Carving up the Commons: How Software Patents Are Impacting Our Digital Composition Environments

Since the 1980s, there has been a general trend in U.S. courts to allow certain aspects of software programs to be patented. Digital composition scholars and teachers are indirectly affected by these decisions through the software environments in which we compose but we are also directly affected through our increasingly code-based methods of composition. Just as we can no longer limit our study of writing to text, we can no longer limit our considerations of intellectual property law to the copyright that governs text. Here I examine arguments forwarded by legal scholars and programmers against software patents; these analyses offer not only a convincing critique of the patent system, but also imply that our legal system should treat code more like writing than engineering. An exploration of the software patent debate, then, opens code up for further study in the field of computers and composition.