Who loves software patents?
Clearly, our current software patent policy wouldn’t exist if it didn’t somehow benefit somebody. If software patents were regarded as a universal evil, they would already have been legislated out of existence. So who benefits from software patents? Some of the biggest winners, according to Besson and Hunt, could be large companies with waning R&D productivity. “By the mid 1990s, software patents became a relatively inexpensive way to expand patent portfolios. This may have increased the attractiveness of a strategy that emphasizes patent rights over a strategy based on R&D. Such a change in strategy would be particularly attractive to mature firms if their R&D labs are not as productive as they once were,” they hypothesize. Other clear winners are patent attorneys, for whom the State Street ruling was a clear windfall. Patent attorneys make money when people sue each other over patents, or even when people merely threaten to sue one another over patents. It’s also worth noting that th
