To briefly come present my opinion with an awful analogy:
Fax machines, Nokia 3310s and also tech patents are becoming increasingly obsolete, and I believe the latter should die out one way or the other. Amazon’s “one-click-buy”-patent is a perfect example. Patents were supposed to incentivize innovation when it was expensive to build something new (like a car). The “one-click-buy”-patent was not expensive. The patent wars going on these days are just a distraction that removes focus from what’s really important: to build great products for the consumers! #GreatMoveTwitter
Twitter’s decision to implement the Innovator’s Patent Agreement could not have been an easy one. While it’s refreshingly straightforward and an obvious crowd-pleaser, it potentially puts the company in a bit of a vulnerable position. What if no one else adopts the policy? They’ll stand alone with their pants partially down.
While I haven’t yet talked to anyone at the company about the decision, my sense is that they made the call using a simple principle: do the right thing.
While obvious, it seems that companies are rarely guided by simply doing the right thing. Legal departments get in the way. Or investors get in the way. Someone gets in the way. What’s right isn’t often what’s “smart”. And that’s a problem on multiple fronts.
When I tweeted about the upsides of this decision earlier, many people were quick to point out some of the practical problems. What struck me is how all the problems mentioned were derivatives of fear. Fear of others. Fear of change. Fear of dying.