Software Patents

Software patents are patents that claim processes, machines, or manufactured articles implemented in computer programs — and they are the single greatest legal threat to the Free Software Foundation's vision of a collaborative digital commons. Unlike copyright, which protects the expression of an idea, patents protect the idea itself, meaning that a programmer can independently reinvent an algorithm and still be liable for infringement. This structural mismatch between patent law (designed for discrete physical inventions) and software (which is inherently combinatorial and abstract) has produced a regime where trivial methods — one-click purchasing, sliding to unlock, progress bars — have been granted monopoly protection, and where patent trolls extract rents from innovators without producing anything of value.

The GPL v2's "Liberty or Death" clause was a direct response to this threat, and the free software movement's opposition to software patents is not merely economic but ontological: software is mathematics, and mathematics cannot be owned.