Archived copy of A Swedish wolf in Norway

Patents were invented for a reason, to share your inventions with others, with the given benefit of giving the inventor the sole right, for a short period, to produce, or decide who will produce, the invention. As Opera’s Charles McCathieNevile writes, this doesn’t work for software. Patenting ideas is bad. The Patent Troll Tracker blog was started to keep track of patent trolls like Ray Niro, who says he has the sole right to decide who can post a JPEG image on a web site. He recently posted a bounty of five thousand dollars to reveal the identity of the owner of the blog, and succeeded.

In other recent pathetic patent news, Apple was sued by another patent troll who claims to have invented the idea to connect caller identification with a phone book. If that’s not an obvious invention, I don’t know what is. Fortunately, the patent should expire soon.

Did I mention that software patents are silly? I think I did. They are.