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Comment by ansy | Hacker News Reader

PG, was this pledge created in response to litigation you have experienced with YC companies?

There doesn't seem to be much evidence companies with fewer than 25 employees are getting sued unless there's something left unspoken here.

I think it would be more constructive to begin the discussion of what patent reform should resemble so that companies and individuals can show support for it. Some kind of software patent working group that can put forward a vision that everyone can get behind. If enough people and companies come to support a way of thinking then it will slowly affect current behavior and ultimately shape the legal framework of the future.

Even if it was a problem that companies smaller than 25 were being sued for patent infringement, I'm not sure the legal litmus test should be how many employees are at the company.

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IIRC none have actually been sued, but one has been sent a letter saying they're violating a competitor's patent. What made me start thinking about this idea was a combination of that letter, this story:

http://k9ventures.com/blog/2011/04/27/modista/

and the fear that YC applicants working on education software have of the notoriously litigious Blackboard.

Interesting, it looks like Blackboard has their own interpretation of a "patent pledge," but it only covers open-source and non-commercial software.

http://www.blackboard.com/About-Bb/Patents/Patent-Pledge.asp...

They did this because of the outrage from the Moodle community over some of these patents.

There was talk of a formal attempt to get some of them overturned but this pledge took a lot of the heat out of the outrage.

Here's a pledge, fuck software patents. I used blackboard in multiple schools and it was terrible, so screw anyone who tries to impede those who improve upon that system.

Given that PG cannot think of "anything that would have turned out for the worse without software patents", what-say-you we hold out for what is really needed, no software patents. That is, let's wait until this problem gets worse, get even more outraged, and effect our own change by getting businesses for whom we work to stop engaging in these vaine battles

At UIUC some of my friends did a startup related to memory architectures. IBM pretty quickly shut them down with threats of patent suits. So I know it happens, not sure how common it is though.

>I think it would be more constructive to begin the discussion of what patent reform should resemble so that companies and individuals can show support for it.

Here's a (possibly already proposed) idea: Why not have much shorter terms for software patents? With software advancing at an ever increasing rate we could reward developers who hold patents by granting them exclusive rights for a year--an eternity in today's world.

Perhaps this timeframe would make patents difficult to enforce (which has its pros and cons) and it doesn't fix the problem of frivolous patents, but a year-long term would (in principle) protect your "invention" long enough for you to get a head start on the market.

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