That's not a very well done petition. Here are some of the problems.<p>(1) The America Invents act was not toothless. It contains provisions that put major hurt on patent trolls.<p>(2) It fails to actually state any realistic action items.<p>(3) It shows a misunderstanding of the role of the President in the patent system. What they are trying to accomplish requires Congressional action, not Presidential action.
Petitions are not a good medium for this conversation. The response to the previous petition <a href="https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/direct-patent-office-cease-issuing-software-patents/vvNslSTq" rel="nofollow">https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/direct-pate...</a> pointed to the place where the actual discussion is happening, <a href="http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementation/faq.jsp" rel="nofollow">http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementation/faq.jsp</a> and <a href="http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementation/comments.jsp" rel="nofollow">http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementation/comments.jsp</a>
We don't have "software patents," since software (as code) isn't patentable subject matter. Instead, we have "business method patents," which cover the systems and methods used by the software in conjunction with an operating environment that are putatively novel, non-obvious, unique, and enabled.<p>I'd imagine most people fall into two camps: (1) business methods shouldn't be patentable subject matter solely because they satisfy the machine-or-transformation test (as articulated in a trilogy of cases from the 1970s and most recent in Bilski); and (2) even if they should be, many of the business methods today fail on non-obviousness grounds.<p>Proscribing the issuance of 'software patents' <i>isn't</i> the problem. The problem is that in this digital age, we're relying on the machine-or-transformation test for business practices that exist in the virtual world. Because of the prevalence and impact of the internet in the global marketplace, there's now a fundamental difference between a ROM chip in a device containing instructions interpreted by a microprocessor and a software program compiled into machine readable code stored in RAM and processed by your computer's CPU.
How about we start spending more than 5 minutes writing these petitions? Several points are missing and what's there doesn't even convey the key points clearly.
This bigger petition received an official response today:<p><a href="https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/direct-patent-office-cease-issuing-software-patents/vvNslSTq" rel="nofollow">https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/direct-pate...</a>
I frankly do not understand such black and white take on software patents. I don't think that <i>all</i> of them are evil. If one invests his time and money in developing a software algorithm - something non-trivial, say, an IFS compressor for binary data - why should such invention not be entitled to the same level of exclusive use protection that a mechanical design receives?