After “One Click” now “In App Purchase”. A patent system that grants such obviously trivial patents is seriously flawed and is hurting economic activity.
I mean, seriously, who can deny that anybody could come up with the idea of making it easy to buy something in a shop. Likewise anybody could come up with the idea that you can buy updates though an application itself. This is blatantly trivial.
A patent on this is a bad patent. It takes away from society something society already had, instead of giving society something new. Claiming money for “the use” of that idea is parasitic. A society that accepts—or even promotes—that kind of parasitic behaviour is doomed to fall behind.
The Lodsys case is one more good reason to not grant patents on software at all. Software patents mostly just take trivial real world ideas and claim them to be new when used via a computer. Additionally, those patents do not claim the implementation but the idea.
Maybe, even quite surely there are certain technical implementations that are theoretically worth to be granted patent protection. It’s just that the misuse or abuse of software patents is already so bad that I am currently totally opposed to software patents.
Addendum:
I am having a hard time thinking of anything more absurd and ridiculous than Lodsys’ claims. I mean, read this: »OMG! Cross promotion in "More Games" violates Lodsys' patent too!«
Well, maybe the Hyperlink Patent.
Addendum (2):
Apparently, the EU offers better market conditions for app developers than the US just by not granting software patents (as yet, knock on wood): “App developers withdraw from US as patent fears reach ‘tipping point’” (Guardian)
[Via Daring Fireball]
