On 21 May 1962, a British patent application entitled "A Computer Arranged for the Automatic Solution of See more

Most countries place some limits on the patenting of inventions involving software, but there is no one legal definition of a software patent. For example, U.S. patent law excludes "abstract ideas", and this has been used … See more

For the U.S., the purpose of patents is laid down in the constitutional clause that gives Congress the power to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors th… See more

In seeking to find a balance, different countries have different policies as to where the boundary between patentable and non-patentable software should lie. In Europe, a number of different proposals for setting a boundary li… See more

A common objection to software patents is that they relate to trivial inventions. A patent on an invention that many people would easily develop independently of one another should not, it is argued, be granted since this i… See more

There are a number of high-profile examples where the patenting of a data exchange standards forced another programming group to introduce an alternative format. For instance, the Portable N… See more

• Open Invention Network (OIN)
• Patent Commons Project
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• Social networking patents… See more