The other day I read this in Dark Shikari’s blog (one of the developers of x264):
Most importantly, stop harassing the guy whose name is on the patent (Lars): he’s just a programmer, not the management or lawyers responsible for filing the patent. This is stupid and unnecessary. I’ve removed the original post because of this; it can be found here for those who want to read it.
I don’t know much about this particular case, I don’t know whether Lars came up on his own with the algorithm that is being patented or not, and I’m not really qualified to discuss that.
But that’s not what I want to write about. What really struck me from this post is the idea that programmers are not to blame for filing software patents. I think that’s just wrong.
Lawyers alone cannot create patents, you also need inventors, and being just a programmer does not absolve you of your acts. Let me rephrase that: There would be no patents without inventors willing to file them.
Obviously, corporations provide incentives for employees to file patents, but in most cases it’s not the actual incentives what motivates people to patent their inventions. It’s the benefit of being a good corporate employee, not being considered a trouble maker, not loosing opportunities for promotion, not bringing negative attention to yourself, not going against the tide.
I firmly believe that patents discourage progress and impede the growth of public domain of knowledge. Today patents do not protect the inventor’s interests, but instead promote anti-competitive practices by corporations. Moreover, most software patents are vague, bogus, or trivial, they do not serve any social purpose other than expanding the patent portfolio of your corporate masters.
You may not agree with all that, but if you do, then don’t excuse yourself blaming the system.
During the 5 years that I worked at NVIDIA I constantly came up with algorithms and software ideas that could be patented. I implemented many of them, others I simply outlined.
So, I started a wiki page in which I documented these ideas. The goal was to prevent others from patenting them. I called them anti-patents. I usually came up with a new one every month, sometimes several.
This might seem exaggerated, but when you are designing new hardware features that no one has explored, it’s very easy to come up with new things to do with it that nobody has done before. I think this is true for almost any field when you are working on the bleeding edge.
Eventually I stopped maintaing the wiki, it was too much work to describe them in detail, and in many cases I considered them trivial. In spite of that I believe that most of them would have been pursued by NVIDIA if I had chosen to allow it.
Over time I ascended in the corporate hierarchy until I became part of a selected group in charge of the design of future GPUs.
I was working with people much more experienced and smarter than me. I didn’t want to get noticed for causing trouble, but for doing a good work. So, predictably my name ended up in several patent applications.
Today, I deeply regret that.
