ABSTRACT
The work and personal lives of technical communicators are often conducted through the medium of software, and so the intellectual property (IP) laws that concern software’s composition and international distribution affect the way we write and live. Copyright is the IP regime most often discussed in the field, but patent law has a potentially greater effect on composition in, of, and with software because the monopoly rights granted through patents can be more powerful than the distribution rights afforded by copyright. Patent protection for software has become more readily available through recent court decisions, international treaties, and changes to guidelines for patent examiners in the United States, European Union, and Japan. Software patents, when coupled with our accelerating reliance on both desktop and web-based software, are impacting our lives as writers and teachers. Several cases illustrate the way that increased patent protection for software has threatened our unfettered access to digital writing and teaching environments. In the high-profile patent case over online content management systems (CMS), Blackboard v. Desire2Learn (2009), Blackboard was poised to have monopolistic rights over basic interface features of CMSs before the settlement for the suit created oligarchic rights instead. In another sphere of digital compositionmobile phones-nearly every hardware and software producer is suing every other one (Bilton, 2010). This legal thicket precariously positions what is now both a primary composition space for young people (Lenhart, Arafah, Smith, & Rankin Macgill, 2008) and an increasingly important one for higher education (Johnson, Levine, & Smith, 2009). Most dramatically, the very existence of the
World Wide Web was threatened by a suit from British Telecom, which claimed the company owned all rights to the hyperlink (Jaffe & Lerner, 2004). Global debates on software patent law are fierce and commensurate with their significant implications for software’s composition and distribution. However, the fact that international implementations of software patent law can be complex and arcane may be why it is so seldom addressed in the literature on technical communication or in writing studies more generally. Here, I hope to translate some of the current and global issues in software patents into contexts relevant to writing specialists in order to help us have a better understanding of the ways patent law, especially for software, affects our lives. I begin by outlining some specific reasons patent law pertains to writing specialists, including a more detailed explanation of several patent law cases and an exploration of the blurring boundaries between written text and computer code. I then give an overview of patent law: its relationship to copyright, the ostensible objective of patent protection for intellectual property, what is generally required to obtain a patent, and variations in international patent law regarding software. Finally, I review some of the controversies surrounding patent protection for software, namely, its de facto favoring of corporations over independent software developers. Software patents can affect our teaching and composition processes, but they also give us a way of reflecting on our profession as writers and understanding the increasing proximity of our work to the work of computer programming.
