Software Patents - Is There Hope In Sight?

Software Patents is a controvertial subjects. It has been the subject of an intense debate on the past few decades, so intense that it even has its own wikipedia page.
One of the main problems with the current patent system is that it is way to easy to file patents on obvious ideas (such as the famouse VB “Is Not” operator or Eolas’s patent on emmbeding objects in html) which then get approved by the patent examiners who are overworked and do not have the resources to validate all the motions.

There seems to be a new hope and bringing some sanity to the software patents field in the form of a yearlong pilot project, endores by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, that aims to allow anyone who is interested to weigh in on 250 pending patent applications belonging to one of the more difficult categories to decipher: that including computer architecture, software and information security. Read more on the CNet post…

Maybe this is the first step in ending the race of software companies to produce large ammounts of pointless patents (as protection ofcourse…) and reverting some of the resources spent on lawyers to induce some real innovation…