Integrity axiom for software patent authors and owners

We recommend to add the following integrity axiom to the assumptions about software patents: every patent which is either live or in the application phase expresses the views held by its authors and owners in the following way:

• The described invention did not conflict with prior art (in the most general sense of this expression) when it came into existence and by definition has been so ever since.⁹ In addition, the patent is non-trivial at that same moment in time.

• The patent authors rightly claim as professional software engineers the IPR for said invention.

• This IPR entitles them to economic revenues in an enforcible way.

• If the patent is owned by an organization that employs one or more of its authors, the relevant management layers of this organization share the views stated above.

This axiom is non-obvious because filing a patent application is an action by some agent and the axiom is about the mental state of that agent.

One might drop the integrity axiom in which case software patenting becomes some form of gaming not primarily based on the meaning of the patents but rather on their tactical and dynamic properties. For instance, a company might file a sequence of trivial patents just to exhaust the capacity of an economic opponent to effectively complain about these applications in order to arrive at a stage where IPR can be claimed even if it is not justified in real terms. But if the only way to get something out of patents would be along these lines we tend to agree with Knuth [23] that the whole enterprise is flawed. The integrity axiom excludes tactical patenting which is not based on reliable facts. This is very similar to scientific publications which are also supposed to adequately represent author's views.