If you are referring to copyright or to anything else besides patents, then you were not reading the article or are making assumptions beyond what was argued in it. This article is against software patents not against software copyrights (and we need not ask the author, but only read it).

I will assume you did read the article and also are referring specifically to patents.

Then, not only does this disagree with some research and possibly is not supported to any significant degree by any, but it makes almost no sense within the context of a widely populated competitive field that assigning a monopoly to one person over many others’ original works would promote advancement (I’ll leave up for debate whether copyright ever promotes the progress.. though at least for software, “copyleft” licenses appear to promote revelation of trade secrets). It’s rather likely instead that such monopolies will stifle and perhaps significantly depending on their broadness and simpleness.

I can clearly say that I have been disincentived to create as much software as I otherwise would specifically because of our patent system. It’s ridiculously easy for a wealthy entity to surf the net and open source channels for ideas (even specific ones) with little risk that those providing the ideas will seek a patent. The risk would be in reputation, but even that is only a modest risk.

Note that a monopoly removes incentives to keep creating at an aggressive pace, and, because patents give much power without even requiring a competitive or marketable product to exist, you might not even lose any incentive to create one period when you can instead sue others who are creating.

And as mentioned in the article, the incentives to leverage existing patents are very low except perhaps for professional patent applicants who never really had an intention to try and build a business or even a competitive product that would avoid others’ patents.

Oh, and did you catch that the inventiveness bar to patenting is extremely low? Honestly, in a field loaded with people, how many people do you think (by glancing at any “bell curve”) would find to be obvious (or at least non-obvious or even difficult but achievable within one year) an invention that merely is “non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art”?

Bingo! Patents stop the smartest people.

They also tend to reward (in a winner-take-all fashion) those potentially far down the competency rung. There is simply too large of a pool of those able to come up with the broad ideas quickly and stop the geniuses real work.

Thank goodness Einstein and many others were able to leverage their social context without fear of infringement. And notable is that this guy was a patent examiner so knew very well of the “benefits” of patent infestation. I’d say he was motivated to contribute to mankind already.. and to avoid patents.

Among the many that object strenuously to software patents are these http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Statements_from_developers http://philsalin.com/patents.html

I’m suspicious of the “innovation is the goal” argument. Innovation is less useful when not everyone is free to take advantage of that innovation. Also, innovation is also never de novo: it is based on existing work. The patent system thus impedes innovation, too; can you be sure which effect is stronger?

It is not a given that inventors need to be given any kind of monopoly at all. There was no shortage of inventiveness in the world before patents. (There were sometimes inventors who tried to keep their inventions secret; but that is once again true in effect, in the sense that now so many patents are filed, and are written in such impenetrable language, that the patent database is the last place other engineers would look for technical help.)

Remember when you criticize protection of any type of IP that without the incentive, less innovation will be made. In regards to the patent length, inventors need to be given a fair amount of time to recoup a return on their investment of both time and money.