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Difference between revisions of "Banning software patents"

(It looks promising but has received the decades of scrutiny that the exclusion approach has.)
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There are two ways to write a law that would protect software developers, users, and distributors from patents:
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There are two ways to write a law that would protect software from patents:
  
 
* '''[[Excluding software from patentability]]''' - exclude software from the [[patentable subject matter|subject matter]] that can be patented
 
* '''[[Excluding software from patentability]]''' - exclude software from the [[patentable subject matter|subject matter]] that can be patented

Revision as of 17:36, 1 September 2013

There are two ways to write a law that would protect software from patents:

The latter is an alternative, suggested in 2012. It looks promising but has received the decades of scrutiny that the exclusion approach has.

A third way would be to abolish the entire patent system, for all domains, but this would require many times more work and there's no consensus on whether it's a good idea. There are advantages in focusing only on software.

For advice about terminology, see: