József Hontvári
Managing Director of Solware Ltd.

As a small software development company we have already experienced the disastrous effects of the US patent system, when one of our partners wanted to stop our collaboration after receiving an email from an unknown company, who claimed that our product MIGHT violate the intellectual rights of the sender. Though the accusation was completely nonsensical without any facts, we needed to consider whether we could afford the litigation in a foreign country. We knew from an earlier case that it would be impossible for a small company due to lack of funds and human resources.
We find it especially nonsensical that the software patents affect us, the developers, on the wrong side. After looking into some US software patents as examples, we feel it totally inconceivable to finance even the supervision of which do we violate from the tens of thousands of patents. We can suspect that no week passes by without our programmers “inventing” the same insignificant triviality during their routine work that has been already patented. We could also try to exploit this system, however we prefer developing software to litigation. On the other hand we cannot afford to finance as much patents that would enable us to protect ourselves from companies with bigger patent portfolio. Based on the above case, a bigger company could easily bankrupt us purely by fictitious accusations.
Being software developers ourselves, we find copyrights capable to protect our intellectual properties, which has been doing well in the past few decades.
We can only accept a patent system in which the possibility to patent any software method is excluded point-blank.