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Red Hat Assistant General Counsel Analyses Supreme Court's Patent Ruling
ectoman (594315) writes The U.S. Supreme Court issued a groundbreaking decision concerning software patents, claiming that abstract ideas are not by themselves patentable. The ruling was a cause for celebration among those opposed to software patent abuse, like Red Hat's Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, Rob Tiller. Here, Tiller analyzes and offers some context for the Court's ruling, which "uses the traditional common law methodology of comparing one case to previous similar cases and harmonizing with those most similar."
As I read it, this says an invention is patentable - but implementing the invention on a computer doesn't necessarily add anything. That seems to be very good news for all those silly patents that only claim "on a computer" or "on the internet".
If software patents were around back in the 80's then IBM would have patented the hell out of the PC and its BIOS. Only IBM would be making them to this day and they'd cost $5000 for a base model. Only major corporations and well heeled geeks would own them. The Internet would likely still be DarpaNet and I could go on and on. If anyone recollects, IBM's BIOS was reverse engineered, legally, as it was only copied by copyright, as is reasonable and proper. The people that read the code described it and people who had never seen the IBM code wrote their own code to behave similarly, again, all very reasonable and legal. The processor your code runs on is the invention. Your code is your art or writing that makes the processor sing. If I can make my code sing a similar song without copying yours then that's as should be. Code should be copyright-able as are words in a book. Just because you write a clever whodunit does not mean that no one can ever write another!