Earth-shaking
Allow me to geek out for a second here...
The Patent Office is sending out signals that it will not honor and will in fact invalidate software patents from here on out.
In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski,
the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new
restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by
Congress in § 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three—the currently pending en banc Bilski
appeal—the Office takes the position that process inventions generally
are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an
article” or are “tied to a particular machine.”
This is really, really big news, as it's a major shift in Patent Office policy. Before this, if you wanted to patent, say, the very idea of a World Wide Web, a database or a spreadsheet, you could, but what you were patenting is, in essence, a very long mathematical equation. This led to the creation of the "patent troll"; people and/or organizations whose livelihood was solely based on suing other corporations for all manner of alleged patent infringements.
Now you can't. Now you have to prove that your patent is tied to something physical and tangible, not just a concept. This will bring about new innovations from the IT industry, as the worries that someone hunkered down in a basement somewhere will go after your new product with a questionable software patent is now gone forever.
Now, on to copyright law!
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