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There are a few sides to the story, you are viewing this as a software developer, as you mentioned. You need to put on a different hat, and then decide it patents are valuable, where, and why. As much as there are horribly abused software patents, I assume the same of other patents types as well. A patent is intended to protect an invention. In most cases, that means the intention is for the benefit of a business, even though the patent itself is awarded to individuals. If you ask me as a software engineer, how I feel about patents, I'll say I don't like them. I don't like having to be concerned that the way I implement a certain feature could be limited because somebody else came to the same or similar solution as I did. As a business owner, ask me how I feel about patents, and now the line gets a bit blurrier. I don't like that somebody can sue me for a product I created and am selling, but I do like that I can protect something I created from being nocked off and copied. We're currently building a sleep-tech hardware product (it's pretty cool https://soundmind.co) and in an industrial design meeting, it was suggested that we get our hands on a similar product in the market so we can reverse engineer it. Me and my co-founder both hated that idea. We already have a unique take on the market, and our own method of doing things which we feel is a better way. But apparently, there are many people who think it is just fine to take a product, figure out how to copy it, and do that and try to sell it. This can happen in software or in hardware. Why should it be any different from one to the other? Now the other challenge comes in when you have examples like the x-plane given by @taf2 in the comments, or Amazon's one-click patent. These should have been obvious to the patent office that the inventions either already existed or were obvious, and should not have been given protection in the first place. I hope you are able to disrupt the current state of patents for software as it could be valuable if handled properly. But I wouldn't go around asking software engineers what they would like in a patent protection service, you need to speak to business owners. |
Regarding reverse engineering, while I don’t know the particulars from the legal perspective it’s fine and done quite often. In truth, the fact that reverse engineering is completely acceptable is one of the reasons to consider patenting. You may also consider getting an FTO (freedom to operate) to provide at least a reasonable likelihood the end product won’t be infringing.
I provided some thoughts to taf2 below you may consider taking a look at as well.