Hi, a relative of mine (Per Edstroem) runs a software company (Abalon)
in Sweden. I had asked him what he thought about patents and
copyrights and the such and I thought that his response might be of
interest to the class. He offered to ask his IP lawyer to send me
some mail with more of the legal details, I intend to take him up on
that. So here is what he had to say :
Joe Corkery
Hi,
- No, my experience tells me that patenting software is not
practical. The issue from a professional point of view is that the
software is only part of the solution that we deliver to an
end-customer. There are numerous examples to prove that it is not
enough to have the best "code". Things like documentation, support,
marketing, training etc. make a big difference in how much benefit a
customer would get. It is also just as hard to deliver these services
and support products as it is to develop and invent software.
Patenting software could make it hard to take good ideas to market and
this would in the end be damaging for the end-customer. Software is
today rapidly becoming a mature industry and the days when a
programmer could write an innovative program and get rich quick is
gone. Software development is more and more becoming a production
process, where innovation has to be built in.
Copyright is more appropriate since we do not want a competitor to be
able to easily and legally copy what we have invested a lot of money
into producing.
An interesting fact is that with our complex solutions targeting
entire companies we (Abalon) feel that there is no need for copy
protection of the actual code. With todays rapid development tools it
is quite possible to copy the functionality in less time than it would
to understand our source code enough to be able to support our
demanding customers. A competitor would have a much harder time
copying our process of delivering our solution (code, services...) to
provide the same level of business benefit for a customer.
- I am not an expert in the details of the legal differences between
US and Sweden (I pay lawyers a lot of money to do this for me), but in
general it is the same. We have some stronger protection here but in
practical business life it is the same. We have never had any problems
exporting or importing because of this.
There are bigger diffrences in warranties and contracts in general. I
know that Swedish law does not recognize a warranty based on "brake
the seal" practice. This because a consumer (business or private) must
be able to study the legal documents in whole when buying a
product. This is generally not possible with shrink-wrapped
software. US vendors have had some trouble with this since the
purchase will then fall under general consumer laws which are very
strong in Europe.
If you would like more info I could ask my Intellectual Property lawyer
to comment your questions, he is one of the best in his field world-wide.
I hope this helps.
Per
jdierkes@cs