Stephen Walli wrote, “Disclaimer: Microsoft is a client. But I swear I’m reconsidering that decision. It’s unclear to me that the mortgage payment is worth this much aggravation.”
Stefan Tilkov wrote, “If your name is on a software patent, you should feel ashamed.”
Paul Simon wrote, “Who’s gonna love you when your looks are gone? / God will / Like he waters the flowers on your windowsill.”
My name is on a software patent. It happened during my brief tenure at IBM. The patent is not yet issued (as I understand it, issuance may take years) and does not show up in USPTO or Google Patent Search. But it will, someday.
The patent describes this method of embedding accessibility metadata in HTML documents. Please don’t flood my comments with calls of “prior art.” Yes, I know (and knew) all about microformats. This is not a microformat anyway, for reasons that would be interesting to very few people. Regardless, the patent is very narrow; there was no prior art. No one had done this exact thing, in this exact way, for this exact purpose, before we did. The patent was original, it was innovative, and it was still shameful.
I delayed writing the patent as long as possible. Weeks passed. My manager bugged me. We argued internally about whether we should patent it at all. Powerful people in our department — people who had personally written dozens of patents — argued against patenting the technique. They wanted the technique to be widely adopted by assistive technology vendors, web authoring tool vendors, and web publishers across the board, and they felt that patenting it would slow down that adoption. (They were right.) My manager insisted. He assured me (and them) that IBM would only use the patent for defensive purposes. He assured me that IBM would grant a royalty-free license for anyone to implement the patented technique, even in open source (like this one for APP). I didn’t believe him. Things like that have a way of falling off the Gantt chart.
You can ask why I would want to work for a company like that, if I feel so strongly. What can I say? I didn’t know how strongly they felt or how strongly I felt, until I was in the thick of it. Even then, I didn’t think it would affect me. Then I tried to resist it from the inside. Then I tried to delay it. I considered quitting. I actively looked for other employment. I made sure I was extra busy with all my other assignments. Weeks turned to months. My job leads petered out. Finally, I reached the now-or-never moment with my manager. I considered quitting anyway. I considered my mortgage payment. I took stock of my personal finances. My mortgage payment won out. I sat down and did what they paid me to do. It’s hard to live up to your principles. If it were easy, your principles probably aren’t worth a damn anyway.
After it was filed, I got a $1500 bonus in my next paycheck. I saw the money and cried. I swore I would donate the money to the EFF Patent Busting Project, but it too got swallowed up by food and medical expenses and daycare and an unexpected tax payment and yes, mortgage payments. At our next quarterly all-hands meeting, my boss’s boss’s boss called me out specifically for a job well done on my first patent. I put the phone on mute and cried some more.
Later we really did release it royalty-free. The patent. Or so I’m told. I never saw it in writing. Either way, it cost us time and money, bought us nothing but aggravation, and delayed adoption of an important piece of the crazy puzzle that is modern web accessibility. IBM shits patents like God waters flowers. It’s what they do. No, I take it back. To say “it’s what they do” implies a level of choice that I don’t think is present. Even our most seasoned patent writers argued against it, and we did it anyway. And for what?
Later I really did quit, but only after I secured another job, and not because of patents. I’m told that once the patent is issued, I’ll get another $500, even though I don’t work for IBM anymore. Issuance takes anywhere from 2 to 7 years. By then, IBM will have filed tens of thousands more. It’s an institutionalized form of madness — outrageous, all-consuming, and incurable. I’m ashamed to have been a part of it.
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