All the brouhaha with Paul Allen suing, well, everyone makes it even clearer that software and process patents need to go.

If you haven't noticed, Paul Allen has sued Apple, Yahoo, Google and other websites over some patents he holds that preclude just about anyone from doing anything modern via a website or browser. I find the brouhaha highly amusing, and it brings up a number of questionable situations.

Here is how the patent in question is described by Information Week:

The 35-page amended complaint still focuses on "Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data," "Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device," and "Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest," according to WebProNews.



Allen claims products such as AdSense, Android, Facebook and its news feed, Flickr, Gmail, iTunes, Yahoo and Yahoo Finance from AOL, Apple, eBay, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, and YouTube infringe on his patented technologies, reports said. The technologies under question address capabilities such as notification, browsing, search, and page navigation.

Basically, Allen got an omnibus patent that covers all these characteristics and feels that there are no examples of this sort of thing in other portfolios or in the public domain. Thus, they can't be thrown out by "prior art" mechanisms.

Anyway, we'll see where this goes.

As for the interesting aspects of this, let's outline them.

First of all, it shows that the pre-1980 attitude of the patent office, which disallowed software patents, was probably a good idea. Software and procedural patents are going to ruin society. But if you have them, use them. Personally, I think they're stupid and signal that every ridiculous idea you come up with is not necessarily worth a patent.

A few years back, I wrote a column "The Patent Riots of 2003" about an interesting moderating experience I had during a debate about patents. Here's a snippet:

I was the moderator for a Commonwealth Club debate between fabled Law Professor Larry Lessig and Todd Dickinson a couple of years ago. Dickinson was the director of the US Patent and Trademark Office under Clinton and a huge promoter of the idea that business models should be patented. From what I could tell, he thought everything should be patented. So I asked him if a football play could be patented. He said probably not, since there had to be something technological about it to qualify. "But what if this was a timing play?" I asked. My jaw dropped when he said it could probably get a patent! I was stunned at such an outrageous and stupefying notion. What can you say to a guy like this?



For a moment I thought about some plays that might get patented. Since then, I've heard tales about patents for how kids can swing on trees and thousands of other idiotic patent ideas. Dumb patents have been around from the first days, but software patents are a recent affliction, and they're going to kill the computer business.

Of course, nothing has changed. Actually, it has changedit has gotten worse. I'm just surprised the football patent hasn't been done by now.

The other thing of note regarding the Allen lawsuit is that Allen owned a think tank that did nothing but patent things. He's obviously gotten a clue from ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, who runs a patent farming operation that buys up seemingly useless patents and finds a good use for themlawsuits.

This idea isn't new, but has not, until now, been put into play by brainiacs, such as Myhrvold and Allen, who can spot infringement where nobody else would notice (or care). Personally, I hope these two guys and the other patent scroungers can bring the system to a grinding halt, since the system doesn't work.

Rebuking all software patents and process patents would be a good start to a new century. Otherwise, this will just get worse.