The Costs and Benefits of Patents to Innovators
by T. Colin Dodd
Interesting. They don’t address software patents exclusively, but it illuminates the growing gap between the intent and purpose of patent law and the reality of it.
Patent Law Blog (Patently-O): The Costs and Benefits of Patents to Innovators
We conclude with three important notes. First, patents do provide profits for their owners, so it makes sense for firms to get them. But taking the effect of other firms’ patents into account, including the risk of litigation, the average public firm outside the chemical and pharmaceutical industries would be better off if patents did not exist. Second, our best evidence relates to the eighties and nineties, but the evidence we have for this decade suggests that the patent tax has grown with the continued growth of patent lawsuits. We find no offsetting evidence that patents have become substantially more valuable in this century. Third, we find that small publicly traded firms get small positive R&D incentives from patents. This is also very likely to be true for small, non-publicly traded firms and non-profit inventors.
