Samsung-what a crappy company

[Xithras]

34. Actually, it's even worse than that.

The problem with software patents is that you can patent nearly any variation on anything, if nobody has written that specific code variation before. The idea that something has to be new and novel seems to have gone completely out the window. Pinch-to-zoom is actually a brilliant example of that. Pinch-zooming wasn't a new idea, and had existed since the 1980's in various forms. Pinch zooming on a multitouch touchscreen wasn't even a new idea, and had been first demonstrated in the 1990's. Not to pick on Apple (you brought up the example) but their great patentable invention was merely that they took an existing software concept and implemented it on a mobile phone. From a technical perspective, it wasn't even a particularly interesting hack. They essentially just ported existing software.

But, under the terms of the United States software patent system, it was a "novel idea", and therefore patentable and defensible. The ironic thing is that, while Apple got to make lots of money off of the patent for their variation, the programmers who actually created the original pinch-to-zoom concept got nothing. Under our law, because they did it on a computer, and not a mobile device, it was considered a different technology and the original inventors were left high and dry. Of course, as anyone who has ever written an application can tell you, there's no difference between the two.

Software should not be patentable. It's harmful to the economy, it's harmful to innovation, and the only benefit they serve is to prop up profits for the big corporations that can afford to litigate them.