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Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth Predicts That Countries Who Limit Patents Will Have More Innovation

from the but-of-course dept

The BBC has an interesting article about Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu, and some of the innovations Canonical is working on. There’s some good stuff in there, but what caught my attention was the bit at the end about patents:

“We know that we are sort of dancing naked through a minefield and there are much bigger institutions driving tanks through,” Mr Shuttleworth says.

“It’s basically impossible to ship any kind of working software without potentially trampling on some patent somewhere in the world, and it’s completely impossible to do anything to prevent that.

“The patents system is being used to slow down a lot of healthy competition and that’s a real problem. I think that the countries that have essentially figured that out and put hard limits on what you can patent will in fact do better.”

Of course, this is the exact opposite of what the patent system is supposed to do — but pretty much everyone who’s actually innovating these days seems to recognize the same thing. What amazes me is that we haven’t seen more of what Mark hints at towards the very end: countries providing explicit safe havens around patents. We have examples of this in the past — perhaps most famously, the Netherlands and Switzerland in the latter half of the 19th century. The Netherlands dumped patents entirely, while the Swiss limited what was patentable massively (to the point that very little was considered patentable at all). And both countries saw economic growth as a result — where industry and innovation flocked to both countries because they weren’t being held back by patent disputes.

It does seem that perhaps some folks in the Netherlands remember this. There’s an ongoing effort called the Appsterdam Foundation (in Amsterdam, of course), where part of the goal is to help protect app makers from crazy patent lawsuits. But I’m waiting for even more recognition from countries that this is a real growth opportunity. Assuming that countries have the nerves to withstand having the US taunt them each year with placement on the Special 301 list, there’s a real opportunity for a developed nation to have innovation show up in droves by massively limiting patents.

Filed Under: appsterdam, mark shuttleworth, netherlands, special 301 list, switzerland
Companies: canonical, ubuntu

Ubuntu's Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life: 'Whole Patent System Is A Sham'

from the and-he-should-know dept

Mark Shuttleworth is probably best known for three things. Selling the certificate authority Thawte Consulting to VeriSign for about $575 million in 1999; using some of that money to become the second self-funded space tourist; and using some more of it to found and sustain the Ubuntu version of GNU/Linux.

Given that history, perhaps it’s only fair that his title in the Ubuntu community is “Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life“. It was using the equivalent acronym “sabdfl” that Shuttleworth took part recently in a Google+ chat organized by Muktware, where he had some scathing things to say about Microsoft’s use of patents:

the biggest mistake Microsoft made was to decide that patents would be an effective defence against new competitors because that stops you from really innovating yourself

And about the patent system in general:

The whole patent system is a sham, unfortunately. Patents were invented to encourage inventors to publish their trade secrets, because society would benefit from the disclosure. But we now allow patents on things you could never keep secret in the first place, like software and business methods and medicines. That’s insanity. Innovation happens because people solve problems, not because they might get a monopoly on it.

Shuttleworth’s successful record in business means that his words ought to carry more weight with supporters of patent monopolies than they might if he were just a free software project leader. After all, in a world where money talks, half a billion dollars just dismissed the patent system as a “sham.”

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Filed Under: mark shuttleworth, patents, sham
Companies: ubuntu