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As of this writing, 5029 of the required 5000 signatures have been collected! Now hopefully this actually goes somewhere...
I have linked to this petition from my blog urging Americans to sign it though.
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.
Is it a machine patent or is it a software patent?
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…
(The trouble is that the politicians, not knowing any better, will go to the USPTO to get both sets of figures. "See? All of these new software patents must mean that innovation has accelerated at a tremendous rate!"))
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.
Software patents are not bad. Obvious patents are bad.
Yes, this is a dupe from earlier today. I posted the damned thing by accident while learning the system in a half awake stupor. And, because I was in an half awake stupor, decided it was a good idea to share it with the world after accidentally posting it. I've been trying to get them to take it down to no avail. Failing that I've suggested better language and asked other people to suggest better language. On Monday…
Software patents are not bad. Obvious patents are bad.
Name a good software patent the world can't live without?
By speaking out against software patents, you are essentially saying that programmers are not capable of inventing, or that they should not be afforded the same protections that other inventors receive.
Since there are trillions of dollars worth of software patents out there, most owned by US companies, this doesn't seem like a good way to proceed even if it were legal. You might be able to stop future applications for software patents. But really there's no bright line between software and hardware anymore -- you really need to reform the entire patent system.
I'd guess that for the economy as a whole, the combined worth of software patents is negative.