Seems like that This American Life piece on the insane world of software patents (remember?) has really got the Internet talking about the state of the industry.. from a legal standpoint. It's a great topic, worthy of much discussion. One such take on the topic is from Timothy Lee and his article The Supreme Court Should Invalidate Software Patents. Here's a great quote from said article:

In my view, the solution is straightforward: software shouldn’t be eligible for patent protection. That might sound simplistic, but there are good reasons to think abolition of software patents is the right reform. Software is fundamentally different than other types of inventions. For starters, software is virtually alone in being eligible for both patent and copyright protection. This makes patent protection mostly superfluous. Second, writing software is an individual, expressive activity at least as much as it is an engineering discipline. We don’t expect novelists to hire patent lawyers, and computer programmers shouldn’t have to either. Finally, the “software industry” is radically more diffuse and diverse than the typical patent-eligible industry. Every business with more than a handful of employees has an IT department producing potentially patent-infringing software. No other category of patents has this characteristic.

- Timothy Lee The Supreme Court Should Invalidate Software Patents

The point comparing writing software to writing novels is, in my mind, right on the money. I mean, Spotify's been open in the US for about a week and they are already in litigation because of this very issue. That's absurd. Something needs to change. Invalidating the patents may not be the best solution but at least it's a great way to get people thinking on the issue.

via Jed.