The first foundations were laid for the patent pirates with the introduction of the first U.S. patent to Samuel Hopkins for a potash process. While patents are a necessary evil to protect the investments of real inventor and corporations that have to spend millions upon millions (sometimes to the tune of hundreds of millions) to produce a truly new technology, software patents are an unnecessary evil that allow the pirates to plunder millions upon millions of dollars from rivals with fundamentally different products (but covered under an interpretation of a sufficiently abstract description) and prevent true innovation in our space.
It’s been a downhill trend ever since the first software patent was issued 51 years, 3 months, and 8 days ago as it was a mere 4 years before the software patent pirates saw an opportunity when the first software patent case went before the courts a mere four years later.
That’s right, we’ve had almost five decades of pirates in cyberspace, and you thought malware was the big problem?