The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140, would throw out Supreme Court rules that limit patents on abstract ideas. If PERA passes, it will open the floodgates for far more vague and overbroad software patents. It will even allow for a type of patent on human genes that the Supreme Cou...
Patents have been an issue for Linux before. For example, memory deduplication (KSM) was delayed and modified to avoid a patent on using hashes for this purpose, resulting in a potentially inferior implementation due to patents.
For those who don't know, if you shop on Amazon, you can have a portion of your purchase price go to EFF every time you do. You pay the same price, EFF gets a slice of the pie, and Daddy Bezos loses a few bucks. Edit: Use the affiliate link not the smile link, Amazon stopped the smile program.
Can you provide an alternative that isn't a PITA? Amazon is successful because it makes shopping easy, often more secure than shopping elsewhere, and is more ecological than shopping in person. Where else can I get a dozen completely different category of items without checking out 12 times? Should I drive to 12 different places, and burn all that gas, just to spite Amazon? Where can I shop where I can comparison shop between a hundred different brands and options, to get the item I want and not just what the shop owner carries?
I'm not being facetious; I want an alternative, but there's only so much inconvenience I'll accept.
The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140, would throw out Supreme Court rules that limit patents on abstract ideas. If PERA passes, it will open the floodgates for far more vague and overbroad software patents. It will even allow for a type of patent on human genes that the Supreme Court rightly disallowed in 2013.
No one should be allowed to take an abstract idea, add generic computer language, and get a patent. And we should never see patents on the genes that naturally occur in human bodies. But if PERA passes, that’s exactly what will happen.
Patent trolls—companies that have no product or service of their own, but simply make patent infringement demands on others—are a big problem. They’ve cost our economy billions of dollars. For a small company, a patent troll demand letter can be ruinous.
But we took a big step forward in the fight against patent trolls in 2014, when a landmark Supreme Court ruling, the Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank case, held that you can’t get a patent by adding “on a computer” to an abstract idea.
This bill by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) would also override the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the U.S. Patent Office from issuing patents on human genes. Patenting human genetic material is wrong and should never occur.
Tell Congress to reject the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act.