The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140, would throw out Supreme Court rules that limit patents on abstract ideas. If PERA passes, it will open the floodgates for far more vague and overbroad software patents. It will even allow for a type of patent on human genes that the Supreme Court rightly disallowed in 2013.
No one should be allowed to take an abstract idea, add generic computer language, and get a patent. And we should never see patents on the genes that naturally occur in human bodies. But if PERA passes, that’s exactly what will happen.
Two pieces of technology are behind the Internet as we know it today.
Neither one is patented.
They are TCP/IP and Linux.
All the network traffic runs over TCP/IP.
95%+ of the servers run Linux. So do the Android phones and Chromebooks.
Clearly, patent protection in software is not required for society to benefit greatly from technological innovation in software.