A judge wants to make patent trolling a first amendment issue

When the Supreme Court decided Alice v. CLS Bank in 2014, it marked a new era in software patent law. By ruling that abstract ideas could not be patented simply because they were executed on a computer, the Alice decision significantly narrowed down the possible universe of software patents. Since then, more and more software patents have been invalidated by the courts—particularly in the Federal Circuit, the appeals court for patent cases, which is still grappling with how exactly to appl