How can software patents possibly make sense in a complex networked business environment?
As many services that are user content driven today start to serve user written code, patent rights get more complicated. I find it hard to see how patent law can work or be enforced in this environment where copyright and contracts are well established.
We have prototyping languages that can change and adapt software in runtime over networks of data and code. Functions get updated and combined with other in realtime. This is not only true for web 2.0 application, its true for the majority (95%) of investments that is for own account or custom made software. (Koji Nomura 2004/OECD)
"We are the machine" becomes more and more real for the Internet. And it makes it more or less impossible to understand if we make patent infringements. Its hard to know if you can draw borders to any specific aparatus and if responsibility can be established. And who's responsibility is this situation, is it The Patent office, politicians or just the nature of development? We do know that publicly available software doubles every 13 month!
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