http://www.aaa-fund.com/?p=7118

Gautam Dutta, Esq.
Executive Director
Asian American Action Fund

One group that was adversely affected by this law was a group gathering petitions for a referendum on access to electronic communications of public officials. This group is trying to repeal a recent law that limited access to electronic communications. Their issues may also end up in court so stay tuned!

All ideas, software or not, have the problem of determining if it’s been done before and patented. The level of “true inventiveness” has often been quite low historically, allowing patents on all sorts of common thoughts — though many would claim they are only “common” now because they invented it and it became successful.

But the number of patents being filed has grown exponentially, meaning that more and more ideas are being locked up to benefit the few. Patents certainly play a bigger part for big corporations than they do for small guys, even though the small guy needs a patent to protect himself from the big guy who will just steal it.

However, patents don’t protect anything. They just give you the right to attempt to police it yourself. You first have to find someone you think may be violating your patent. Then you have to press charges in a legal system that will surely cost you $10,000 to $50,000 just to get it going to the point where you’ll have to decide if it should go to court or not, and once it goes to court, you can add one or two zeros to that sum.

So if you are small, trying to outspend a big company is a huge gamble. The big guys often will throw their portfolio of patents back at you.

There may have been a time when patents were useful, but with capitalism and education in such force today around the world, I don’t think they are as useful as they used to be. They tend to lock up ideas that then slow future invention, and they put fear in many who have to wonder if whatever they are doing will just be taken away from them (someone else patented your hard work, even though you had no knowledge of that patent, or perhaps even recognize your creation as being in violation of that patent).

It becomes all legalese and nuance of the “claims” of the patent rather than what the patent actually describes. Even if your invention is dramatically different from what the patent describes, if they can twist their claims, which are written as broadly as possible because it’s really easy to tweak just about anything and be different, to show they cover what you did, you are in violation.

I’d bet that very few patents actually make money through licensing, and those that do tend to be owned by big companies, not small inventors.

I agree with you that copyright applies to software (it’s written, like a novel, not built like a machine), and of course trade secrets when desired.

Somehow they missed the fact that electronic records via computers has been the major force in reducing costs and improving efficiency at just about every business in the world over the past 50 years.

If we just had one more regulation….

Our experience is that only about one quarter of our customers stay electronic for the vast majority of their electronic contracts. Some people just can’t help but print and file, and we’ve heard about situations in which an electronically signed document is printed multiple times (such as once by each party involved) just to show things can actually get worse in this respect. Some then even fax those, so it can escalate.

Time will resolve this bad printing habit that generally shows the advanced mental age of the parties involved, but for now, claims about “green” for electronic contracting are sorely misplaced in practice.

We manage to avoid printing any electronic contracts, but we’re in the roughly 25% minority.

Apostile