and see that for the market to grow Web infrastructure must be royalty free.

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.3337