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Despite EFF syndrome, patents are a tool, they are not evil, patent trolls are evil, patents are just tools.



This was always going to be the case eventually (a task that was already performed, this just invalidates adding "on a computer").

It's much harder for the law (I would say impossible) to actually judge stuff that is obvious. For example wavelet patents in certain video codecs are absurd - improving fourier transforms in a very very obvious way - but it won't be obvious to a judge or a jury and certainly isn't covered by this supreme court decision.

The more specialised people become in certain fields the more 'obvious' discoveries become. The law has no means to understand what rights it's protecting, and for how long they should be protected, which means it will never police the patent's system effectively, no matter what this judgement says.

Given how fast software patents and technology change and that the law can't judge them effectively I would suggest that instead of all this mess can we not just have software patents that last a maximum of 5 years.


Some tools empower evil more than good or even just accidentally do more harm than good more often than not.

Land mines for example.


Absurdly oversimplified.


Patents are a tool that was being abused so badly that the Supreme Court has been taking multiple cases just to try to set things straight.

The abuse has been evil.


EFF didn't say patents were evil. I can do that too:

Despite inane anonymous commenting syndrome, you are a person, you are not evil, you are just a person.




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