Popular venture capitalist blogger Nic Brisbourne of The Equity Kicker argues that software patents are bad for innovation.
In our partner meeting today we were discussing the patent strength of a potential investee company. In a sign of how crazy patents have become the important thing to us what not the quality of the invention that had been patented but the extent to which the patents might drive value on exit. This is the latest in a long line of examples of patents not really being about innovation any more, and why I think that software patents now act as a brake on innovation.
After our partner meeting I came across an old argument against patents that was new to me. It dates to 1934 and belongs to an English economist called Arnold Plant. I read it on the Becker Posner blog:
[Arnold Plant argued] that patents distort innovations in favor of goods and processes that can be patented and away from innovations that cannot be patented. His favorite example of the latter is basic research in the sciences that produced the theory of relativity, the theory of evolution, and in more modern times our understanding of DNA and genes. He believed that the patent system induced some creative scientists to work in areas that could be patented rather than on basic scientific research that could not be patented.
That’s another nail in the coffin for me. Patents have their uses, for example in the pharmaceutical industry*, but they are not serving the tech industry well and the system needs reform. The Becker Posner post I mentioned above has a reasoned argument about the pros and cons of patents and makes the suggestion that patents be eliminated on anything that is not expensive to develop and cheap to eliminate. The process of change could be tackled piecemeal, starting small in less controversial areas and spreading if it is successful in increasing innovation. That seems sensible to me.
* That patents are the best way to incentivise and reward innovation in the pharmaceutical industry is of course hotly contested by many including public interest NGO Knowledge Economy. Similar concerns about the damaging effects of restrictive copyright laws are covered by Consumers International’s Access to Knowledge project.