End Software Patents

• "There is no authority that we know of which permits software per se to be considered statutory [patentable subject matter]." —-Patent Office board of administrative judges, October 2007 (source PDF)

• Portion of patents granted every year by the Patent Office that are software patents: 15% (Bessen and Hunt, 2004)

• Websites that may be violating a software patent as of January 2007: 155,583,825 (Netcraft)

• "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." —Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft (cited in this New York Times op-ed.)

• Estimated annual cost in legal fees incurred by software patents: $11.2 billion. (2008 State of softpatents)

• Estimated economic benefit from software patents, as calculated by several pro-software patent economists: $0. (See the list of null results on the resources for economists page.)

HELP: In the USA, please help ESP respond to the USPTO's request for comments (deadline 27 Sep 2010)

We have years more work ahead of us.
Donating to ESP will keep this work going.

For more about Bilski, on the wiki you can read:

• Bilski: analysis of Supreme Court decision
• Patentability in the USA after Bilski
• Bilski v. Kappos (2010, USA)

Contact: Ciarán O'Riordan (+32 487 64 17 54), Executive Director, End Software Patents.

Get involved!

• Help build the en.swpat.org wiki - we're documenting the entire case against software patents.
• Join our ESP mailing list.
• Donate to ESP - we keep our costs low, so financial support goes a long way.

News

Comment at news.swpat.org. From the RSS feed:

• USPTO interim guidelines request for comment - as text
• USPTO’s 101 Method Eligibility Quick Reference Sheet - as text
• Australian petition needs signatures against swpats
• Bilski's patent application – the published parts
• Bilski decision, as text
• Bilski's out!
• Late-comers guide: What is Bilski anyway?
• No Bilski; last possible date: Monday 28th
• New Zealand software patent victory crumbling
• Still no Bilski; next dates: 24th, 28th
• German court ruling X ZR 27/07, upholding MS FAT patent, as text
• Again, no Bilski. Only June 21 and 28 remain
• Yet again, no Bilski
• Patent Absurdity mailed to 200 policy setters
• CSIRO wifi: a hardware or a software patent?
• Again, no Bilski
• Which policy setters should see Patent Absurdity?
• German court ruling, upholding Siemens patent, as text
• Still no Bilski
• EPO rules own software patents review inadmissible
• EPO publishes internal review of software patenting
• MPEG-LA's patents exhausted by camera sale?
• Who’ll write the Bilski opinion?
• ACTA official text, re: software patents
• Patent Absurdity – or Bilski, the movie
• Australia: legislation still coming
• When to expect Bilski
• Which ways could Bilski go?
• New Zealand govt against software patents!
• Full ACTA draft leaked – text version
• Transcript: Andrew Tridgell on Patent Defence
• Interview: Brad Feld
• EU, USA, Japan pushing for patents in ACTA!
• Israel: last three days of software patent consultation
• German January 2010 ruling, as text
• Letter to Israeli Patent Office, from Hamakor
• Page orientation patents, the USPTO, and you
• Australia: time for action
• ESP launching public mailing lists
• Israel: one month to end software patents
• Summarising the problem
• Analogy: road blocks and toll booths
• Consultation responses in Australia
• Australia: change coming, opportunities already missed
• Bilski: the next steps
• Education and software patents
• Three rulings based on Bilski
• Israel in danger of software patents
• Bilski's hearing and software patents

Why this matters

Every company is in the software business, which means that every company has software liability. We estimate costs of $11.2 billion a year due to software patent suits (see our 2008 State of Softpatents report), and not just by Microsoft and IBM—The Green Bay Packers, Kraft Foods, and Ford Motor are facing software patent infringement lawsuits for their use of the standard software necessary for running a modern business.

Software innovation happens without government intervention. Virtually all of the technologies you use now were developed before software was widely viewed as patentable. The Web, email, your word processor and spreadsheet program, instant messaging, or even more technical features like the psychoacoustic encoding and Huffman compression underlying the MP3 standard—all of it was originally developed by enthusiastic programmers, many of whom have formed successful business around such software, none of whom asked the government for a monopoly. So if software authors have a proven track-record of innovation without patents, why force them to use patents? What is the gain from billions of dollars in patent litigation?

Change is happening now. The 2008 ruling of the appeals court of the US Federal Circuit on the case in re Bilski narrowed the scope of what is patentable. Some experts even question if software patents are still valid at all in the US. ESP, under the direction of Ben Klemens, played a key role in this case. See our resources for lawyers page for details.

This site is an overview of how courts self-expanded their jurisdiction to include software despite the protests of practitioners such as Bill Gates or Adobe Microsystems, of the economic damage done, how the story is evolving today, and how your company can help to restore the software market to a world run by innovators, not judges.