Timothy Lee argues in this OP-ED piece in the New York Times that patent applications for software have gone too far. The thrust of the argument appears to me to be that patents are now being sought by software firms merely to use in strategic ways to extract rents from users and restrict competing firms from innovations.
It is not too difficult to see why corporations resort to patent applications for software when similar legal protections would inhere from copyright protection which is automatically available. This is pure strategic behavior calculated to raise the costs of any challenge to that patent. As this blogger has maintained, the proper welfare effects of stringent IP protection is increasingly becoming questionable because patent protection has gone too far generally and especially in regard to software. That this stringent protection is absolutely necessary for further innovations is a patent lie. Bill Gates used to know this.
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