A former No 10 insider told me on Thursday that David Cameron's offices are like a drop-in centre for passing technologists: Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, can barely avoid bumping into senior people from Facebook or Microsoft as the prime minister's people try to marry the "big society" with big technology.
There's a problem with this, though, which is that the interests of governments and big companies aren't always – perhaps even often – aligned. Yes, it sounds great if Facebook tells you how it manages to corral the details of about 500 million people around the world without having to go through a vast tendering process every time it needs paperclips. And sometimes there's a temptation to think that because a big, successful company tells you something's wrong, that it really must be. So when Google tells him it doesn't like our laws on copying, he believes Google's right and the law is wrong.
And so up pops Cameron on Thursday, announcing that after the Olympics, the media centre will be turned into "tech city" where would-be Googles can hire office space by the square yard, while he twiddles the intellectual property laws in the UK. Here's why, he says: "The service [Google] provide depends on taking a snapshot of all the content on the internet at any one time, and they feel our copyright system is not as friendly to this sort of innovation as it is in the United States.
"Over there, they have what are called 'fair-use' provisions, which some people believe gives companies more breathing space to create new products and services.
"So I can announce today that we are reviewing our IP laws, to see if we can make them fit for the internet age."
Well, I have some news for Cameron. The "fair use" provisions in the US are very similar to the "fair dealing" ones in the UK, and the US ones don't allow for what Google does, either. Nor did they allow for Google's book-scanning project, which created a massive copyright row. And it's not as if Google even knows what side of the law it's on half the time. Witness Google Street View capturing personal data, or the settlement it has had to offer over invasions of privacy by Google Buzz.
And that's not the worst of it: David Willetts, the science and universities minister, said before Cameron's speech that he would investigate making it easier to obtain software patents. "In the US, it's easier to obtain software patents, and Google was able to patent some work – using a federal grant, I might add – that it might not have been able to patent in the UK. The US rule is that 'anything man has invented under the sun you should be able to patent'. That's something we do wish to investigate."
Hearing him say that in a roomful of startups, I was aghast, and not only for female inventors. Software patents are a blight – and that's not just my opinion. Here's what Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, said about the US patent system, and particularly software patents, when he spoke in London in October: "Is the patent system perfect, or the world in which we live? Answer is of course not, the patent law was crafted in a day and age that preceded modern IT systems … We think that the law ought to be reformed to reflect modern times." He thought that the present system is better than no system at all – but that's like preferring life over death. You only have to look at our diagram of the smartphone patent wars to realise that there's a lot of nonsense going on, and for the UK to mimic it would at least mean that legal graduates of the future will be able to pay their vast debts off quite quickly because they'd be dealing with those rows so much.
I queried Willetts about whether that's really what he wanted. "There are problems with both the British and US regimes," he said. "We need to review the way our system works, and what lessons we can learn from the US."
What I think he heard was the bit about Google taking a patent – from which he (or an adviser) drew a line to the idea that software patents are what got Google where it is.
Not at all: software patents are defensive, and they're often a problem for startup companies, which may find themselves threatened by bigger ones which, being bigger, have been able to build them. They're a blight, and British startups are much better off without them. A senior insider at another big internet company mused to me afterwards: "It sounds like the minister has been nobbled. We'll have to un-nobble him."
Just as foolish is the idea of pouring £200m into the disused media centre, post-Olympics, in the belief it will create a beehive where startups will throng and make honey – er, money. They won't. They prefer real streets in real cities, where there's a bagel shop down the road, three other startups within five minutes' walk who they can meet for a chat, and a choice of pubs and coffee houses in which to have ad-hoc meetings.
A far better use of that £200m would be as a pump-primer for the tax cuts for games developers that industry lobbyists have been calling out for, and which the Tories and Lib Dems have reneged on. It would create or save about 3,600 jobs in cities around the country – a very necessary balance to the tedious focus on London as the centre of the business universe. And it would generate £415m in tax revenue over five years, a net win of £215m for the Treasury.
But ministers and prime ministers are in thrall to those who would sell them technology. Bill Gates of Microsoft told Tony Blair's No 10 that computerising health records isn't really that difficult; Microsoft's already computerised loads of stuff, so what's the hassle? Billions of pounds later, we're still no closer to it happening. ID cards came out of a similar foolish trusting of salespeople with stuff to sell.
In fact, the only time I can think of a prime minister listening to a technologist and it all turning out well is when Gordon Brown turned to Sir Tim Berners-Lee at a dinner in 2009 and asked: "What should the government be doing with the internet?" To which Berners-Lee replied: "Put all your data online." To his surprise, Brown responded: "Yeah, let's do it."
The effects have been marvellous for startups – they now have postcode information, mapping data from the Ordnance Survey and reams of government data that they can use freely to build their sites.
There's a lesson here: Berners-Lee spurned the idea of commercialising his invention of the web, in favour of giving it away; and everyone, including government, has benefited enormously. Maybe the next person to go through the doors of No 10 should be Linus Torvalds, the architect of the free Linux operating system; or Monty Widenius, a key inventor of the free MySQL database; or John Powell, the Briton behind the open-source Alfresco, an enterprise content management system you can download for free.
Quite apart from anything, they could probably tell him precisely how the copyright laws could be improved – and what they think of software patents. It would, I think, be very different from what Google says. Particularly as Google runs on Linux.