I certainly hope so, and I have (around) fifteen myself including one that covers the internet cookie and another which I think covers the Galois Counter Mode f

I certainly hope so, and I have (around) fifteen myself including one that covers the internet cookie and another which I think covers the Galois Counter Mode for encryption or at least certain applications of GCM. I filed for these as a part of my employment for IBM a long time ago (around 1988), and by now all of my IBM patents have expired. When I left IBM to start my own company I invented more than I did at IBM, but I chose to license our technology to the Open Software Foundation instead of patenting it. Part of my thinking in not filing for patents was that the big companies that were our biggest competitors (IBM, HP, Sun, DEC) wouldn't be slowed down by patents. They had armies of lawyers and big portfolios of patents and inventions that would be used against us if we tried to enforce any of our patents against them. Whether or not any of their claims were valid, we would not have been able to afford the legal battle and would have been forced to cross-license with them anyway. Patent protection for software has always bothered me. Patents that made sense in the days of steam engines just don't work well for software. Patents give too much protection (preventing independent discovery of some idea from being used) and last too long, way too long for the software industry (I think 4 years is plenty of time to get exclusive use for an idea in software). Ideally, I would like to see patent protection to software eliminated and replaced with a much easier to obtain protection for a couple of years. Or, use copyright protection for software. Copyright protection is sensible since it protects the programs from being stolen while allowing the ideas to be used by others if they do an independent implementation.