Software Patent Searching Doesn't Scale

Nathan Myhrvold, the Microsoft veteran who founded the patent-trolling giant Intellectual Ventures, is right that patent infringement is rampant among software firms. But in demanding that this infringement stop, Myhrvold isn't just declaring war on what he regards as Silicon Valley's patent-hostile culture. He's declaring war on the laws of mathematics. The legal research required for all software-producing firms to stop infringing patents would cost more than the entire revenue of the software industry. Even if firms were willing to pay the bill, there simply aren't enough patent lawyers to do the work. Firms infringe software patents because they don't have any other choice. [...] Why is software different from real estate? In a new paper, we argue the fundamental difference is a matter of scalability: how much effort it takes to discover who owns an invention—or a piece of land—as the number of patents or land parcels increases. Property rights in land scale well because parcels exist in relatively well-defined locations on a two-dimensional plane. County officials take advantage of this fact to store records in a predictable order (or, more recently, to build databases searchable by geographical location). Geographical locations serve as an "index" for real property claims, so record-keepers can find any specific file quickly no matter how many files there are.
From Ars Technica

IP: Revenge of the Humans—Defending Business Method Patents

From last August Inside Counsel:

"If you can practice the claimed method without the claimed machine, then the claimed machine is irrelevant and the claimed method isn’t patentable." ... "The next time your company stares down the barrel of a software or business method patent, ask if the claimed method can be performed by a human being without the claimed machine. You might need to be a Kasparov to do it, but that’s still checkmate against the plaintiff"

NASA to auction off software patents

The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has announced plans to auction off a number of its advanced software patents at the fifteenth ICAP Ocean Tomo IP Auction in California. Originally developed for control of satellite systems and other mission specific needs, these patent lots have a number of potential applications in software development, robotics, telecommunications, utilities, smart grids, wireless sensor networks, quantitative finance and cyber security. Patent lots fall into three categories: automated software generation, autonomic computing architectures and autonomic management of environmental monitoring systems FromComputerworld Other reports at PC Advisor and Techworld.