While I was out (running my business)

I’ve had to back-burner my righteous indignation to focus on running my business. There was a fair bit of software patent news while I’ve been out:
End Software Patents has launched their web site. Ben Klemens, Executive Director, is the author of Math You Can’t Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software. To quote, “Every company is in [...]

What Is a Patent?

From uspto.gov, with my comments interspersed.

What Is a Patent?
A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Generally, the term of a [...]

Business of Software

What an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) sells isn’t the software itself, but the right to use. The rights, and restrictions, of both the vendor and the user are spelled out in the software license agreement. By definition that agreement will strike some balance between granting users sufficient privileges to use the software, while preserving the [...]

The Original Patent Troll

Bless YouTube. Check out The Original Patent Troll, an excerpt from a 1994 educational video. Much funnier than what patent trolls have turned into. See the Yahoo Patent Troll.

Empirical Evidence that Software Patents Stiffle Innovation

In a direct lift from Brad Feld’s Brad Feld’s(fixed link) recent post, a pointer to Slashdot’s post that that a Critic of Software Patents Wins [the] Nobel Prize in Economics. “One recent subject of Professor Maskin’s wide-ranging research has been on the value of software patents. He determined that software was a market where innovations [...]

How Software Patents Work

This video is hysterical, even without the across-the-pond pronunciation of PAY-tent.
I’m consolidating links on the links page, so you won’t have to search the blog entries.

Software patents are evil

Our attorney claims that software patents will not go away in either of our lifetimes. I want to prove him wrong.