Steven Zenith writes that software patents are BAD. Readers of this blog won't be surprised that I agree completely.
However, he says that he has found a new reason for this view. The reason he gives is that software ideas are "inevitable". That means they are "obvious to one skilled in the art".
I agree that there are a lot of trivial software patents around, eroding support for the patent system as such. One click comes to mind, as well as the FFII webshop.
However, the question if something is obvious or not is different from the question if it is patentable subject matter or not.
Writing a Harry Potter book is something not everybody skilled in the art of writing can easily do. It would be quite unfair to the author to describe her effort as "obvious".
Books are not patentable subject matter. That is the reason that there won't be a patent on a "story about magicians' high schools" (though with recent patent inflation trends, one never knows).
In the same way, I see no theoretical reason why there can't be ideas in the software field that are neither trivial nor obvious, though I quite agree that the majority of software patents actually awarded are.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at August 16, 2005 08:36 PM