Spolsky on Patents

Joel Spolsky:

Software developers don’t actually invent very much. The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two.

The other 40,000-odd software patents issued every year are mostly garbage that any working programmer could “invent” three times before breakfast. Most issued software patents aren’t “inventions” as most people understand that word. They’re just things that any first-year student learning Java should be able to do as a homework assignment in two hours.

Nevertheless, a lot of companies large and small have figured out that patents are worth money, so they try to file as many as they possibly can. They figure they can generate a big pile of patents as an inexpensive byproduct of the R&D work they’re doing anyway, just by sending some lawyers around the halls to ask programmers what they’re working on, and then attempting to patent everything. Almost everything they find is either obvious or has been done before, so it shouldn’t be patentable, but they use some sneaky tricks to get these things through the patent office.

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