Guest post written by Martin Goetz Martin Goetz, a retired software engineer, filed for the first ever software patent. In Eric Goldman’s recent Forbes.com 3-part series on software patents he ...

Software's Lifecycles End Before Patents Issue. As a practical matter, the commercial lifespan of a software program or feature (before being mooted by new innovations) is usually shorter than the ...

Opinion: Retired federal appeals court judges Paul Michel and Kathleen O'Malley say Congress should pass legislation to ...

Software patents are still in the news. The European patent directive continues to lumber forward, despite overwhelming opposition from groups on all corners -- excepting the big software ...

Software patent supporters feared—and opponents hoped—that the Alice ruling could lead to wholesale invalidation of software patents. And these hopes and fears were partially realized: ...

The judges of the Federal Circuit proved far more sympathetic to software patents than Supreme Court's justices. A key ruling came in 1994, when the court decided the case of In Re Alappat. The ...

In contrast, patent trolls use software patents against 93 percent of the defendants they sue. The unclear boundaries of software patents make them well suited for patent trolls.

When dealing with software patents the process we follow is rather straight forward; we view the innovation as a system that provides a desired set of functionalities.

The patent office doesn't divide patents into software patents and other patents. So, in fact, any patent might conceivably get you sued for writing software if it could apply to some software.

If there’s any lesson to be learned from Google’s news-making activities these past few days, it’s that software patents are a problem. The most recent illustration, of course, is Google’s ...

That's because trolls are filing an unprecedented number of expensive lawsuits. Over 5,000 firms were named as defendants in patent troll lawsuits in 2011, costing them over $29 billion out-of ...