The Death of Many (If Not Most) Software Patents?

It's basically impossible to write any non-trivial piece of software without violating half a dozen completely absurd patents, and I don't think I've seen a legitimate software patent lawsuit in the last 10 years. There may be a few in there that I don't hear about, but upwards of 95% are either 1) a big company trying to kill a small competitor before they get too big by tying them up with useless litigation and legal fees, 2) an IP holding company trying to extract money from a big company with deep pockets, or 3) two big companies using patents as leverage to try to extract concessions out of each other.<p>I can't think of any company or engineer I know of that would stop writing software if they couldn't patent it, or of anyone that's learned anything useful from reading a patent filing.<p>The most important parts of software are already protected by copyright and trade secret laws, and patents have absolutely no place there.

This article comes at a particularly opportune time for me. A site I'd built for a client was sued by Channel Intelligence in their mass filing last week (TechCrunch covered it) for their revolutionary and genius idea of "configuring a database system to store information regarding a plurality of items," focusing on wishlists.<p>The client (#12 in the suit if you're curious) called me in a panic telling me to pull down the site, so all its users are screwed. I've also run a free wishlist site at GreedyMe.com for several years which wasn't named in the suit, but if it had been, I couldn't financially justify trying to fight it.<p>PageRank was pretty revolutionary. I'm on the fence as to whether that should be patented. Amazon's 1-Click and Channel Intelligence's "list storage" are obvious methods, and I can't fathom how any lawyer or businessman can submit a patent for such nonsense with a straight face.

"In sum, an innovative process is not patentable when operating on a single computer processor but is when operating on two processors, even though the Board recognizes that the process in the unpatentable claim 'is essentially the method' set forth in the patentable claim."<p>So you just move your data repository to one machine and your data processing to the other, and you have your patents back.<p>I really just don't understand how something like this happens. I guess "The Law" is a massively backwards-compatible system that makes computer architecture anachronisms look mild.

If software patents stop being valid, companies will keep many of their inventions secret and will protect them as "trade secret" from now on. With patents they were at least forced to publish them. Not good either way, although certainly this will put an end to portfolio-only kind of businesses that did only harm and nothing but harm to everybody.

i think the biggest problem with software patents is how long it takes. You may invent something amazing, but it'll be 5 years before you actually see the patent and by that time your amazing technology will be widely used

If most software patents suddenly stops being valid, then this could open up lots of new business opportunities?