Software patents

Over at Cato, a good piece about software patents:

Last month, Vonage, a company that pioneered Internet telephony, was ordered to pay $58 million to Verizon and enjoined from signing up new customers. Vonage is appearing in court today to appeal the decision. Given that Vonage has yet to turn a profit, if the injunction is upheld it’s likely to be a death sentence for the company.

The really frustrating thing about both cases—and numerous other software patent cases in recent years—is that there was no allegation that the defendants’ products were in any way based on the plaintiffs’ technologies. It’s universally agreed that RIM and Vonage developed their technologies independently. Rather, the problem is that the patents in question cover extremely broad concepts...
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... software is built out of a very large number of modular components. (A typical software product might have 100,000 lines of code, and just a handful of lines of code could conceivably be considered an “invention”) If you allow a significant number of those components to be patented, it becomes prohibitively expensive for software companies to even find, much less license, all of the patents that might be relevant to their particular software.