Web Security, Privacy & Commerce, 2nd Edition

Patents

Patents are a type of license granted to an inventor to protect novel, useful, and nonobvious inventions. Originally, these were intended to allow an inventor a fixed time to profit from some new innovation or discovery while also encouraging the inventor to disclose the development behind the patent. Before patents, inventors would try to keep discoveries secret to profit from them and thus impede scientific progress. In some extreme cases, the inventor died before disclosing the discovery, losing it indefinitely.

In recent years, there has been a shift in patent activity to the granting of patents in computing. Firms and individuals are applying for (and receiving) patents on software and algorithms at an astonishing rate. Despite the wording of the Constitution and laws on patents, the Patent Office is continuing to award patents on obvious ideas, trivial advances, and pure algorithms. In the middle of 1995, they effectively granted patent protection to a prime number as well!^[221] Paradoxically, this shift is itself discouraging some scientific progress because it means that the development and use of these algorithms (or prime numbers) is regulated by law.

The danger comes when you write some new code that involves an algorithm you read about or simply developed based on obvious prior work. You may discover, when you try to use your program in a wider market, that lawyers from a large corporation will tell you that you cannot use “their” algorithm in your code because ...