In a talk earlier this week, Richard Stallman described software patents as a sort of lottery, bringing benefits to people only rarely. Stallman is well known among free software fans as the writer of ...

Martin LaMonica is a senior writer covering green tech and cutting-edge technologies. He joined CNET in 2002 to cover enterprise IT and Web development and was previously executive editor of IT ...

Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D ...

Many members of the Open Source community oppose software patents. Software patents, they say, hinder the advancement of software art, and as such, counter the beneficial effects of open and published ...

Software patents are still in the news. The European patent directive continues to lumber forward, despite overwhelming opposition from groups on all corners -- excepting the big software companies ...

New paper from legal researcher suggests a fix for the software patent mess has been lurking in the statute all this time Software patents have been an agent of change in open source over the last ...

If you haven’t been following this story it may (hopefully) turn out to be a milestone in the history of software patents: The story concerns a US financial institution, CLS Bank, and an Australian ...

Collecting the information necessary to prepare a patent application covering a computer related invention can be quite challenging. Typically, most computer related inventions today relate at least ...

The U.S. Supreme Court today basically put off for another day the issue of whether software applications are patentable. In Bilski et al v. Kappos, the court ruled 5-4 that Bernard Bilski and his ...

This is the second half of my interview with John Ferrell, longtime Silicon Valley patent attorney and angel investor, about intellectual property protection for software. Read the first half here.