Yahoo! Blog from Sunnyvale, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
Generic license (caption added by us, with Ballmer's words)

Yahoo is a dead company and Yahoo's death is due to Microsoft's intervention. Yahoo's USPTO-granted software patents are on sale although they might not be worth much after Alice. It remains to be seen who takes these; maybe some Microsoft-backed consortium? Maybe some patent troll with "PAE" as a euphemism? This new article is titled "Next up in Yahoo’s closing down sale: The patent auction". We can't help but wonder who would be so foolish or overly hopeful... enough to attempt litigation with software patents in spite of this hostile atmosphere in the US courts. Well, even if the USPTO granted these patents, it does not mean they're potent.

"We can't help but wonder who would be so foolish or overly hopeful... enough to attempt litigation with software patents in spite of this hostile atmosphere in the US courts."Speaking of Yahoo, a lot of patent news comes from there, so with the demise of Yahoo there will be less information. These couple of spammy articles/press releases from Yahoo [1, 2], for example, are quite revealing. Some companies are so boring that the only press releases they make public are about poor-quality software patents. The other article uses a buzzword, namely "Big Data", in an attempt to sell proprietary software that will (supposedly) manage Intellectual Property [sic]. It surely won't work as well as a human, but there are also some fools in suits with no scientific background who believe examination can be done by machines from start to finish. ⬆