Halfway through The Little Prince, the pint-sized planet hopper meets a businessman who is so busy counting the stars that he cannot spare a moment to talk. His count is at 501,622,731, and accuracy is important because he owns them all—every last star in the sky. The businessman has no real use for them, of course; he just writes down their numbers on a piece of paper. When the prince asks how anyone can possibly own the stars, the businessman responds, "They belong to me because I was the first person to think of it."
One can only assume that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's businessman makes money by getting his lawyers to sue anyone who tries to put the stars to some useful purpose. This would make him the prototypical patent pirate, or patent troll, as they are sometimes called. These are "technology companies" that produce nothing but lawsuits. Typically, they buy up as many patents as they can, often from defunct or bankrupt companies, and then seek out successful companies to sue for infringement.
Take Apple: In the past year alone, it has been sued over iTunes, the iPod and its Time Machine back-up system. Most recently, it's been slapped with lawsuits over the iPhone's touchscreen keyboard and visual voice-mail systems—plus the whole concept of the iPhone itself. Patent pirates are a problem for any company looking to innovate today, but the situation is particularly acute when it comes to software. A flood of patents granted to overly broad, trivial and vague software "innovations" has created a situation where literally any company involved with technology can be dragged into court on an infringement claim. Companies such as Kellogg's, Sears and Encyclopedia Britannica have been sued for merely displaying images on their websites. For real innovators like Apple and Google, it's even more absurd—every move they make seems to result in a lawsuit.
It's clear that the entire patent system in the U.S. needs to be overhauled—and that the very notion of software patents should be abolished. According to End Software Patents (ESP), a patent reform advocacy group, if all your company does is operate a website, you could be infringing on more than 4,300 patents. If you sell a product or service through your website, that number jumps to over 11,000. Keep in mind that it doesn't matter if you've invented every process on your website from scratch; nor does it matter if the patent holder has never made any attempt to implement the idea outlined by their patent—independent invention or ignorance of existing patents is no defence in an infringement claim. Add it all up, and ESP says that the cost of defending against software-related infringement claims has risen to more than $11 billion (U.S.) a year.
Patents were meant to spur innovation by rewarding inventors for taking the risks and absorbing the costs involved in the invention process. But there's little evidence that greater patent protection has led to increases in innovation. In 1999, Harvard finance professor Josh Lerner looked at patent practices in 60 countries over a period of 150 years. His conclusion? There's no correlation between strong patent laws and increased innovation.
