> I agree that wholesale copying is an issue. However patents are almost never going to be the appropriate response to that for software companies. With software you can always go for copyright violation and/or misappropriation of trade secrets
Only if software is the product you're selling. I worked at two companies that had patents on software algorithms, but our software was just a reference implementation. Explain to me how a company like ARM would operate relying on just copyright and trade secrets. I think ARM represents a great and valuable business model, and patents enable that business model.
> Instead software patents seem to be mostly used to sue people who independently invented the same thing.
I don't think you can point to any statistic to back this up.
>> Instead software patents seem to be mostly used to sue people who independently invented the same thing.
>I don't think you can point to any statistic to back this up.
I think that was already clear from the word 'seem'. To me, the same thing seems to be true, actually. That /might/ be caused by the number of software-patent cases I see that fall into this category, or are about trivial inventions, while I simply don't see the cases that do have some merit.
On the other hand, I've never yet seen a software patent related case where I could actually relate to the suing party.
Only if software is the product you're selling. I worked at two companies that had patents on software algorithms, but our software was just a reference implementation. Explain to me how a company like ARM would operate relying on just copyright and trade secrets. I think ARM represents a great and valuable business model, and patents enable that business model.
> Instead software patents seem to be mostly used to sue people who independently invented the same thing.
I don't think you can point to any statistic to back this up.