Software Patents

A 1911 Industrial Worker (IWW newspaper) publication advocating industrial unionism that shows the critique of capitalism. It is based on a flyer of the "Union of Russian Socialists" spread in 1900 and 1901.

I'm reading about those loathsome creatures, patent trolls, this morning and I come across this little bit:

Rader's four-judge group affirmed the broad scope of what is eligible for patenting under Section 101, written in 1952. "Both inventions and discoveries are eligible for patenting," wrote Rader. "Before 1952, the courts had used phrases including 'creative work,' 'inventive faculty,' and 'flash of creative genius' which compared the existing invention to some subjective notion of sufficient 'inventiveness' as the test for patentability."  

In the view of these four judges the 1952 Act, written largely by a patent judge and a chief patent examiner, got rid of that "flash of creative genius." It simply stated that to get a patent, an idea couldn't be obvious. This simple test for "nonobviousness" would be more "objective" than a test for inventiveness.

This might explain why I haven't patented anything. Everything I think of is perfectly obvious, otherwise I wouldn't have thought of it. Never mind that you actually need to apply for a patent in order to get one.
    I don't like patent trolls (companies that make no use of their patents themselves other than to extort licensing fees from other people), but I view them as a product of our times. If our society was not so productive, we would not have so many under-utilized lawyers who have nothing better to do than to cook up near-criminal schemes for making money. It we weren't so busy pushing half of what we make over a cliff every day, we might be putting more people to work. I keep looking for an answer and I keep coming back to pyramids. We need a national program to transform the Rocky Mountains into a series of giant pyramids. That should keep the unemployed busy, and it would straightened out all those ugly, craggy rocks.