Early in April, the Indian Parliament voted to drop an incredibly stupid clause from the Patents Bill, 2005. This clause, if passed, would have allowed software companies to own patents in India.

So what’s wrong with software patents, you may wonder? Isn’t it much the same as copyrights? It isn’t. Allow me to use an analogy to explain why the idea is a stupid one. Imagine me strolling over to the patents office tomorrow with a battery of lawyers. My team and I convince the officers there that I, at CHIP, originally thought up a computer magazine and ought to own a patent to it. The officers are convinced and award me one.

Having done that, I walk over to my competitor’s offices and tell them that by running a computer magazine, they are violating patent laws. So, either they shut down, or create a clone of what I have and pay me royalties. If I tried something as asinine as that, either the competition or you will lynch me.

Precisely the reason why music, literature, art and software programs were traditionally not awarded patents. What they have instead are copyrights. Which is why, Mark Twain could not patent humorous fiction. If he did, we wouldn’t have had P.G. Wodehouse.

Why then in the devil’s name are America and a handful of software companies like Microsoft lobbying so hard for software patents?

The earliest recollection I have of software patents and the furor that followed was August 1999. That was when Refac International sued six companies including Microsoft and Lotus for infringements. Refac argued in court that it owned patents to a process called ‘natural order recalc.’ What this process does is common place in spreadsheet software. When you make a change in a calculation on a spreadsheet, the change is applied throughout the document. That was the first time software developers figured that patents could exist on everything from sequences of machine instructions to features of the user interface. The courts predictably threw the suit out and life got back to normal.

The idea though refused to die and has raised its head often enough on various occasions. The most recent ones being when Amazon.com staked is claim to cookies - those little pieces of code that reside on your machine to help sites identify you when you visit them. The resulting public outcry forced Amazon to back off. And then there was the celebrated case when British Telecom made an outrageous claim that it owned hyperlinks on the Internet and that anybody using hyperlinks ought to pay them royalties.

What terrifies me now is that Europe is wilting under pressure and after having resisted for so long is warming up to the idea.

Take my word on this - if patents are allowed, software development as we know it now will simply cease to exist.

At times like these, I wish the Americans and Europeans had Leftist parties in their parliaments like we do. Had it not been for them, we would have gone the patents way.

And no, I’m not a Leftist. I am a social democrat with libertarian principles.