A patent is a deal the public makes with an inventor: publish your invention and we'll grant you a time-limited monopoly on it. In order for this to be a good trade, the invention has to make a real intellectual contribution to the art. The problem we have is that no one is unambiguously empowered to ensure that it does so. The PTO does some of this, but has neither the bandwidth to do a good job nor a clear mandate to be hard-ass about it. And then once a patent is granted, the courts tend to defer to the PTO on its validity.

I haven't read the patents in question here, but I nonetheless feel safe in saying that "technologies for tracking vehicles and providing users with electronic updates" cannot possibly make a contribution to the art significant enough to counterbalance the societal cost of the monopoly the patent holder has been granted. I'm sure there are thousands of engineers here on HN that could design and build such a system using well-known techniques.

In some domains, the determination of how much of an intellectual contribution an invention makes is fairly straightforward. If a novel molecule is synthesized -- the chemical and pharmaceutical industries keep a record, I gather, of all molecules whose structures have been worked out, so it's possible to know when a new one appears -- and then proves useful for some medical purpose, it's pretty clear that a contribution has been made, and what that contribution consists of. In software, it's much harder. The field is massive and sprawling, and no one can keep up with all of it.

That's why I'm convinced the only solution is to amend the patent laws to require objective evidence of nonobviousness -- objective evidence that the invention makes a real intellectual contribution -- in order for a patent holder to successfully sue for infringement. Such evidence could come, for example, in the form of publication in a peer-reviewed journal or conference proceedings. Absent such evidence, the law should direct the court to invalidate the patent.

An advantage of this approach is that it requires no special-case rule for software patents, which run into the difficulty of defining the term "software patent" precisely. Rather, in domains other than software, the required evidence is generally not hard to come by. So the rule is domain-independent in definition -- and defensible as such, I believe -- but would have by far the greatest impact in the software domain.