Story: BSA figures do not add up

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Very good but what exactly is the BSA paper supposed to be persuasive of in the first place? It certainly doesn't support its argument: presumably that software patents promote innovation and progress. It is not even a properly conducted survey, as you have discovered, and it is also not correct to interpret it as a measure of opinion, as the BSA appear to have done, of SME attitudes to software patenting. Perhaps they would conclude from the proportion of SMEs paying corporation tax that SMEs are in favour of high taxation.

In fact the surveys that have been done, such as the German Government survey, demonstrate that SMEs are absolutely against software patents, even when they consider it necessary (as many in the US do) to acquire such patents. By far the most important point, however, is that the BSA paper is not an economic analysis and has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether software and business method patentability promotes innovation and progress. For the MEPs to alter their positions on the basis of this flawed and irrelevant counting exercise from the BSA, while ignoring the proper analyses in the economic literature (and some genuinely useful opinion surveys), is very worrying indeed.

Counting patents cannot answer the salient questions that the MEPs must ask before they make their decisions on this macro-economic policy. The rise of the "IP companies", patent thickets and competition excluding cartels are some of the features not revealed by the BSA paper and the nature of the patents being applied for by some of the SMEs that MEPs may encounter is another reason they should be cautious:

Claim 1. A method of distributing digital information at a user advice point comprising displaying information relating to at least one packageable digitised information product at the user advice point, receiving a selection instruction from a user selecting a digitised information product and providing a high resolution display image of the digitised information product packaging.

[EP1536385, Daniel Doll-Steinburg of Tribeka]

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