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Why this matters
Every company is in the software business, which means that every company has software liability. We estimate costs of $11.2 billion a year due to software patent suits (see our 2008 State of Softpatents report), and not just by Microsoft and IBM—The Green Bay Packers, Kraft Foods, and Ford Motor are facing software patent infringement lawsuits for their use of the standard software necessary for running a modern business.
Software innovation happens without government intervention. Virtually all of the technologies you use now were developed before software was widely viewed as patentable. The Web, email, your word processor and spreadsheet program, instant messaging, or even more technical features like the psychoacoustic encoding and Huffman compression underlying the MP3 standard—all of it was originally developed by enthusiastic programmers, many of whom have formed successful business around such software, none of whom asked the government for a monopoly. So if software authors have a proven track-record of innovation without patents, why force them to use patents? What is the gain from billions of dollars in patent litigation?
Change is happening now. The 2008 ruling of the appeals court of the US Federal Circuit on the case in re Bilski narrowed the scope of what is patentable. Some experts even question if software patents are still valid at all in the US. ESP, under the direction of Ben Klemens, played a key role in this case. See our resources for lawyers page for details.
This site is an overview of how courts self-expanded their jurisdiction to include software despite the protests of practitioners such as Bill Gates or Adobe Microsystems, of the economic damage done, how the story is evolving today, and how your company can help to restore the software market to a world run by innovators, not judges.
