The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140, would throw out Supreme Court rules that limit patents on abstract ideas. If PERA passes, it will open the floodgates for far more vague and overbroad software patents. It will even allow for a type of patent on human genes that the Supreme Court rightly disallowed in 2013.
No one should be allowed to take an abstract idea, add generic computer language, and get a patent. And we should never see patents on the genes that naturally occur in human bodies. But if PERA passes, that’s exactly what will happen.
Patent trolls—companies that have no product or service of their own, but simply make patent infringement demands on others—are a big problem. They’ve cost our economy billions of dollars. For a small company, a patent troll demand letter can be ruinous.
But we took a big step forward in the fight against patent trolls in 2014, when a landmark Supreme Court ruling, the Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank case, held that you can’t get a patent by adding “on a computer” to an abstract idea.
This bill by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) would also override the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the U.S. Patent Office from issuing patents on human genes. Patenting human genetic material is wrong and should never occur.
Tell Congress to reject the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act.
Two pieces of technology are behind the Internet as we know it today.
Neither one is patented.
They are TCP/IP and Linux.
All the network traffic runs over TCP/IP.
95%+ of the servers run Linux. So do the Android phones and Chromebooks.
Clearly, patent protection in software is not required for society to benefit greatly from technological innovation in software.
Linux isn’t a patentable thing. It’s not one idea or even really a new one. I agree with your premise though. Patents, in nearly all cases, suck.
Linux isn’t a patentable thing.
Yes, that’s been true so far. Are you sure it’s true under the newly proposed law?
What would you patent? “A program which handles low level functionality and manages other programs?” I suppose what I mean is that there is “prior art”. You can’t patent something if it isn’t new and the concept of Linux isn’t. Linux isn’t the first kernel. This law wouldn’t change that. The first person to create a kernel though, under this law that might perhaps (?) have been patentable. Which would’ve crippled the entire software industry in it’s infancy. Yay patents!
Patents have been an issue for Linux before. For example, memory deduplication (KSM) was delayed and modified to avoid a patent on using hashes for this purpose, resulting in a potentially inferior implementation due to patents.
“TCP/IP” is conventionally used to indicate the whole protocol suite; including UDP, ICMP and sometimes even ARP.
Technically the parent protocol is IP.
In all my years I have never heard someone suggest that TCP is a catch all term.
Fixed it for you: Tell Congress: Don’t Allow Patents
They never stop so we have to stay vigilant and vocal.
Thank you for posting this
