Okay, it's gone past bad into just silly

An article in the International Herald Tribune for June 14 about Tim Berners-Lee receiving the Millennium Technology Prize for his creation of the World Wide Web included this tidbit:

In April, Microsoft was awarded a U.S. patent for the use of short, long or double-clicks on the same button of a hand-held computer to launch applications, according to a report earlier this month on eWeek.com.

A patent on button clicks? Are we serious here? Does this mean that any software designer that wants to have a program on a hand-held open by double-clicking on a button has to pay Gates and company a fee?

I think the slippery slope began several years ago when Lotus Development Corp. (Full disclosure: No connection whatsoever.), purveyor of Lotus 1-2-3, successfully sued a much smaller (and much cheaper) rival for patent infringement. The claim was based on the fact that the programs appeared much the same to consumers: menus were in the same order, and so on. (This in fact was used as a selling point for the cheaper version.) Even though the underlying codes were completely different and even though no reasonable person could be thought of as buying a $100 program advertised as the inexpensive alternative to 1-2-3 in the belief that they were actually buying the $500 original, still LDC prevailed on the grounds that the similarity of "look and feel" violated their patent. (I can't say those were the actual prices, but I do recall that the cheaper version cost something around 20% of 1-2-3.)

This struck me at the time as much like, say, Ford taking out a patent on the arrangement of foot pedals, the positioning and shape of the steering wheel, and so on, and then insisting that no other auto manufacturer could lawfully duplicate the "look and feel" of their cars. That is, transparently idiotic.

But it was now precedent and for a time such suits were popular. And they opened the gates to almost everything about computers and software being the target of patents and patent suits - to the point where we are now patenting button clicks.

It's not just computers, either. People are patenting basic mathematical algorithms that have been in use for decades. They're patenting plants found in the wild. DNA sequences. Phrases. It has gotten wildly out of hand to the point where people doing basic science who are opposed to the whole trend are still patenting every detail of their research in other to defend against the possibility of someone else doing it and thus denying them access to their own work. It needs to be stopped.

It's a few years old now, but Owning the Future by Seth Shulman still deserves a read.