Patents in the post
Apologies I’ve been a bit quiet lately. I’ve been working right hard on patents.
Last time I asked about patents, the consensus (on this blog and elsewhere) was that I should stop fannying around and just do it. So I did.
I’ve filed two patents (I decided to split my original patent into two, because it had two fairly unrelated things). I’ve written my description, drawn my drawings, and filled in my forms. I haven’t done the abstracts or claims (the tricky legal bit) – I don’t have to do them for 12 months so I’ll wait and see whether I want to continue at that stage.
It’s not been a very positive experience.
For one thing, I wasn’t sure it was the right thing for me to spend my time on. As you’ll remember, I was trying to do it in advance of the Symbian Smartphone Show, so that I could talk more freely about what I was doing, instead of getting everyone to sign NDAs and/or worrying my ideas will be snaffled. The alternative would have been to work hard to get something worth demonstrating, which obviously I haven’t done because I’ve been busy with patents – it seems a shame.
Secondly – writing software patents is just plain hard, especially since I was doing it to a deadline. Since you can’t properly patent software, you are supposed to describe a device which does what you are suggesting. I think, relative to many software patents, mine are sound because they do solve a particular technical problem, and the method by which they do so is fairly technical in itself. But – nevertheless – I’ve had to try to identify the pattern used by other patents to get around these limitations on software patents. I doubt that I will have succeeded. Related to that is the difficulty of describing your invention in a sufficiently generic way, so that other people can’t just do the same thing a different way. Yet you have to describe your invention in enough detail that people will be able to replicate it. In short, I have limited confidence that the patent applications I’ve submitted will actually be granted. Obviously I’ll be employing a professional to draft the claims in a few months, if I do go ahead, but they’ll probably be having to work around the flaws in my description and drawings – which can’t be changed after today.
Thirdly, writing a patent involves doing at least a cursory search to find out what other patents are out there in a similar field. Entirely predictably, there are some that come quite close to what I’m up to. I knew there would be, just due to the massive volume of patents that exist. There’s one in particular which is rather close to one of mine – unfortunately I didn’t come across it until I had finished writing my patent. I hurriedly emphasised the parts of my patent which were different from the existing one… but that might not be good enough. But of course, we’re not just talking about whether I can get my patent granted… we’re talking about whether I can continue with my tools ideas without licensing the existing patent. The point of a patent is to stop anyone else doing the same thing.
Naturally, nearly all the patents in my field are filed by big corporations, and therefore could be used to squish little guys like me. Software patenting is just a game of Mutually Asssured Destruction by them – they try to get enough patents that, in the event of a dispute, they’re all infringing each other and have no choice but to put their guns down. That’s fine, so long as they only threaten each other – but of course, it means nobody except those big companies can really develop software of any kind, because they are guaranteed to be infringing on something. There’s no choice for small companies like mine except to infringe, knowingly or unknowingly, and just hope. The net effect is therefore for the patenting system to stifle innovation, instead of encouraging it. The whole system absolutely sucks. I really, really hate it with a passion.
The theory goes that the big companies won’t bother to sue you until/unless you make a profit big enough for them to notice, so by then it’s a good idea to have some patents of your own to defend yourself. We’ll see. Obviously I’m going to work hard not to infringe but it’ll be tricky given the deliberately vague nature of patent wording (of which mine are guilty too).
Which leads on to the fourth reason I haven’t enjoyed the past couple of weeks – I am now a total, 100% grade-A hypocrite. I hate the software patent system, and now I am part of it. (It turned out I was already part of it – I hadn’t realised I’d been named as an inventor on a patent Symbian had filed in the past). I am still hopeful I will decide not to take my patents forward, in which case I will put them in the public domain. But hey, who am I kidding. I’m only going to do that if they turn out to have no value to me.
So I am presently grumpy and stressed (not to mention evil). And I’ve got nothing really prepared for next week’s show. I haven’t even figured out how freely I will be able to talk, as there are other factors which may prevent me from fully explaining what I plan to do. I’ll be thinking about that over the next few days.