The most glaring negative aspect of patents nowadays are patent trolls, and nowhere is this more obvious than with software patents. here is another one for your enjoyment, or not.

Ars Technica reports about a firm threatening to sue large corporations for the use of roll-over images on their website. What makes this one different is that instead of intimidating small players, it is going after big fish who have legal teams, and those are willing to fight back. Even stranger, the patent expired a few days ago. But I wonder how many still fell for it.

That was very informative and well written. I look forward for further posts from you. Recently I came across an article titled "A functionality based approach for assessing patentability of software" which I felt, is quite interesting and informative. I would like to bring your kind attention to the above mentioned article. Below given is an excerpt of the article.

"The whole idea of software is to avoid making specific hardware for every application. We came up with software to be able to dynamically create a new "machine" out of a standard hardware. A software allows the "new" machine to perform a "new" function based on the instructions as part of the software.

Now, saying that a software invention to be claimed must have a specific machine limitation is like asking the inventor to come up with corresponding hardware embodiment for the software based invention. It really defeats the purpose of…" read more at http://www.sinapseblog.com/2010/12/functionality-based-approach-for.html

Sorry, Lonnie, but no I will not read your pro-software-patent article that you tried to fly past me under the radar here by making it sound like it might be something else.

If hardware patents ever had any justification it was in the high R&D costs involved in testing and prototyping physical machines. Those costs are vastly lower in software -- and original software creation is already covered by an IP right, namely copyright, which original hardware design was not. And the copyright lasts longer, potentially over a century! Greedy IP-loving software companies should be quite happy with the monopolies they already have and should be smacked back when they demand even more.