There are few issues that get me as riled up as the concept of software patents. Algorithms should not be patentable. Even the concept of patents on physical inventions makes me uneasy.

A patent is a claim on a bit of virtual property which may be valuable if passage to other virtual property of interest requires going through the area of virtual property covered by the patent. Unlike real property, the virtual property of the patent can't be fenced off. This means that anyone can recreate the virtual property of a patent independantly.

Exclusivity to a patent is granted on temporal grounds; if two individuals have come up with the same idea, the party who has filed a patent application first would be granted the patent. This exclusivity applies only in the realm of reality consisting of the intersection of government reality with the set of inventors..

I have never applied for a patent. I have invented many things some of which could have been eligeable for patents. I have refused to go through this process since I believe that one cannot claim exclusivity in the country of the mind.

A patent is a very arrogant document which asserts dominion over a novel portion of reality despite the likelihood that multiple instantiations of the piece of reality might exist at a given point in time as many people can come up with creative ideas.

In the US demonstration of prior art invalidates a patent. I have dates on all of the programs I wrote, and in some of the earlier ones, C14 dating could even be applied to the output to verify their age. A large number of people are placing more or less everything they've coded onto the internet along with the date at which this program was written. If one of these bits of code happens to match that in a later software patent, that patent is invalidated. Some of the most assininely trivial algorithms have been patented and hopefully hackers around the world can render these patents useless.