Patent Trolls Are Screwing Up Everything [INFOGRAPHIC]

Now, don't get me wrong - I firmly believe that inventors of cool stuff should get paid for their inventions. I also firmly believe that patents are a good thing - provided they are used for truly novel inventions.

I don't, however, believe that a "process" should be able to be patented. OK, well maybe some processes - like Pasteurization - or the vulcanization of rubber - or the algorithm used to encrypt data.

However, software is not one of those things. A software language, maybe. But not software, in general. There are just too many outstanding patents for vague, wide-ranging, processes that are stifling innovation. For example, here's one for "A Method, Process, and System for Searching and Identifying Sources of Goods and/or Services Over the Internet".

Really. It's a REAL patent.

Or how about the fact that in 2010 Facebook received a patent (7,669,123) for the news feed. Yeah. Hopefully Twitter got their license already...



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