I agree that those shouldn’t be patented - they’re ideas, not implementations. If you have a particular ingenious implementation for one-click shopping, go ahead and patent it. But don’t sue people if they come up with a different way to do the same thing - that just means your implementation wasn’t particularly novel.

So yes, there have been some bad software patents given out. That just means that the process for giving software patents needs to be reformed, not that we need to get rid of software patents.

From a certain point of view, everything is mathematics. It still takes time and effort to figure out the mathematics to make new things work. Patents guarantee that the people who figure out the math will be able to profit off of it before a whole bunch of copycats steal the work. That should apply to software too - assuming that people actually figured out the math and didn’t just patent some idea without an implementation.

I think patents make some sense for software, if you patent a particular algorithm you developed for doing something useful. An example I always use for a good software patent is Google’s original PageRank algorithm - it was a specific algorithm that provided significantly better search results than existing search algorithms. But that patent just covered one specific algorithm for ranking search results, not the idea of searching the web (which was around before Google). Patents that are given for an idea, not an implementation, are bad.

This article is unclear, but it sure makes it seem like this patent was given for the idea of sending video from one device to another, not a specific algorithm for doing so. So that would be a bad patent. But I don’t think it means we should get rid of software patents altogether.