Copyright is no substitute for patents. If you implement that same thing in another language, it would probably be different enough to avoid copyright infringem

Copyright is no substitute for patents. If you implement that same thing in another language, it would probably be different enough to avoid copyright infringement. So the fact that this author has licensed software under copyright has nothing to do with copyright's effectiveness in protecting their ideas. Also, this author is apparently unaware that "pure software" patents have never existed, and do not exist today. This is especially true in the post-Enfish world we now live in. The author is spot-on that obviousness is broken, that's true. Also a good point that patent quality is ill-defined. But those of us who work in this industry absolutely know it when we see it. Overall, this article doesn't do a great job of explaining what is actually broken and why software patents suck. But saying that software as a class should not be protected like other forms of labor is insulting to software developers. What a software developer does is just as important as what a mechanical engineer does.