The patent situation in this country is becoming more ridiculous by the minute. IBM was just awarded a patent (7278116) on those little checkboxes you see on just about all software and websites (they usually say things like “Click here if you would like to receive email updates”). Regardless of the fact that “prior art” is obvious, it still costs a small fortune to fight a patent.

BitLaw has more information about the history of software patents. It’s interesting to note that up until the 1980’s, the patent office was reluctent to issue patents for software because it viewed software as mathmatical algorithms (which is not patentable… for good reason).

Other ridiculous software patents:

SAP patents software breakpoints (7225433)

LSI patents the doubly-linked list (7028023)