This is an enormously complex issue with billions at stake for the software industry. The article does not explain the rationale the courts used to allow the patenting of software.
As a matter of principle, software code should not be be patentable. How are revisions dealt with? Ideas embodied in code are different than an 'invention' as the nation's founders perceived the term.
I suspect the courts were persuaded to extend paptent protection to software in the days when the U.S. was the undisputed leader in software development. We still may be, but many countries are catching up. I'm not sure how international patent protection works, but this is a big deal!
Patenting genetic modifications falls in this same difficult arena
"...But patent protection for software? No. Not for Microsoft, nor for anyone else.
Others share this conviction. 'Abolishing software patents would be a very good thing,' says Daniel Ravicher, executive director of the Public Patent Foundation, a nonprofit group in New York that challenges what it calls 'wrongly issued' patents. Mr. Ravicher, a patent lawyer himself, says he believes that the current system actually impedes the advance of software technology, at the same time that it works quite nicely to enrich patent holders. That's not what the framers of the Constitution wanted, he said.
Earlier this month, the European Parliament rejected a measure, nicknamed the 'software patent directive,' that would have uniformly removed restrictions on those patents among European Union members."
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