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IANAL, but I don't think the executive branch has the authority to do what the petition is asking. The patent office merely interprets what Congress and the courts tell it - while there is some interpretational discretion, I don't think it extends to the point of rejecting all software patents and certainly not to the point of retroactively invalidating all of them.
Why?
There is much debate over whether software patents encourage or discourage innovation. There are a lot of arguably obvious software patents (e.g. "Method to retrieve backups from the internet"). Since the USPTO only started issuing software patents in the late 1990's, some or most of these patents are predated by plenty of examples of prior art. Imagine if a movie screenwriter were suddenly able to patent the romanti…
Is this "petitions" feature on whitehouse.gov brand new? I've heard of a couple of petitions today, and never before. I see right now that there are only 32 petitions there, and every one of them is either a neutral or leftish cause. The only completely nutty one is the UFO one, and there are no troll ones either (I thought "Stop Animal Homelessness At Its Roots" was a clever troll, but apparently it's talking about…
Is this "petitions" feature on whitehouse.gov brand new? I've heard of a couple of petitions today, and never before. I see right now that there are only 32 petitions there, and every one of them is either a neutral or leftish cause. The only completely nutty one is the UFO one, and there are no troll ones either (I thought "Stop Animal Homelessness At Its Roots" was a clever troll, but apparently it's talking about…
Is this "petitions" feature on whitehouse.gov brand new? I've heard of a couple of petitions today, and never before. I see right now that there are only 32 petitions there, and every one of them is either a neutral or leftish cause. The only completely nutty one is the UFO one, and there are no troll ones either (I thought "Stop Animal Homelessness At Its Roots" was a clever troll, but apparently it's talking about…
In addition, a petition must get 150 signatures in order to be publicly searchable on WhiteHouse.gov.
I googled "white house petitions free republic" to see whether the freepers were planning anything, but so far they haven't got past the "They'll harvest my IP address" paranoia stage.
I'm sure that conservative activists will get wind of this eventually. If there isn't a serious competition for the most-signed petition between "Legalize pot, man" and "Make Ron Paul President" by this time next week then I'll be suspicious that they're deleting things they don't like.
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The US Patent system is badly broken with respect to software patents. Patents are being issued to companies for “inventions” that are, in fact, common knowledge included in any introductory software textbook. The result is that the large software corporations are buying up reams of patents and using them to bully small, innovative companies out of business or into paying ridiculous licensing fees.
Quite apart from encouraging innovation, patents are now stifling it. The software industry is one of the few industries still strong in America. Even in a time of recession, there are not enough computer programmers to fill all the available positions. Startup companies are forming and growing readily. But if every line of code written brings with it a potential violation of someone else's intellectual property, this will cease to be the case.
To solve this problem, we petition the Obama Administration to direct the Patent office to cease issuing software patents and to instruct the judicial system to take a long hard look at existing patents for validity. With these two steps, those of us in the software industry can stop worrying about mutually assured patent destruction and get back to doing what we do best.
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If anyone else comes up with language the community prefers, I'm game to use it when I call the switchboard on Monday.