Debating the pros and cons of software patents

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For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld. Paul Krill is an editor at large at InfoWorld, whose coverage focuses on application development. Here are the latest Insider stories. More Insider Sign Out. Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register. Latest Insider. Check out the latest Insider stories here. The software industry has thrived with patents, Sachs said.

Free Software Foundation's Smith was skeptical. Examination times for patents at the U. This article, " Debating the pros and cons of software patents ," was originally published at InfoWorld.

Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld. The problem of limiting software to copyright protection is that any enterprising software developer can simply tweak the code of a particular program while maintaining its core functionality without running afoul of copyright law.

Because the value of software is in its functionality rather than in its method of expression, patent law is the only appropriate protection for it. No one doubts that computer hardware is patentable. Bilski v. Kappos , Obtaining a patent on software is much more controversial because software is not tied to a specific machine in the classic conception of the term, but is instead meant to be run on any general purpose computer.

Goetz; Should Patents be Awarded to Software? It is well-known in the technological arts that the functions of a particular program can be either wired into a chip as hardware or coded as software. The only difference is that a software program costs less to produce and is more efficiently sold to end-users than hardware.

In fact, the Software Alliance argued in an amicus curiae brief to the Alice court that software actually has the capability to turn general-purpose machines into specific machines, albeit for a short period of time:.

With the stroke of a finger, a tablet computer or smartphone can instantly become a GPS navigation system, a word processor, a camera, a video or music player, an eReader, or an electronic piano. To illustrate this concept with an example, the invention of a word processing program during the PC Revolution of the late twentieth century is the functional equivalent of the invention of a typewriter during the Industrial Revolution.

In the intervening years, our use of technology has shifted away from owning many machines that each perform one task to owning one or two machines that perform an infinite number of tasks. The only difference between these two technological paradigms is that the functionality the consumer seeks today is sold on the marketplace as software instead of as single-function hardware.

If the way we interact with our machines has changed, why should patent law not respond? This article is merely a summary of the arguments that attempts to give an overview of the many issues surrounding software patentability.