Software patents suck

Ok, that title sucks, but I couldn't think of anything witty. ;-) Anyway, I just got done reading an article over at Ars Technica:

Cox's DRM patent less than meets the eye

1/17/2007 9:01:09 AM, by Timothy B. Lee

On Monday, Slashdot reported that legendary Linux kernel developer Alan Cox filed a patent application in June 2005 related to digital rights management technology. Cox's patent describes software that would automatically suspend operations if the user was found to be out of compliance with the software's licensing terms but that would save the user's data before suspending to prevent data loss.

The topic of the article was interesting, but what I really liked was the last paragraph:

The fact that even Red Hat, a company publicly opposed to software patents and unlikely to assert them against anyone, feels the need to apply for dozens of patents suggests that there are serious problems with the American patent system. The resources Red Hat spends hiring lawyers to obtain patents it will most likely never use could be more productively spent hiring programmers and customer support personnel to do useful work.

Too right. It is ludicrous that companies have to spend so much money for events that may never transpire when they could be spending money improving their products! This is roughly akin to insurance, except this is much more expensive and much less assuring. It is good to see that many of the biggest players in this industry support patent reform, even some that we wouldn't expect. I hope that people in the European Union continue to fight the good fight.

This seems like a good site. Check it out: http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/