Patently Destructive

The patent laws were originally thought as an attempt to motivate innovation. The patent laws basically provide inventors with exclusive rights to profit from their inventions, and in return the inventors publish their inventions and describe how the inventions work. Instead of keeping their knowledge secret the world will share the knowledge. As an additional movitation to innovate, a patent is automatically granted if one demonstrates how to improve an existing patent. So it seems reasonable enough that the patenters are provided with some compensation for their innovation.

Enter reality. Competition never gave birth to cooperation, and this is also true for knowledge sharing. In practice the patent laws have become a legal cesspool where the patenter takes great care to obey the following two rules when he or she submits his or her patent application:

• Firstly, the description of the idea is obscured that no-one can understand the invention. If the patent is obtained, the knowledge will remain the patenter's well-kept secret.
  

• Secondly, the patenter describes the idea in very general terms to enable as many products, concepts, and ideas to be covered by the patent as possible. This ensures that future improvements are also covered by the original patent. It also ensures that new ideas derived from one's invention are also covered by the invention, even if the patenter never dreamed of such ideas.

Large corporations that can afford hordes of administrative have patent departments that apply for any patent under the sun, and they have several patents approved each day. The world's patent bank contains a huge array of patents, most of which are so nebulously described that few companies have the resources required to get a clear picture of the patent wilderness. Smaller companies don't stand a snowball's chance in Hell to discover whether they might have violated some patent during their product development.

At the same time, the larger corporations include a number of experts that survey products manufactured by smaller companies. If a smaller company seems to grow and pose a threat to the corporation, the corporation's patent lawyers go to war. They dig into their patent database and locate patents that the smaller company may have violated. Software patents are particularly prone to being violated, because software patents refer to ideas and methods rather than tangible products.

It doesn't really matter if the corporation is wrong. The corporation can legally prevent the smaller company from selling its products while the lawsuit extends endlessly until the smaller company is starved for resources and stands no other chance of survival than agreeing on a settlement.