That said, I would much prefer a proper legislative approach to an executive one. The Patent and Trademark Office is part of the Department of Commerce, so I don't think it would be frowned upon too much for the executive branch to enact some reform. Still, I think a legislative approach would be more robust and less controversial.
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The US Patent system is badly broken with respect to software patents. Patents are being issued to companies for “inventions” that are, in fact, common knowledge included in any introductory software textbook. The result is that the large software corporations are buying up reams of patents and using them to bully small, innovative companies out of business or into paying ridiculous licensing fees.
Quite apart from encouraging innovation, patents are now stifling it. The software industry is one of the few industries still strong in America. Even in a time of recession, there are not enough computer programmers to fill all the available positions. Startup companies are forming and growing readily. But if every line of code written brings with it a potential violation of someone else's intellectual property, this will cease to be the case.
To solve this problem, we petition the Obama Administration to direct the Patent office to cease issuing software patents and to instruct the judicial system to take a long hard look at existing patents for validity. With these two steps, those of us in the software industry can stop worrying about mutually assured patent destruction and get back to doing what we do best.
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If anyone else comes up with language the community prefers, I'm game to use it when I call the switchboard on Monday.
(The trouble is that the politicians, not knowing any better, will go to the USPTO to get both sets of figures. "See? All of these new software patents must mean that innovation has accelerated at a tremendous rate!"))
I see right now that there are only 32 petitions there, and every one of them is either a neutral or leftish cause. The only completely nutty one is the UFO one, and there are no troll ones either (I thought "Stop Animal Homelessness At Its Roots" was a clever troll, but apparently it's talking about abandoned pets rather than wild animals).
Have conservative activists not yet got wind of this? Has 4chan not yet got wind of this? Or is the White House carefully curating what petitions it allows to appear on its site?
I googled "white house petitions free republic" to see whether the freepers were planning anything, but so far they haven't got past the "They'll harvest my IP address" paranoia stage.
I'm sure that conservative activists will get wind of this eventually. If there isn't a serious competition for the most-signed petition between "Legalize pot, man" and "Make Ron Paul President" by this time next week then I'll be suspicious that they're deleting things they don't like.
I'd guess that for the economy as a whole, the combined worth of software patents is negative.
By speaking out against software patents, you are essentially saying that programmers are not capable of inventing, or that they should not be afforded the same protections that other inventors receive.
I have linked to this petition from my blog urging Americans to sign it though.
Same complaints on that thread. We as a community seem embarrassed to sign something which has such awful grammar.
Is it a machine patent or is it a software patent?
