Yep, I do patents and have more comming....
Ok , firstly, full disclosure, I have patents with my name on it. I have a bunch that are filed and pending examination.
So do I believe in patents? Yes / No. My patents are software related patents and that is one area that I think that patents are not helping innovation but hindering it.
I’ve had to create patents for two reasons; one as a measure of innovation to investors and so that in a case of a patent dispute they are a bartering chip.
Patents in other industries are useful and necessary. In the pharmaceutical industry there would be no point investing 3 years of research and the cost of getting the drug through medical trials if someone could just copy the final product for pence on the tablet.
Software however is different. We are now at the stage where many things that are invented are natural evolution. In truth, good software is less about innovation but execution, how well the stuff was written.
There are some industries where big companies create as many patents as possible. In my industry I would hazard that every product is probably infringing on some other company’s patents. I know having done some recent reviews where someone asked me if a particular bunch of patents were a problem for us, it turned they weren’t but I know of least 3 other products for which they were.
The problem is creating these patents costs money , a lot of money. You can easily spend £5k+ per patent. If you are a small company you cant afford to do many. What is more you also certainly cannot afford to check that everything you do isnt infringing on someone else.
You can easily spend years working on a product and find that as soon as you may some headway in the market and someone pulls a patent that says you infringe. The problem is you may not even have the funds to fight the case even if you are in the right.
I am now at the stage where after this particular venture, I will never start a small company again. Or if I do, it won’t be in software.
So any comments on how software patents can help innovation is naïve.