A Declaration
WE INTEND to eliminate patents for software and other designs with no physically innovative step.
We believe that patents may be beneficial to certain segments of the economy—-but not everything should be patentable. People put great effort into writing stories, recording music, exploring mathematics, and writing software, but patents impede, and do not promote progress in these fields.
We believe that a claimed invention consisting of software plus a trivial physical step cannot be claimed as a bona fide physical innovation. The Supreme Court has ruled three times in support of this position.
Existing software patents have shown no benefit, but continue to haunt the system. We believe that they too must be addressed, and no one should be held liable for infringing such patents.
We believe in the ingenuity of the hundreds of millions of individuals who have a computer in their homes, businesses and classrooms, who are constantly building and inventing—-and running risk of infringing patents.
We believe that eliminating such patents will have benefit not just for computer users: patent quality for non-software inventions will improve, frivolous lawsuits will diminish, and the resource crisis at the US Patent and Trademark Office will be resolved.
This is not about the copying of specific works, and this campaign is not about the rules of copying specific works. Rather, we simply wish that our own works and efforts will not be claimed by a third party.
For all of these reasons, we believe that software patents have been detrimental to both computer users and to the economy at large. Therefore, we intend to eliminate patents for software and other designs with no physically innovative step.