Fixing Patent Law

I think creators (and those that bankroll them) deserve certain rights to their creations, whether they be physical or intellectual.  However, things have been broken for too long, and it is time that Patent Law be revisited before innovation and progress are suffocated under a blanket of legality.  From Boing Boing:

Peter Brown from the Free Software Foundation sez,

End Software Patents (ESP) and the Free Software Foundation have filed an amicus curiae brief in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's (CAFC) rehearing of the In re Bilski case set for May 8, 2008. The rehearing could lead to the elimination of patents on software.

With the boundary to what can be patented effectively destroyed by previous Federal Circuit rulings, massive-scale liability has been created throughout the US economy. Over the last few months alone, ESP has tallied over fifty non-software companies being sued for infringement regarding their web sites or other course-of-business software, including the Green Bay Packers, McDonald's, Dole Foods, Kraft Foods, Caterpillar, J Crew, Burlington Coat Factory, Wal-Mart, and Tire Kingdom. The rest of this list can be found here.

Ironically, the Federal Circuit's own web site is produced using software that likely infringes some number of software patents.

ESP executive director Ben Klemens said, "This is an historic opportunity to fix the US patent system, as the Bilski rehearing will directly address the boundaries of the subject matter of patents. In our brief, the End Software Patents project supports the Supreme Court's long-held position that computer software should not be patentable, and has highlighted to the Court the real economic harm software patents cause the US economy."

From Boing Boing:
Cory Doctorow
Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:33:03 GMT