This is so depressing. I have to say, the replies from engineers who have spent some time figuring out how the patent system works have been enlightening and i

This is so depressing. I have to say, the replies from engineers who have spent some time figuring out how the patent system works have been enlightening and interesting to read. But none of this matters unless a well funded group (maybe the EFF, maybe some businesses who want to challenge this patent) decides to pick up the cause and fight. There is no way a programmer who coded something in a weekend and put it on his blog is going to be able to go up against a well funded patent holder. The merits are irrelevant, seriously irrelevant. This is what depresses me so much about the US legal system. While the law around software patents is absurd, the problem isn't really that software patents exist per se (1), it's that stupid patents are granted and that it is brutally expensive in terms of time and money to fight them. (1) I do consider software patents to be a failed experiment. Sometimes the implementation is so bad that we can say "tried it, didn't work" even if in theory it could have been done better.