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Comment by freejazz | Hacker News Reader

The software patents you described are consistently knocked-out on §101 eligibility grounds for being an "abstract concept".

IMO people who advocate scrapping software patents are disingenuous - look at what Google is trying to do software copyright at the same time. Essentially, if you take Google up on software patents and copyright, there will be no protection left for software.

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Patents are granted, then if challenged, can be invalidated in court. It should be the other way around, they shouldn't be granted in the first case.

Not all can handle being taken to court for a claimed patent infringement of a crappy patent. It's expensive, time-consuming, and difficult. Did I mention wasteful?

I’m not trying to be argumentative and someone who is a lawyer can correct me here but generally speaking a company like ibm is only going to seek licensing from a party where the commercial impact is sufficient to merit the use of their resources to secure a licensing deal. Even in the case of Airbnb, it’s clear in the article ibm is suing only after attempting to exhaust other remedies. Again, I don’t think it’s necessarily bullet proof legal policy to advise companies to fly under the radar but de facto I don’t think ibm is spending a lot of time chasing companies who can’t afford a legal defense.

> Essentially, if you take Google up on software patents and copyright, there will be no protection left for software.

... and this is a bad thing?

I was not commenting on that, simply informing the poster about the issue.

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