It's not that I don't believe you, but everybody claims their software patents are defensive. I've heard Nokia and Philips claim the same thing, for instance.
Oddly the same organizations do support software patents as far as I'm aware. You'd think that if they were defensive only, it would be in their benefit to lobby for them to be abolished, and save lots of money.
We're on a slightly different scale to Nokia and Philips, but we want to have *something* up our sleeve in case any of them try and pick on us. 
I don't think we'd be sorry to see the end of software patents, even though our product is very innovative.
Heh heh, your paper is generated by the software those guys, who actually got their paper accepted by a conference, wrote (perhaps this sentence was as well)
Aww... you sussed us. 
Well, whatever you say about the defensive aspect of your patent, it really doesn't mean anything without some kind of patent promise. EvilCorp could buy Resolver tomorrow and start threatening people with that patent and it wouldn't matter a jot whether it was filed "defensively" or not.
Software patents (and patents in various other fields) are, amongst other things, a highly unethical tool typically used to claim credit for something that the people filing them have never actually done, in a manner which can only usually be described as extortion. Whilst having your lawyers threaten some other company's lawyers with your own patents might seem cheaper and more effective than working to forbid such indecency in the first place, I'd like to think that Resolver, if it is serious in protesting its innocence, might work with the effort to exclude software from patentability in the European Union and elsewhere rather than playing along with the "intellectual property" games encouraged by intellectually lazy venture capitalists and market analysts. Just filing such a patent is an implicit threat to people who may have never heard of Resolver; people whose legitimately produced work could hardly "infringe" on anything actually produced by your employer. And it is an implicit threat to virtually every software-related community, whether it be the Python community, the Free Software community, the open source community, or anyone else.
Any organisation filing software patents is misguided if it believes that this somehow confers bragging rights. So, consider your company's image and request that a patent promise be implemented at the very least: it won't restore any expectation of bragging rights, but it might prevent a conferral of pariah status.
But Resolver has a responsibility to its shareholders to protect its assets, and in the current climate it can't do that *without* filing patents on the unique aspects of Resolver.
If we are threatened by a larger company with suit for breach of patent for some obscure aspect of our software, then only having protection under patent ourself gives us the means to defend ourselves. As a company it would be irresponsible not to assert patents.
(And least of all not my decision.)
You should definitely watch the video of the talk by Simon Phipps of Sun from FOSDEM [1] where he goes through the reasons why Sun files patents: it's mostly the same argument that they can counter-sue companies in the litigious US business arena if threatened themselves. He then goes on to mention how Kodak managed to get Sun to hand over damages for infringing a patent where, despite their considerable portfolio, Sun had nothing to respond with. I think that really woke the executives up: so much for "defensive" patents!
[1] http://www.fosdem.org/2007/media/video
Interesting, thanks. I'm personally against software patents - and I believe in resolver the product enough to think that anyone else copying us wouldn't produce the same quality - but I've never had to run a business and make those kinds of decisions.
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