Wow - a sudden burst of sanity has emerged from the Patent Office. Let's hope it lasts:

The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc.

Copyright is perfectly good for this kind of stuff, and - if this holds up - a whole ton of value free patent trolls will just vaporize. Now if we could just get equivalent sanity applied to copyright law...

Technorati Tags: software patent, copyright