Ending Software Patents in Recent Years (Software Freedom Fighters MIA)
YESTERDAY we re-posted a recently-updated long article from GNU. It was about software patents.
The topic (software patents) is barely covered anywhere anymore. That's not to say resistance to them has stopped, it's just that the press is not doing much beyond "Bill Gates says" pieces (and "tweets" as headlines) anymore, or perhaps that's just the "new normal"... wherein even Blogspot blogspam means writing a short blurb about some release of some product/application (based on Microsoft GitHub, not original sites).
35 U.S.C. § 101 is still in force at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Alice-type questions have not been revisited by the SCOTUS, so enforcing software patents in American courts remains difficult or fiscally risky (you might have to end up paying the legal bills of the defendant).
The EFF hardly writes about patents anymore and the Linux Foundation mentions this word at most once a year.
The FSF? Well, it barely touches the subject anymore and the site it runs to deal with the subject appears not to be maintained so much anymore:
It was a lot busier last year.
The last change was 6 days ago. Ciarán O'Riordan still seems to be involved, but not as much as before. He's editing the page about himself for the first time in nearly 12 years.
More people ought to write about this subject. At the EPO it's a growing problem, not a resolved issue. █