Re: Why software patents are no different than other patents

"The technical literature - frequently hostile to patents - is most often based
on an examination of a small number of pathologically bad patents, and thus like
the law literature does not shed much light on software patents in general."

"We focus on the technical merits of what, on the surface at least, should be
good software patents - a set of 50 most highly cited patents."

"We conclude that for the set of patents examined here...this has little to no
apparent impact on the industry...the accusations that software patents are
generally obvious, trivial, and impede progress do not stand up to scrutiny."

Heh! - I wonder if that abstract is just very poorly worded. I'm sure it
wouldn't be fair to judge the quality of the whole paper by it and I certainly
wouldn't wish to use it to draw conclusions about the quality of the authors'
work in general.

If someone here reads the whole thing  and it turns out not to be quite as
hilarious as its abstract, never mind - here's one I found this morning that's
surely a comedy classic of the software patent literature:

http://www.cne.org/pub_pdf/2005_05_00_Simonnot_White_Paper_EN.pdf