Meantime, truly productive companies are forced to spend time and money settling or defending. A number of document-imaging vendors, for instance, have chosen to pay Millennium more than $1 million rather than fight its patent claim, even though Millennium has never marketed a system based on its processing and capture methodology.
Software patents aren't protecting scraggly haired geniuses toiling away in attics. For the most part, they're protecting opportunistic litigants at the expense of incremental innovators. In this respect, software development is often compared to musical composition: If any of a symphony's many components were ever deemed patentable, no composer would be able to create a work without infringing on a past claim.
Similarly, software development must build on established principles rather than reinvent them. It's time for government to hear the music.
Rob Preston is editorial director of NETWORK COMPUTING. Write to him at [email protected].
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