Marco Arment on Twitter's Patent Agreement

As Marco states, much praise has been heaped on Twitter for the announcement of their Innovator's Patent Agreement, which is supposedly going to afford Twitter employees a greater amount of control over their patents. I'm with Marco on everything he says in his response, but the most salient point of all is actually in the footnotes (emphasis mine):

2. Many Instapaper ideas might have been patentable, including the one-click-save bookmarklet, many techniques the bookmarklet uses, many text-parser algorithms, some Kindle methods, proportional tilt scrolling, automatic-by-sunset dark mode, smart auto-rotation prompting, smart gesture-error prompting, methods for pagination of arbitrary web content, and methods for inter-app communication.

I didn’t patent the older inventions because I couldn’t afford to. I probably could have patented some of the newer ones, but I didn’t even look into it enough to do basic prior-art searches. I fundamentally disagree that software patents (and many other types of patents) are a net gain for society, and I can’t participate in that system in good conscience. That’s a stand that I’d like to see more companies adopt.

Marco.org | Twitter's "Innovator's Patent Agreement"