Re: German court invalidates FAT patent ..

[AES]

In article <DMOdnXPf4IupFDTUnZ2dnUVZ_szinZ2d@giganews.com>,
 Rjack <user@example.net> wrote:

> > http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/86141
> 
>  From the heise article:
> 
> "The plaintiff in the action before the Federal Patent Court had
> argued that the subject matter of the challenged patent was prior
> art or if not prior art per se could be easily deduced by a
> specialist at least from prior art."
> 
> This argument applies to 99% of the software related patents granted
> by the U.S.P.T.O. The only creativity demonstrated in justifying the
> award of a monopoly on these software related ideas is in the
> tortured legal language describing simple methods in highly complex
> ways.
> 
> Unlike copyright protection, I have concluded that any benefits to
> technological advancement induced by software patents are vastly
> overshadowed by their ability to stifle innovation. They should be
> eliminated. It is not within the scope and purpose of a public
> software license to do so. The United States Congress should be
> urged to ban them.

I have no views or opinions on the "open software" debates that I 
believe are behind this post; but I have a lot of experience with 
patents, and I believe that truer words than the above would be very 
hard to find.

In fact you could take out all the "software" and "software related" 
words in the above, and the basic assertions would be almost equally 
true.