The NY Times asks why Bill Gates wants 3,000 new patents and finds a massive siege of the patent office with mountains of software patents, which are often just trivial patents (like the cited patent for adding/removing spaces in documents). The commentator makes a demand in the comment (after considering whether Microsoft should not simply have all the patents it already has revoked):
Perhaps that is going too far. Certainly, we should go through the lot and reinstate the occasional invention embodied in hardware. But patent protection for software? No. Not for Microsoft, nor for anyone else.
And this from the country that has had software patents for a long time and that is repeatedly cited by software patent proponents in the EU as a reason for a necessary worldwide harmonization.
No, software patents are also not popular there and not really useful. Dan Bricklin, known to some as the father of VisiCalc, also thinks so:
Mr. Bricklin, who has started several software companies and defensively acquired a few software patents along the way, says he, too, would cheer the abolition of software patents, which he sees as the bane of small software companies. "The number of patents you can run into with a small product is immense," he said. As for Microsoft's aggressive accumulation in recent years, he asked, "Isn't Microsoft the poster child of success without software patents?"
And why is Microsoft doing this now? The manager responsible gives a reason, as only a business administrator could come up with, it's that stupid:
"We realized we were underpatenting," Mr. Smith explained. The company had seen studies showing that other information technology companies filed about two patents for every $1 million spent on research and development. If Microsoft was spending $6 billion to $7.5 billion annually on its R&D, it would need to file at least 3,000 applications to keep up with the Joneses.
Ok, the idea of patent applications alone being oriented towards numbers from the industry is absurd, but how stupid do you have to be to draw a connection between the number of patents and revenue in the field of research and development?
The NY Times also draws a parallel to the pharmaceutical industry, which - at least according to its own statements - is happy to get a patent for a drug when it invests 20 million in research (which is already critical enough, as can be seen in the fight against AIDS in Africa).
And the fallout is also well summarized in the NY Times:
Last year at a public briefing, Kevin R. Johnson, Microsoft's group vice president for worldwide sales, spoke pointedly of "intellectual property risk" that corporate customers should take into account when comparing software vendors. On the one side, Microsoft has an overflowing war chest and bulging patent portfolio, ready to fight - or cross-license with - any plaintiff who accuses it of patent infringement. On the other are the open-source developers, without war chest, without patents of their own to use as bargaining chips and without the financial means to indemnify their customers.
The question of what Jefferson (the founder of the US patent system) would say about what is now being patented is quite justified. In his sense - which was actually more about protecting real inventive genius from exploitation by corporations - this is definitely not the case.