Remember the thread a while ago in general about this app being attacked by the thousand-dollar machine companies?

Here is an article from disability scoop about it:

http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2012/06/1...led/15846/

This post was last modified: 06-19-2012 03:12 AM by Lang.

People are so f*ckin' selfish.

That isn't selfish. Designing and resarching programs takes time and money. Everyone has the right to protect and benefit from their intellectual property.

Individuals are moral entities and deserve rights.  Organizations aren't and don't.

First of all, say patent law - not intellectual property - lumping all these different laws together causes confusion, trademarks for example are actually a good thing when used as intended.

Software patents on the other hand - well, they're used either as defensive measures against other people's software patents in a form of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) or they're used by scumbags as described in this news story.

Shame on Apple for bowing to their demands

Here's the most evil aspect of software patents:
There's so many of them on so many different aspects of software that it is literally impossible to write anything without violating multiple patents.

Patent law just allows those with resources to shutdown competitors,thus solidifying monopolies.

Patents protect intellectual property; that is, they protect an idea in concrete form. Standing up for your rights does not make you a scumbag. It means you want to have the right to seea return on the investment you put into developing the idea.
Stealing other people's property for personal gain, however, does make you a scumbag. Having or working with disabled children does not exempt you from that.

Organizations are composed of individuals, schmuck.

Patents aren't property, they're government-granted monopolies that were originally intended to promote innovation by allowing inventors to obtain a financial reward through those monopoly privileges in exchange for publication of the invention on the public record after expiry.

The problem with software patents though is that they so often cover obvious innovations and there are so many that it is impossible to write ANY software without infringing on someone's patents.

I still stand by what I say - using a government-granted monopoly to wipe out a competing product rather than competing by selling something superior while harming innocent third parties in the process does make you a scumbag.

It's legal to get a software patent and use it to bully others - that doesn't mean that it's ethically right.

As an example - jump tables on mobile devices (why on mobile devices?) are patented.

That means all software written in C++ for a mobile device (unless you use a very very weird compiler) infringes on that patent and the patent holder has a tool they can use to shutdown anyone using C++ on a mobile device.

Why should any entity have monopoly rights to the fundamental building blocks of software? Especially with "first to file" laws, they don't even have to do the hard work of inventing said building blocks first.

Gee, that's nice.  It also doesn't refute what I said.  

ONLY individuals have moral standing.  Organizations do not.