Story: UK Patent Office considers problem of trivial patents

Posted by: Xavi Drudis Ferran (Tuesday 7 February 2006, 6:05 PM)

I can't speak for FFII, but I've talked to them enough to know that the list of patents in the FFII website is not there because they are trivial, but because they are software patents, or patents in non patentable fields.

I don't have a problem with anyone trying to solve the triviality problem (if they can), but this is by far not the only problem. In fields like software, even very bright ideas should not be patented, simply because that hinders its use, avoids further innovation and is not needed for this brilliant ideas to appear and be put to use. Software innovation does not require building prototypes in laboratories, or expensive experiments, it requires intelelctual work, and the result of this work is covered by copyright. Patents cover ideas which are too cheap to be covered in software (because computers follow exact formal models of behaviour, unlike the physical world).