Bonum Certa Men Certa

Demise of Software Patents and Refusal of the Patents 'Industry' to Accept That

Limiting entry of patents on software

Sign - no entry



Summary: More stories about the invalidation of software patents in the US and some responses from people who make a living handling patents

PATENTS on software are gradually being invalidated, not just failing to be granted in the first place. The Supreme Court (also known as SCOTUS) decided that if a patent on an abstract concept has insufficient merit, then it shouldn't be upheld and should instead be discarded. This discouraged some litigation, as numbers serve to demonstrate. Patent trolls and giant corporations would rather intimidate using patents (shakedown) than actually sue. SCOTUS has of course endorsed patent trolling since then and it very much knew what it was doing:



Not only did Scalia acknowledge such a beast as a patent troll, but threw in my second-most favorite Latin phrase of all time, in terrorem which means “into or about fear”.


This new Securus press release, published from Texas, says "Securus Expects Some Patents To Be Invalidated – No Impact On Quality Or Scale Advantage of Securus' Industry Leading Patent Portfolio" (the context being some of their patents having been invalidated).

It seems clear that companies which base their business around patents are worried. It looks like the landscape is changing and SD Times, a magazine focused on software development and Microsoft promotion, has asked: "What just happened to software patents?"

Well, as lot of them are going away. "Rightly or wrongly," says the author, "these voices against software patents have become a cacophony. Courts listen to public opinion—don’t let anyone fool you into believing differently. So, when the public became concerned about the software-patent “threat,” so did courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court."

Activism in the area does make a different, make no mistake about it. That's why patent lawyers have been so adamant and determined to take over the media, spreading the false impression that nothing has changed after Alice.

"Software is reducible to mathematics, so software must never be patentable if we are to advance science rather than guard or create monopolies."The author proceeds to stating: "This mutated strain of cases harks back to a Supreme Court case decided in 1948 that had nothing to do with computer software: Funk Brothers v. Kalo. A fundamental tenet of patent law has long been that laws of nature (e.g., E=MC2) cannot be patented. Funk Brothers pushed that much further, saying that a newly discovered law of nature cannot even be the basis for patenting a practical application of that law to solve a real-world problem. Thirty years later, the Supreme Court applied this reasoning to a software-related patent in Parker v. Flook."

Software is reducible to mathematics, so software must never be patentable if we are to advance science rather than guard or create monopolies. Here is a company in DC bragging about acquiring patent monopolies on software, boasting some more in a press release [1, 2]. This is in no way advancing science; in this particular case it can even harm health.

A patent lawyers' blog, which often gives the platform to Microsoft and pro-software patents voices (never the opposite), is giving the platform to a Judge who is defending patent trolls. Among his words of 'wisdom': "The less enforceable the patent is in various ways, the lower the value of the patent for the whole portfolio."

In other words, this judge advocates more lawsuits (business for him) or shakedowns. Recall what patents were conceived for in the first place. It was about publication in exchange for a temporary monopoly, not a parade of litigation. A lot of patent lawyers, whose business is litigation and armament (in the legal sense), seem to conveniently forget or ignore that. Thankfully, as the SCOTUS tries to revert back to some level of sanity, the future of software patents does not look promising.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Gemini Links 12/08/2025: Meditation, OpenStreetMap, Smolweb, and More
Links for the day
Google News is Dying: Most of Its Top Stories Now Are LLM Slop With Slop Images (i.e. 100% Fake 'Content')
Google News has been drowning in this sort of stuff for quite some time
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, August 11, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, August 11, 2025
Our Predictions Were Right: GitHub Dying as Losses Pile Up (as a Company It Cannot Continue to Exist, It's Not 'Free Hosting')
GitHub always lost money
Links 11/08/2025: Meritless Twitter Suspensions and Disney Scraps Deepfake Dwayne Johnson
Links for the day
Gemini Links 11/08/2025: Upgrading Debian Bookworm and Better Quality PDFs From Gemini Pages
Links for the day
Currys PCWorld Lied a Decade Ago, 10 Years Later It Still Effectively Voids Your Warranty for Installing GNU/Linux Despite It Being Increasingly Mainstream
Microsoft gatekeepers
Team GNOME Has Libeled Me for Nearly 20 Years
we are not dealing with sane people
Experience With Airlines in 'Web Sites' and in 'Apps'
In a lot of ways, Stallman Was Right about what JavaScript would turn out to be
Open Does Not Mean Free
wiser to ask if some program is freedom-respecting
The Register MS Takes Money From Companies Banned by the Biden and Trump Administrations (National Security Risk)
today's sponsor
Sabotaging GNU/Linux PCs (and Users) is Not a 'Joke'
maybe cruelty is the very objective
How We Process Screenshots of Slop to Suitably Tag Them as Slop
everything is a single command
Links 11/08/2025: Data Breaches, Politics, and Climate
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 10, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, August 10, 2025
Gemini Links 11/08/2025: Tea Caffeine Hot and Super ZZ Zero
Links for the day
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Brian Fagioli, and Other Serial Sloppers
Maybe Microsoft wants to dub this "Web5"
Gemini Links 10/08/2025: Residents Management Company, Automation, and Politics
Links for the day
Links 10/08/2025: AOL Ending Dial-up
Links for the day
Seductive Mirage or Allure of Complex, Proprietary Coffee Machines (or Similar White Elephants)
Software is a lot like those things
Links 10/08/2025: Webrings, “AI Sunglasses” and “AI Eyeglasses”, US Administration Intensifies Attacks on Science and Research
Links for the day
Sometimes Newer is Worse
We generally need to reject this dumb notion that "old" means bad
The Code Used to Make Techrights Fits on a Seventh of a Floppy Disk (or 100KB When Compressed)
For the sake of comparison I've just downloaded the latest version of WordPress. The ZIP file is 27.2MB in size, or ~27,200KB.
What They Tell Young Programmers
Coding in 2025
Simpler is Better When Simple is Enough
Over-complicating things to "sell" new versions is so 1990s
Links 10/08/2025: From Social Control Media to Prison, New Examples of Windows TCO
Links for the day
Sloppy Reporting About Slop, or How The Register MS Lowers Its Standards
Maybe the management isn't even aware of this
IBM's Strategy: Cull 'Expensive' Workers, Replace Them With Cheaper Ones
So far we saw not even one rebuttal or challenge to the claim of Red Hat layoffs scheduled for tomorrow
If You Attack Somebody Too Much You Legitimise and Strengthen That Somebody
at the end those attacks add up to a "martyr" status
The Man Who Helped Microsoft Kill Linux is Trying to Delay Our Lawsuits Against Him
By conservative estimates, and based on court documents submitted by them, they're prepared to spend over a million dollars on lawyers, fighting against me and my wife
Gemini Links 10/08/2025: Gen Con 2025 and Framework Laptop
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 09, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, August 09, 2025