Lukas Mathis brings into discussion the group closest to my heart, small businesses:
While large corporations can afford to get defensive patent portfolios, small corporations often can’t. It’s not that they couldn’t come up with ideas to patent. Most small companies could easily come up with dozens or hundreds of patentable ideas within days. But actually getting patents is expensive. Not just in terms of money (including paying lawyers), but also in terms of time. If employees are writing patents, they’re not improving the company’s products.
This is the main reason why we vigorously fight against software patents in EU. Mathis also brings up another reason: how patents are supposed to be a trade-off for their applicants:
[T]he inventor «pays» for the protection by giving society (and his competition) access to the invention.
This trade-off does not apply to many software patents. I only need to spend five minutes on Amazon’s site to figure out how one-click shopping works. There is nothing useful I can learn from reading the patent. Likewise, I only need to turn on an iPhone once to figure out how to unlock it. This means that Amazon or Apple don’t give up anything when they patent these ideas. There is no trade-off involved; the state grants these patents «for free», because nobody gains anything from the publication of these ideas. They are already public.
Patent laws were built to foster innovation. In the world of software, they mostly seem to inhibit it.
