Will specialized devices become the last bastion of software patents?
July 24th, 2008[back from a fun vacation and a quick trip to Ottawa… hello to our new readers from LinuxDevices]
Jonathan Corbet at LWN.net called my attention to a recent article in the Patent Law blog which discusses a recent patent appeal outcome. The takeaway is that the appeal provided a rubric for evaluating the validity of patenting a software application that may mean that software algorithms that run only on general purpose computers are not patentable.
Whoa. That should cause some heartburn. If the analysis from the Patent Law blog is reliable then there could be a number of software domains which just aren’t candidates for protection using patents. Since IANAL I’ll refrain from adding my own analysis.
Let’s see if I can tempt Matt “I blog 98 times a day” Asay into saying something about this.
Brad
