Don Marti, a writer for LinuxWorld, describes “the other side” of the software patent debate:
To the “think tank” types [on the Technology Liberation Front], lawyers are basically free and software innovation is hard to get. Most of the think tanks are in Washington, DC, where you can’t swing a cat without hitting a bunch of lawyers. To a think tank staffer, it’s just as obvious that you’d get a lawyer to patent your software idea as that you’d back up your files. Lawyers are background noise, and software innovation is something that you see on the cover of Wired and wonder “how did they do that?” (If there’s a breeze on Technology Liberation Front, it’s all the pro-software-patent posters hand-waving the transaction costs.)
To the people opposed to software patents, lawyers are expensive, and software innovation is abundant. As a working programmer with a white board, software innovation comes to you faster than you could actually get the software working, so software innovation might as well be free. The limiting factor in producing software value is debugging, testing and integration time, not patentable ideas.
In the real world, transaction costs around software patents—mainly the price of lawyers—matter way more than the think tankers are able to see, what with taking swarms of lawyers for granted. And software innovation, to most people, isn’t just a nusiance that leaves you with a stack of notes and half-baked programs, it’s actually rare.
Is this a fair criticism? One of the things I like about TLF is that we have a non-trivial number of both lawyers and geeks in our audience, so there’s some opportunity for these “two cultures” to become better acquainted with one another’s perspectives.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.