Ben Klemens on Software Patents

Peter Zura writes at his 271 patent blog:

Ben Klemens, author of "Math You Can't Use," is a guest scholar at the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics at the Brookings Institution, where he writes programs to perform quantitative analyses and policy-oriented simulations. He also consults for the World Bank on intellectual property in the developing world and computer-based simulations of immigration policy.

Ben is also an aggressive critic of software patents (who has previously butted heads with the 271 blog on this topic), and has just published a working paper titled "Drawing the Line: The Rise of the Information Processing Patent." The paper highlights many of the points brought up in his book, and provides some updates on recent developments in software patents.

Ben's work is important because he is one of the few critics that does a decent job at times in dissecting many of the problems facing the software industry in light of patents (as opposed to IP anarchists Eben Moglen and Richard Stallman, who propose banning software patents and other IP entirely). While I do not agree with many of his conclusions (e.g., software is math and is therefore unpatentable), his papers are often thought-provoking and well-written.

The timing of Ben's most recent article is interesting, since the criticism of software patents has now served as a catalyst for other industry and business members to call for sweeping reforms that would limit patentable subject matter and restrict patent rights across the board. While people have reflexively equated patents with a "pro-business" outlook, this has started to change. As Professor Wegner stated in his recent post on Patently-O, in today's business climate, being "pro-business" means to some people that you are "anti-patent."

Read the transcript from Brookings Institution symposium "Software and Law: Is Regulation Fostering or Inhibiting Innovation?"

Patent Trolls: The paper addresses "patent trolls" and also provides a revised definition of "patent troll," which, in my opinion, is more accurate: "a patent troll is one who unfairly takes advantage of informational asymmetries by suing independent inventors who are ignorant of the field of patents in which the troll works."

Read Mr. Zura's full article and access the links here.

Comments

[ankara evden eve nakliyat]

very nice workings.