I see a lot of misinformation and disinformation about intellectual property and patents in software. In order to try to clear some of this up, I am going to point out that Donald Knuth, the author of that magnum opus, "The Art of Computer Programming", has already expressed the definitive assessment of software patents: the US has issued far too many of them, most of them are groundless and flimsy, usually failing to meet the USPTO requirements for a valid patent.
In fact, he even says that many of these patents specifically fail to mee the requirement that it be 'non-obvious' to a person versed in the state of the art, since they grant a patent to the kind of solution Knuth expected his undergraduate students to be able to solve in their homework!
But don't take my word for it: read the master's words themselves at http://eupat.ffii.org/gasnu/knuth/index.en.html
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