Angel Devil : Patent Problem of Chewing

Angels and devils always go hand in hand. It's perfect for the most concerned Apple in 2011. Whether it is appearance or performance, Apple has brought great enjoyment to users. But for other companies of smart phones, Apple is not an angel. Some of the facts are cruel. For example, in 2011, Apple filed a lawsuit against Samsung that caused Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to be banned from listing in Germany. The patent warfare of other smartphone companies is also in full swing. HTC sued Apple for three issues related to Wi-Fi technology and product features; Oracle filed lawsuits against Google for the Android system; Microsoft sued Motorola. Nowadays, patent warfare has become a kind of business activity frequently used by developed countries in Europe and America.

In terms of software-related intellectual property protection, we must pay special attention to software patent issues, because software patents are entirely likely to lead to monopoly, and this monopoly will kill China's rising software industry.

Some countries are very eager for software patents, people of insight have many criticisms. Some people think that patents will harm small software companies. In fact, a small software product may involve many patents; 20-year protection of software patents does not help software innovation. Some people think that software patents are too easy to obtain if they are compared with drug patents (usually a drug patent often takes several hundred million dollars and wait for 10 years to get); nowadays, software patents are only a small part of the standard.

Who benefits from software patents can be inspired by Microsoft's change in attitude toward software patents. In the past, Microsoft was not interested in patents. At that time, it was still in the development stage and did not want to be bound by software patents. For example, as far back as the 1970s, WordStar and VisiCalc from other companies were on the market. If the word processing software and spreadsheet software of these companies were all patented, then afterwards, In 20 years, Microsoft could not do it. If so, there will be no Microsoft today. But later, when Microsoft gained monopoly status in many software areas, it changed its position. According to its annual R&D expenditures, Microsoft has set a target of 3,000 patent applications each year based on the relationship between the number of general patent applications and R&D expenditures. In this way, Microsoft quickly has a large number of software patents. From this change of attitude of Microsoft, it can be clearly seen that software patents are beneficial to software giants that occupy a monopoly position and are not conducive to small and medium-sized software companies, which is not conducive to innovation in the software industry.

Of course, one of the reasons for this change in Microsoft's attitude is an attempt to use a patent to kill its rival, open source software represented by Linux. For example, Microsoft had threatened that Linux infringed on Microsoft's 235 patents in an attempt to stifle Linux or deter users from using Linux. Since software patents are obviously not conducive to the survival and development of open source software, supporters of open source software in the world basically do not advocate the implementation of software patent protection.

The development of the Internet has challenged the traditional software intellectual property protection system. At present, the standards of the Internet are open. There are basically no patent fees for Internet standards; the software for supporting the Internet is mostly open source software, and there are more and more trends; the development of the Internet has made software-as-a-service (SaaS) become The trend of major business models in the software industry. Recently, the rapid development of cloud computing, most cloud computing service providers are based on open source software platform, an important reason is to rely on open source software, can respond to the rapid changes in the market, will not be constrained by other software providers, and facilitate the strengthening of information security and cut costs. In open source software, in addition to adopting the AGPL license, the use of other licenses such as for Web services does not require open source code, which makes service providers willing to use open source software, so the rise of cloud computing also promotes open source Software development. All these situations have a great impact on the software's traditional intellectual property protection system, including software patent protection.

On an international scale, the European Union, as a victim of software monopoly, does not want to accept the US software patent system as a whole. Around the software patents, support and opposition have been fiercely fighting. This situation is beneficial to China's boycott of software patent protection.

The current patent law in China does not accept pure software patents, that is, rules and methods for intellectual activities cannot be patented. As a developing country, China is conducive to freeing itself from the constraints of monopoly and is conducive to the independent innovation of the software industry. Obviously, it cannot copy the US software patent system, but should implement a software intellectual property system that conforms to China's national conditions. At this stage, China, like most of the countries in the world, is mainly implementing software copyright protection.